Residential Segregation and Friendship Networks

During the past few decades social network analysis has produced a great deal of insight into the workings of social systems. While social scientists have done a great deal of investigative work with regards to residential, friendship, trust, exchange or discussion networks, scientific inquiry has typically limited itself to investigating the characteristics of networks of only one kind. This approach has produced plentiful insight on the structure and function of different kinds of social networks, but the interaction between the different kinds of social networks has received insufficient investigation so far. Our work, in which we examine the interaction of residential and social networks represents an attempt at advancing this field of inquiry. More specifically, we extend a classic model of residential segregation (Schelling, 1968) by incorporating a social network that constructs -- and is influenced by -- residential preferences. We use Agent-Based Modelling to examine how social network topology affects residential segregation in the Schelling model. We start with a semi-static model, where social networks are fixed but the residential network is allowed to vary, after which we proceed to describe the case where both networks evolve in interdependence with each other.