The Sociospatial Isolation of Agents in Everyday Life Spaces as an Aspect of Segregation

This article suggests that common segregation indices be complemented by an additional index that emphasizes an agent’s isolation from members of other groups in everyday life. We suggest a “sociospatial isolation” index that is studied for individual agents in respect to the spaces in which they actually conduct their everyday life, leading to the aggregation of individuals who share the same orientation toward segregation. The index refers to both the territorial and the interactive contexts of seven aspects: home vicinity, cluster of neighboring homes, neighborhood and city in the territorial context, and friends, work, and leisure activities in the interactive context of an agent’s everyday life activity spaces. The article calculates some hypothetical examples that demonstrate the qualities of the index and is followed by the case of African migrant workers and their segregation in one neighborhood of the inner city of Tel Aviv. The index may receive values between 0–1, with the value of 0.5 representing population mixture, lower values representing exposure to members of other groups, and higher values representing an agent’s tendency toward isolation from members of alternative groups. The results emphasize the fact that there was no correlation between the territorial and the interactive dimension of sociospatial isolation. African migrant workers maintained extremely high rates of intergroup isolation, regardless of their territorial isolation.