Interdependence Evaluation between the Home Neighborhood and the City: How Socio-Spatial Categorization Impacts upon Residential Segregation

This paper proposes a socio-cognitive approach to how people assess the different neighborhoods of a city. The main objective is to show that beyond the meanings associated with each neighborhood, the way in which residents relate to and evaluate their own neighborhood and the city center influence how residents perceive and assess the other remaining neighborhoods of the city. The assessment of one neighborhood cannot be analyzed separately from the other neighborhoods. Cognitive processes of assimilation, contrast, contagion, and non-contagion contribute to the conceptualization of a city’s neighborhoods from the two main emotional and symbolic anchorages of residents. However, the implementation of these processes is conditioned by the socio-spatial situation of the interviewees. In this regard, a field survey of 320 residents was conducted in different neighborhoods of Besançon (in France), and allows us to show that the geographical anchorages of a resident’s own neighborhood and the city center are systematically more positively assessed than the other neighborhoods. The more these geographical anchorages are appreciated, the more the other neighborhoods are also positively assessed. The fact that it is impossible for a city’s neighborhoods to be autonomous is discussed in this paper in terms of socio-cognitive constructions of urban segregations.