Segregation and Residential Mobility Spatially Entrapped Social Mobility and Its Impact on Segregation in Athens

The relation between segregation and residential mobility goes back to the relation between mobility and the modern metropolis.1 In Simmel’s terms mobility is part of a ‘world in flux, whose substantive contents are themselves dissolved in motion’ (Frisby, 2002: xxiv). Mobility is the product of the intense commodification of social relations fuelled by industrial development and entwined with the sharply increasing division of labour and the spatial concentration of diversified activities in the modern metropolis. In more abstract terms, motion is at the heart of capitalist social relations through the objectification of contentless form in money, which ‘embodies social reality in constant motion’ (Frisby, 2002: 101). The protagonists of the Chicago School, deeply inspired by the Simmelian treatment of mobility and social change – R.E. Park was Simmel’s student – translated this theoretical construction to a research agenda for social change in the modern metropolis.2 Subsequently they presented, among many other things, their model of the social patterning of urban growth – the Burgess zonal model – in which mobility and segregation were key elements related by competition. Increased mobility in both its social and spatial components was conceived as the product of growing competition. Social mobility was seen as a consequence of the process of individuation that broke up old bonds and attachments through the occupational opportunities and moral choices offered in the urban context (Park, 1957a: 51). At the same time, competition induces segregation, since ‘change of occupation, personal success or failure ... tend to be Abstract ★