Scholars in Urban Social Geography and Urban Sociology traditionally explore and map the patterns of racial and/or social segregation and measure its intensity at the neighbourhood level. The focus on the neighbourhood level is related to the low-rise and sprawled urban context of the English-speaking world that dominated Segregation Studies for more than a century. This unilateral focus on the neighbourhood level has led to neglecting segregation at spatial levels below the neighbourhood.

Academic interest on micro-segregation –i.e. on the social or ethnoracial hierarchies formed at the micro spatial scale of apartment or building blocks– emerged recently and attracted some attention, especially from scholars working on urban contexts where the analysis of segregation at the neighbourhood level was not enough. Research on micro-segregation has brought new questions for segregation studies, especially regarding the impact of social hierarchies at the micro scale on social reproduction, and gave new dimensions to the questions on the nature and assessment of social mix.

In this session, we invite presentations providing further evidence of micro-segregation in different urban contexts around Europe. The proposed presentations are expected to focus on the forms of micro-segregation (e.g. vertical social and/or ethnic segregation within apartment blocks; social and/or ethnic segregation between apartments at the front and back of apartment blocks; social and/or ethnic segregation between adjacent but different types of housing provision [e.g. public versus private] and/or different types of housing stock [e.g. old versus new built or high-rise apartment blocks versus single houses]; etc. and/or on the underlying processes that produce it and on the impact of micro-segregation on the reproduction of urban social inequalities.