Researchers from the Centro de Sociología y Políticas Locales Manuel Fernández, Clemente Navarro, Ángel Zapata and Cristina Mateo have published an article in the January issue of the journal Empiria in which they make a contribution to the analysis of urban inequality through the proposal and validation of a socio-economic level index for urban areas in Spain. The analysis of inequality in cities has been a central issue in urban sociology, with a long tradition, from the Chicago School’s analysis of urban areas through factor ecology to the current concern reflected in research on’ urban vulnerability’. Within this framework, different methodological proposals have been developed to analyze it empirically. Specifically, the objective of this article is to present a proposal to measure the socio-economic level of Spanish urban areas in cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, as well as its validation. Therefore, it is not a question of providing explanations on the phenomenon of urban inequality or its reflection in terms of residential differentiation or segregation, but to propose a valid tool for doing cross-sectional comparisons (between urban areas) and comparisons over time that allow longitudinal analysis. This article reflects the firsts advances in Urban Impacts project, in which this socio-economic level index is already being used to analyse the urban areas intervened by the European Union’s URBAN Initiative.
The article is available in https://doi.org/10.5944/empiria.39.2018.20877