Critiques of Schelling's Model on Residential Segregation

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[...] It has also had a legacy beyond the questions of residential segregation. It has inspired the 'threshold models' (Granovetter5, 1978) who seek to explain how social phenomena can have a cumulative character, for example when the decision for an individual to participate in a strike or a demonstration depends on the proportion of other people who make the same choice. [...]

[...] Finally, the main criticism formulated by these authors is that Schelling's model is based on strong hypotheses about the ways in which individuals evaluate neighborhoods and decide where to live. Individual preferences are assumed to obey a threshold logic, that is, their preferences are strongly non-linear. Bruch and Mare examine the relevance of the hypotheses posed by Schelling on individual behaviors and their consequences on residential segregation. They mobilize, like Schelling, models of residential differentiation, which consider the aggregated consequences of individual behaviors. [...]

[...] The cumulative effects of these choices can ultimately lead to very, or even totally, segregated situations, with strong ethnic concentrations in the same neighborhood. In the same vein, Schelling (1971, p. 182) also introduces the term of 'tipping point'tipping point) to signify the moment when a minority ethnic group reaches a proportion in a neighborhood that prompts residents of the other ethnicity to massively leave that neighborhood. New arrivals from the minority group then take the place of those who leave. [...]

[...] They conclude that ethnic preferences alone are not sufficient to explain the high levels of segregation observed in American cities. Other mechanisms must be invoked, including, for example, the housing market: as Black individuals are on average poorer than Whites, higher prices in predominantly White neighborhoods contribute to excluding them from these neighborhoods, and reinforce the effects resulting from ethnic preferences. Legacy of Schelling's work in social sciences Schelling's work has widely inspired the social sciences. It has allowed establishing a relationship between the notions of ethnic preference and prejudice and the research on the mechanisms of residential segregation. [...]

[...] Critiques of Schelling's model: example of Bruch and Mare's research However, despite the importance of Schelling's contribution, several questions arise: they include the empirical validation of the theoretical model's predictions, as well as the robustness of the empirical predictions of these models on the aggregated level of segregation compared to other behavioral hypotheses that could be made on individual preferences. The hypotheses, and the robustness of Schelling's results have been discussed in several works. An example is given through the research of Bruch and Mare4 (2006). [...]