Residential segregation of foreigners: an analysis of the Italian city of Palermo

Ethnic residential segregation in Italy is an emerging key question, which will be crucial in the definition and implementation of both urbanistic and social policies. This paper focuses on this phenomenon in the Italian city of Palermo. We use individual data for all the population residing in the city at 31 December 2011, organized by ethnicity and district. Firstly, we describe the spatial distribution and the residential segregation of foreigners in the city, applying many different segregation measures. Among the others, we also apply the Duncan and Duncan dissimilarity index. Finally, we apply a recent methodological approach, which allows reducing the bias of the Duncan’s index and performs better than previous bias reduction techniques, in terms of both mean bias and mean square error.