Bridging the divide: Economic exchange and segregation in dual-income cities

Segregation is a growing concern around the world. One of its main manifestations is the creation of ghettos, whose inhabitants have difficult access to well-paid jobs, which are often located far from their homes. In order to study this phenomenon, we propose an extension of Schelling's model of segregation to take into account the existence of economic exchanges. To approximate a geographical model of the city, we consider a small-world network with a defined real estate market. The evolution of the system has also been studied, finding that economic exchanges follow exponential laws and relocations are approximated by power laws. In addition to this, we consider the existence of delays in the actions of the agents, which mainly affect the happiness of those with fewer economic resources. Besides, the size of the economic exchange plays a crucial role in overall segregation. Despite its simplicity, we find that our model reproduces real-world situations such as the separation between favoured and handicapped economic areas, the importance of economic contacts between them to improve the distribution of wealth, and the existence of efficient and cheap transport to break the poverty cycles typical of disadvantaged zones.