Social Frontiers: Estimating the Spatial Boundaries Between Residential Groups and Their Impacts on Crime

Abstract

Inthischapter, we highlight the importance of social frontiers—sharp spatial divisions in the residential make-up of adjacent communities—as a potentially important form of segregation. The handful of studies estimating the impacts of social frontiers have been based in the USA and the UK, both of which are free-market democracies with a long history of immigration, ethnic mix and segregation. There are currently no studies of social frontiers in former socialist countries, for example, or in countries where immigration and ethnic mix are only a recent phenomenon or non-existent. This chapter aims to address this research gap by estimating the impacts of social frontiers on crime rates in a post-socialistcountry, Czechia. We demonstrate how a Bayesianspatial conditional autoregressive estimation can be used to detect social frontiers in this setting, and we use a fixed effect quasi-Poisson model to investigate the impact on crime. Our results suggest that in new immigration destinations, social frontiers may not be associated with higher rates of crime, at least in the short run. Moreover, our use of cultural distance measures helps to promote a more nuanced approach to studying the impact of segregation and highlights the role of cultural diversity in understanding the link between immigrant segregation and crime. We reflect on how this approach could contribute to the study of segregation and inequality in the Chinese context.

Theorising the causal impacts of social frontiers: The social and psychological implications of discontinuities in the geography of residential mix

“…This might seem obvious, but none of the existing empirical papers on social frontier impacts (e.g. Dean et al, 2019; Křížková et al, 2021; Legewie and Schaeffer, 2016) consider frontier dynamics or the effects of different socio-cultural contexts, or many of the other aspects noted above. In fact, all existing studies are cross-sectional, focussing on a single town or city in a particular country at a specific moment in time.…”

“…Variously labelled ‘spatial discontinuities’ (Harris, 2014), ‘neighbourhood boundaries’ (Legewie and Schaeffer, 2016) and ‘social frontiers’ (Dean et al, 2019; Křížková et al, 2021; Piekut et al, 2019; Staples et al, 2023), there is growing empirical evidence in the urban studies, human geography and sociology literatures that these ‘cliff edges’ not only exist not only exist between races, self-reported ethnicities and countries of birth (Dean et al, 2019; Legewie and Schaeffer, 2016) but also have potentially important impacts (e.g. on crime).…”