Sri Lankans’ residential segregation and spatial inequalities in Southern Italy: an empirical analysis using fine-scale data on regular lattice geographies

Abstract

Sri Lankans constitute one of Italy's oldest foreign communities. A comparative geographic study of Sri Lankans’ settlement patterns in three main municipalities of South Italy (Naples, Palermo, and Catania) is performed in the present work. The uniqueness of the analysis relies on the fact that, to the authors’ knowledge, no other existing studies comparatively examine the spatial segregation of Sri Lankan communities in different southern European municipalities. Moreover, implementing a single geographic reference grid allowed the homogenisation of different areal unit arrangements and the comparison between urban contexts. Original results have emerged from the empirical analysis, detecting peculiar and similar residential behaviour in Sri Lankans’ settlement patterns across the three municipalities analysed, jointly influenced by work specialisation and variations in the local cost of living. In particular, the high levels of Sri Lankan concentration detected in the wealthiest neighbourhoods revealed complex dynamics underlying the urban spatial segregation, beyond the mere centre-periphery dichotomy.

From South Asia to Southern Europe: a comparative analysis of Sri Lankans’ residential segregation in the main Italian cities using high-resolution data on regular lattice geographies

“…Thereafter, Italy's easier admission possibilities compared to other European countries, its simplified procedure for family reunifications and its use of socalled nominative calls (formal requests made by an Italian employer guaranteeing a job to a foreigner) attracted a large number of Sri Lankan men, balancing the proportions between genders (Henayaka-Lochbihler & Lambusta, 2004). As mentioned above, Sri Lankans' spatial distribution across Italy is characterized by a twofold specificity 1 (Benassi et al, 2023a). First, Sri Lankans prefer to settle in large cities, 2 particularly those listed in Table 1, which were home to almost 55% of the total number of Sri Lankans residing in Italy at the beginning of 2021 (as indicated by the bold numbers in the fourth and ninth columns of Table 1).…”

“…Sri Lankans exhibit a strong work specialization in the domestic sector, with their most common jobs being domestic assistance, housekeeping and cleaning services (Benassi et al, 2023a;Mazza & Punzo, 2016;Mazza et al, 2018). In particular, many live in the house in which they work (Henayaka-Lochbihler & Lambusta, 2004).…”

“…Even fewer contributions analyse the settlement geographies of Sri Lankans in Italy, one of their main European destination countries together with the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland (Dharmadasa & Herath, 2020). This is quite surprising, because this community shows a peculiar residential distribution across Italy (Benassi et al, 2022(Benassi et al, , 2023a.…”

Framing the Residential Patterns of Asian Communities in Three Italian Cities: Evidence from Milan, Rome, and Naples

“…Although there are fewer contributions focused on the Italian context compared to the ones regarding Northern Europe, the relevance of this topic has been rapidly increasing, leading to a growing number of analyses (Benassi et al 2023b(Benassi et al , 2019Bitonti et al 2023;Busetta et al 2015;Mazza et al 2018;Mazza and Punzo 2016;Petsimeris and Rimoldi 2015;Rimoldi and Terzera 2017). Overall, these studies have revealed a spatial dichotomy at the macro level between the northern and southern parts of Italy, with Northern Italy exhibiting a higher proportion of immigrants and experiencing lower levels of residential segregation and inequalities.…”

“…For this reason, we believe that the assessment of possible betweencity variations in segregation could encourage the critical thinking of the implications of macro-level dynamics on the immigrants' residential allocation choices. Furthermore, the comparative approach implemented here allows the present work to cope with the scarcity of segregation studies (e.g., Benassi et al 2023b), performing comparative analyses across Italian cities. The basic reasoning is to analyse several dimensions of segregation starting with the traditional separation between the dominant group (i.e., Italians) and the minority ones (the main immigrant groups residing in the areas), and then moving to the analysis of multi-group separation and interaction in the perspective of a growing "super-diversity" of the society.…”