An Open-Source Software for Calculating Indices of Urban Residential Segregation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to introduce a new stand-alone application—Geo-Segregation Analyzer— that is capable of calculating 43 residential segregation indices, regardless of the population groups or the metropolitan region under study. In practical terms, the user just needs to have a Shapefile geographic file containing counts of population groups that differ in ethnic origin, birth country, age, or income across a metropolitan area at a small area level (e.g., census tracts). Developed in Java using the GeoTools library, this free and open-source application is both multiplatform and multilanguage. The software functions on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and its user interface currently supports 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, Portuguese, Creole, Vietnamese, and Chinese). The application permits users to display and manipulate several Shapefile geographic files and to calculate 19 one-group indices, 13 two-group indices, 8 multigroup indices, and 3 local measures that could be mapped (location quotient, entropy measure, and typology of the ethnic areas proposed by Poulsen, Johnson, and Forrest).