Schelling’s model of segregation
Schelling’s model, which earned Schelling the Nobel Prize in 1979, models the social segregation of two populations of individuals who can move within a city by obeying a few simple rules:
- Each agent is satisfied with their position if there is at least a consistent percentage of neighbors like them around them
- Otherwise, the agents move
The neighbors are, for example, those of the Moore neighborhood, which is its eight closest neighbors. By letting the system evolve according to these rules, it is shown that starting from a mixed population, we obtain a city segregated into neighborhoods in which there are individuals of a single population. This phenomenon has been interpreted as an emergent property as it is typical of the macro scale of the system. It is not due to any centralized control or to explicit decisions by the two groups as a whole, and there is no direct causal link between the rules on individual agents...
