This article is part of our series “The New City” about the development of major German cities.
Every city is home to rich and poor people. They often live just a few houses away from each other. Sometimes a river separates low-income and high-income households, sometimes a train station, sometimes just a street. Classes are often distributed according to patterns that have developed over decades, sometimes centuries.
ZEIT ONLINE evaluated income estimates from the information service provider infas 360 and visualized them for all 80 major cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Each individual point represents a household; the color symbolizes the estimated household net income, i.e. what a household has left after deducting income tax and social security contributions. For the first time, a pattern of inequality is becoming visible, which shows that in many parts of the big cities, the income classes largely remain among themselves. In technical jargon this is called “segregation”.
#Income #distribution #large #cities #patterns #inequality
