1. 4 th International Conference on Population Geographies The Chinese University of Hong Kong 10-13 July 2007 Session 4A International Migration The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy at the start of the 21st century. Corrado Bonifazi*, Frank Heins* and Salvatore Strozza** * Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies, National Research Council, Rome, Italy ** University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy

2. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...2 Structure of the presentation  Aim  The foreign population in Italy  The dissimilarity index  Regional patterns of dissimilarity  The possible determinants

3. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...3 Aim of the project  The aim of our project is the (1) analysis of the regional settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy in a national perspective and (2) the comparative analysis of its local settlement patterns.

4. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...4 Aim of the presentation  The following presentation focuses on the comparative analysis of the local settlement patterns. The local labour market areas (686 areas defined based on the commuting patterns found during the 2001 population census) are the reference areas and the observations are the single census tracks.  Results regarding the dissimilarity index, measuring the dimension of evenness in the distribution of the foreign population compared to the Italian population, are presented.

5. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...5 The foreign population in Italy  The foreign population amounted to 1334889 at the 2001 population census. Since then it grew rapidly.

6. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...6 The foreign population in Italy  the share of the foreign population at the census in 2001 was 2.3 % and stands today at 4.8 % of the total population of Italy  the foreign population is concentrated in Central and North- Eastern Italy – the Third Italy

7. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...7 The dissimilarity index  Problem: the number of foreign residents influences the value of the index: the lower the number of foreign residents the more it is likely that their settlement pattern is different from the pattern of the Italian population. An aspect of aleatory to the value of the index is introduced.  We refer to the review of dissimilarity indices by Massey and Denton and the more recent contributions by Apparicio et al and Wong, who introduced GIS to the calculation of the dissimilarity index.

8. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...8 The dissimilarity index  The dissimilarity index is defined in the following way with i as the indice of the territorial unit (in our case the census tracks) ps i – foreign population of the census track i PS – foreign population of the Local Labour Market area of reference pi i – Italian population of the census track i PI – Italian population of the Local Labour Market area of reference

9. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...9 The modified dissimilarity index  To ‘standardise’ the territory we applied the concept of ‘composite population counts’ (see Wong): the observed population date are substituted through a weighted mean of the population data of the adjacent census tracks. The distance between the centres of the census tracks (in km) serves in the present case as a straightforward weighting model:

10. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...10 The modified dissimilarity index  This simple distance criteria does not take into consideration natural or man-made barriers, which would be important to determine social interactions between adjacent areas. The distance parameter expresses a hypothesis regarding the effect of distance on social interactions: the higher the exponent a, the smaller is the area taken into consideration to calculate the value of the composite population counts. To test the effects a was set to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. This approach could be a step towards tackling the ‘modifiable areal unit problem’.

11. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...11 The modified dissimilarity index

12. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...12 The modified dissimilarity index  Before proceeding with the calculation of the modified dissimilarity index the contributions to the composite population counts of census track i of each census track j were re-proportioned to its observed population numbers. This correction is necessary to make sure that the population of a census track is not taken into consideration more often than others only due to the small distance between census tracks especially in the case of city centres.

13. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...13 The dissimilarity index

14. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...14 The not-modified dissimilarity index

15. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...15 The modified dissimilarity index  CPC and distance parameter a = 8

16. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...16 The modified dissimilarity index  CPC and distance parameter a = 2

17. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...17

18. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...18

19. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...19

20. Bonifazi/Heins/Strozza - The settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy...20 Conclusion  a low proportion of foreign residents, high unemployment and a low gdp per capita are associated with an uneven distribution of the foreign population  it does not seem obvious to use the dissimilarity index, even in its modified form, in a comparative study of the local settlement patterns of the foreign population in Italy