Residential Patterns in an Industrialising City: Urban Segregation in Early 19th-Century Ghent

Martijn Collijs, Ghent university

In this paper I examine residential patterns in Ghent, a Belgian city of around 80,000 inhabitants, during early industrialization and urbanization in the 19th century. Industrialization triggered mass rural migration, leading to a labor surplus, declining wages, and widening socio-economic disparities, particularly in northern Belgium. Cities experienced polarization and housing shortages, likely shaping their residential structure. While 19th-century segregation has been extensively studied in Britain and North America, the European context remains less explored. Additionally, most studies predated GIS, making fine-grained spatial analysis impossible. I contribute to this literature by analyzing Ghent with GIS to examine socio-economic residential patterns at a detailed scale. First, I assess macro-segregation without spatial characteristics to compare Ghent with cities like Uppsala, Montreal, and Liverpool. Next, I incorporate spatial dimensions—clustering and centralization—to analyze how segregation manifested locally. I then explore neighborhood-level patterns, comparing meso- and macro-scale segregation. Finally, I investigate how factors such as centrality, housing quality, and accessibility shaped these patterns and identify the key actors responsible for their development. I hypothesize that Ghent was divided into distinct socio-economic neighborhoods, with a wealthy historic center and a poorer periphery. However, each neighborhood likely housed a full social spectrum, with differentiation at the meso level. Urban development, accessibility, and housing quality shaped these patterns. The middle class played a key role by responding to housing demand and constructing substandard units within their vicinity. My analysis draws on a dataset of 13,000 properties from the 1828/1835 cadastre, which documented land values and ownership. This geolocated dataset enables a rare, detailed historical study of segregation. Property value serves as a proxy for socio-economic status. I use evenness, clustering, and centralization measures, alongside visualizations like kernel density maps and linear isolines, to analyze segregation’s extent and underlying causes.

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 Presented in Session 137. Geospatial Approaches in European Urban History