Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or, near Lyon (Rhône), La Mosson, in Montpellier (Hérault)… Although large cities are places of diversity, “Within cities, the poorest and richest populations tend to separate and regroup with each other”points out the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) in its annual report on the income and assets of French households.
For the first time, the institute mapped pockets of wealth and poverty in all urban units with more than 10,000 inhabitants and identified 2,300 neighborhoods, especially “modest” or “rich”, which bring together 11 million people. This geographical approach is innovative, although it does not allow the analysis of the numerous intermediate districts, reflected in other studies, such as that of Apur for Greater Paris.
The Décoders focused on “large cities”, the 59 urban areas with more than 100,000 inhabitants, representing the INSEE data in the form of a polar graph, that is, a polygon that draws the profile of urban areas based on various data. : percentage of households called rich or poor, surface area occupied by each type of neighborhood or according to the median income of residents, etc. A typology emerges in four groups:
Find this ranking and the analyzes of geographers and sociologists. An exploratory map of all cities is available at the end of the article, highlighting pockets of wealth and poverty identified by INSEE.
Cities that concentrate rich neighborhoods: Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Annecy…
In this first category of cities, the average standard of living is much higher than average, the population of rich neighborhoods, as well as their associated surface area, is significantly larger than that of poor neighborhoods.
The metropolis of Paris is very representative of this pattern, with a large high-income population clustered in pockets of wealth that extend into and around Paris, to the west and south. Almost 35% of the inhabitants – or 3.8 million inhabitants – live in these “rich neighborhoods” that occupy almost 20% of the area’s total area. On the contrary, pockets of poverty that represent 9.5% of the population – or 1 million inhabitants – are limited to 3% of the surface and are distributed between the center of the city, the north and the east, mainly in Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Oise.
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