Assessing neighborhoods, wealth differentials, and perceived inequality in preindustrial societies

Humans often live in neighborhoods, nested socio-spatial clusters within settlements of varying size and population density. In today’s cities, neighborhoods are often characterized as relatively homogenous and may exhibit segregation along various socioeconomic dimensions. However, even within neighborhoods of similar social or economic status, there is often residential disparity, which in turn impacts perceived inequality. Drawing on the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project database, we study housing inequality within a sample of neighborhoods using the Gini coefficient of residential unit area and related measures of inequality. We examine patterns of intra-community inequality within more than 80 settlements from diverse spatiotemporal contexts including some of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, the Classic Maya region, the Central Andes, and the Indus River Basin. Residential disparity differs within and among sectors of these settlements; some neighborhoods exhibit more similarity in residence size, resulting in lower degrees of housing inequality, while other sectors display greater variations in residence size with higher degrees of housing inequality. We observe a meaningful relationship between neighborhood inequality and population size, but not date of foundation or longevity of occupation. The macro-level structural processes associated with varying forms of governance seem to trickle down to the scale of the neighborhood. These findings may help explain why more unequal systems are not necessarily more unstable, as the inequality people experienced in their neighborhoods may generally have been less than that present in the overall settlement.