Fragmenting urban space: Do residential compounds increase segregation?

The relationship between social inequality and residential segregation is neither linear nor straightforward, and the same applies to the link between segregation and the expansion of residential compounds – housing developments with shared amenities and varying degrees of physical or symbolic enclosure. While much of the literature assumes that these developments contribute to increasing segregation – particularly in the case of gated communities, which represent the most enclosed form of residential compounds – this relationship has rarely been examined empirically in Europe. A major limitation lies in the lack of systematic data to capture the scale, diversity and spatial embedding of residential compounds. This gap has constrained empirical assessments of their role in contemporary processes of urban differentiation and has tended to overemphasise their most enclosed forms. This article examines the evolution and spatial distribution of residential compounds in the Granada metropolitan area (Southern Spain) over the last four decades. It draws on an original and exhaustive inventory of 642 developments, combined with census-based socio-economic data (1991–2021) and income records from the Spanish Tax Agency (2021), to analyse their relationship with changes in social structure and residential segregation. The findings show that the expansion of residential compounds has not led to higher levels of residential segregation at the metropolitan scale. Instead, it has contributed to a more diffuse pattern of socio-spatial fragmentation, characterised by micro-scale forms of differentiation that are not fully captured by conventional segregation indicators. These results qualify prevailing assumptions about the segregation effects of residential compounds and provide new insights into the dynamics of urban inequality in Mediterranean metropolitan contexts.