Fig. 1: Fictitious maps of the association of seven ethnicities to the wards of Greater London.
From: Quantifying ethnic segregation in cities through random walks
a The ethnicities are distributed uniformly at random across the city, to simulate a "maximally'' homogeneous and unsegregated pattern. In this case, a random walker starting from any ward will get in touch with all the available ethnicities within a relatively small number of steps. b The same map with a substantial clustering of ethnicities imposed artificially. In this case, a walker starting in the middle of a cluster will need a lot more time to visit all the other ethnicities. This observation leads to the idea of using the statistics of Class Coverage Time to quantify the level of segregation and heterogeneity of an urban area with respect to a given variable of interest.
