Federico Benassi

• PhD
• assistant professor (tenure track position) in demography at University of Naples Federico II

Taylor’s law states that the spatial variance of the population density varies as the power function of the mean population density. This law is tested on daily Covid-19 infection density for five periods between February 25, 2020 and March 15, 2021. The Italian provinces are grouped by geography into three ensembles. A simultaneous-equation model...

This study presents a spatial analysis of suburban inequalities (residential concentration and income inequalities) among the main foreign-born population groups resident in Spain (Italians, Britons, Chinese, Moroccans and Romanians) in Madrid and Barcelona. Through a local spatial approach at census tract level, a number of relevant issues are hig...

Taylor’s power law (Tpl) is applied to the human population density of Italian regions and provinces for the period 1971–2011. Three different weighting systems are used to estimate Tpl at the national and subnational levels in which seemingly unrelated regression models are adopted. The following results were found: Tpl is suitable for human popul...

Residential segregation is a well studied subject especially after the publication of the pioneering and seminal contribution of Duncan and Duncan (Am Sociol Rev 41:210–217, 1955). Considering the theoretical and methodological advances made since then, the contribution endeavours in describing and understanding the differences in residential segre...

In the article a new approach for measuring the spatial concentration of human population is presented and tested. The new procedure is based on the concept of concentration introduced by Gini and, at the same time, on its spatial extension (i.e., taking into account the concept of spatial autocorrelation, polarization). The proposed indicator, the...

Asylum applications in European Union (EU) Member States have had a nonhomogeneous tendency over the past decade, with an unequal distribution of refugee burdens within the EU, a solidarity deficit, and a lack of uniformity in the EU Member States’ refugee protection systems. By using Eurostat data on 26 EU Member States and considering the period...

The growing number of people living alone in single-person households is a recent trend which reveals the growing incidence of loneliness and social isolation. Loneliness has traditionally been associated with ageing, and problems of health and well-being. However, voluntarily loneliness among young people and professional groups is now on the rise...

The paper proposes a preliminary investigation on the multiscale dimensions of residential segregation. The study case refers to the municipality of Naples and to the most important foreign group settled in the city of Naples: the Sri Lankans. The results of the analysis, carried out at local level with the 2021 Census data and using a multiscale g...

There are significant disparities in health care resources across different regions of Italy, particularly between the centre-north and the south. Public health care spending is notably lower in southern Italy. As a result, health related migration is a major phenomenon, with many individuals traveling to other regions - especially from the south t...

Foreign presence is an intrinsically spatial phenomenon, characterized by strong geographical variability across different territorial contexts. This variability becomes progressively more intense as we move down the territorial scale of analysis. This contribution proposes an empirical evaluation of the residential geographies of EU foreign citize...

Residential segregation refers to the spatial separation between two or more social groups in urban areas. Originating from scholars of the Chicago School, this topic has since consolidated over time within the fields of urban and sociological studies. In the European context, the growing social disparities and levels of segregation experienced by...

In studies examining the settlement patterns of foreign communities within a region, the primary aim often involves assessing the level of spatial segregation compared to the native population. However, such analyses typically overlook the assessment of the historical presence of these communities in the region. Particularly with small-sized commun...

Between 1992 and 2007, the Italian healthcare system underwent a profound and complex transformation. This reform rekindled interest in the study of health and mortality inequalities in Italy, and fears were expressed that the new system could trigger a rise in health disparities across regions. We contribute to the debate examining the evolution o...

The literature on knowledge spillovers explains how regional firm location is positively affected by the two main knowledge outputs of higher education institutions: new knowledge and specialized human capital. Following these premises, this paper aims to (i) detect spatial dependence in the distribution of certain firms that are potentially more e...

This paper aims to analyse the demographic dynamics that occurred in the largest Italian urban areas (14 metropolitan cities) in the last ten years, paying particular attention to the emerging geographical patterns. The study adopts a multiple comparative perspective: between centre and peripheries, between Northern and Southern contexts and betwee...

There has been a significant increase in single-person households in Europe. The studies that analyse this process have shown its relationship with the increase in physical and mental illnesses, or the perception of well-being. Similarly, social isolation has been addressed through the study of single-person households, with a particular focus on i...

The geographical (im)mobility of immigrants in host countries is a significant issue due to its strong links with the integration process. This is particularly evident in Italy, a country with a long history of emigration, where the foreign resident population has now become a structural element of society. Using original data sources and adopting...

The interplay between accessibility and population change is a relatively new subject in Italian academic research. Along with social and economic factors such as regional economic prosperity, the ease of movement inside and outside an area can play a pivotal role in shaping population dynamics. This study seeks to explore the spatial distribution...

This article delves into the distinctive intra- and interregional geographical heterogeneity of Italy, emphasizing demographic and socio-economic variations and the role of foreign employment, considering the labour market as a fundamental driver for migration and local inclusion. The article identifies a gap in understanding the employed foreign p...

This article explores spatial patterns of demographic change and residential segregation in Italy over the past decade, a topic which has not been studied in detail in the literature. Population ageing and migration are unfolding rapidly in a number of European countries, generating tensions and challenges at local level. Aggregate regional or nati...

This book analyses the most recent socio-territorial trends that are developing in the Spanish metropolitan space. The first part focuses on the most recent metropolitan dynamics and demographic changes in Southern Europe. The second part discusses the most important processes in metropolitan areas: the problems of increasing social and residential...

This introductory chapter has two main objectives: (i) to provide a general overview of the theoretical and phenomenological framework from which the book draws its inspiration; and (ii) to concisely describe its content, 19 chapters grouped in 4 thematic sections. The entire book is focused on the Southern Europe, probably one of the densest and l...

The aim of this contribution is to analyse the peculiarity of the Southern European context in the European migration system. In particular, the first part of this chapter describes the transition of the Southern European countries from areas of origin to areas of destination of international migration flows. The differences in terms of country of...

There has been a significant shift in migratory behavior within Italy over time. The origins and destinations of the migration flows, which were previously characterized by a clear prevalence of moving from the south to the center-north, are now much more heterogeneous and complex. Despite the important progress achieved in the past 20 years, the m...

The implementation of place-based policies entails the construction of intervention areas (spatially contiguous areas in which the policies are adopted). Many approaches can be adopted for the definition of such areas. This paper reflects on the use of geographically weighted regression (GWR) models as a tool capable of supporting the definition pr...

This research studies the residential mobility of Italians and foreigners in Rome from 2002 to 2019. We examine the differences in residential mobility patterns for (1) Italians and foreigners, (2) foreign migrants by selected country of origin, and (3) the effect of intra-urban mobility on residential segregation. Log-linear models and segregation...

Urban concentration played an important role in economic growth over the whole 20th century, being more recently less and less associated with the rate of population growth, suggesting the growing importance of other forces acting on a local scale. Large metropolitan regions, however, seem to escape from this general model, adhering to even more in...

This article explores the application of the Structural Causal Models (SCM) approach in the field of demography, discussing the PC algorithm to identify the causal chain, and the backdoor criterion, to identify the variables that need to be controlled for. Using a subset of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) dataset, we applied the SCM appro...

Verifying the intrinsic stability of demographic processes over time and space is a pivotal task from both science and policy perspectives. Compared with other regions of the old continent, a latent peculiarity of demographic systems in Southern Europe is their persistent heterogeneity over space, especially observed across metropolitan regions. ‘C...

The present work proposes a spatial analysis of the residential segregation and settlement models of Sri Lankans in the eight main Italian municipalities. Hosting more than half of the total Sri Lankan population residing in Italy, the selected urban areas allow Sri Lankans’ residential model to be globally framed across the country. The purpose of...

Today, the interplay between economic inequality, international migration, and urban transformation has raised awareness about segregation and its social implications on a global and European scale. As cities become home to diverse populations with various backgrounds including social, racial, ethnic, and cultural, the proximity of these groups bec...

In several European countries, life expectancy has progressed little in the past two decades. In this paper, focused on Italy, we investigate whether “austerity” and health regionalization may have contributed to this outcome. We show that the succession of reforms to the Italian health system introduced since the 1990s closely corresponds to disco...

A local spatial comparative approach to study internal migration of national and foreign population in Italy is proposed in the paper. Univariate and bivariate local analysis of spatial autocorrelation of internal migration rates of the two populations is conducted. Results are mapped and crossed with municipalities typologies identified by the Deg...

Spatial mobility is a distinctive feature of human history and has important repercussions in many aspects of societies. Spatial mobility has always been a subject of interest in many disciplines, even if only mobility observable from traditional sources, namely migration (internal and international) and more recently commuting, is generally studie...

The spatial concentration of human populations is a dynamic attribute of demographic systems and a multifaceted research dimension intrinsically dependent on settlement patterns and diverging (individual) geographies. An extensive literature dealing with the quantitative assessment of this demographic aspect has proposed several methodologies and a...

Population trends in Italy are strongly spatially differentiated, with some municipalities showing a systematic loss of population, and others showing an equally continuous demographic increase. Here, we focus our attention on the spatial dimension of population change, looking at how different socioeconomic and demographic dimensions affect popula...

The population dynamics in Italy show a strong spatial heterogeneity within a framework of persistent demographic territorial disparities. From a local point of view, it is necessary to understand what demographic determinants govern this process. In the paper, we model the population change according to a local (i.e., spatial varying coefficients)...

Spatially unequal demographic dynamics lead to a progressive fragility of a territory and its socio-economic system. In Italy, municipalities characterized by demographic malaise tend to be increasingly small in size and peripheral in location, and their local spatial aggregation increased over time. A spatial approach is here proposed to investiga...

Knowledge of long-term population trends is still incomplete at the global scale. In this perspective, human and animal ecology has intensively studied the relationship between the Mean (M) size and the Variance (V) of specific attributes of subpopulations within a given regional system. One of the best-known relationships between these two attribu...

The 2008 economic crisis, also called the Great Recession, produced only a moderate rise in unemployment in Italy, but the consequences for public debt management were far more serious. Italy makes for a good case study for evaluating the effect on life expectancy at birth of the cost containment program in the health care system, implemented after...

The spatial concentration of population is a key dimension for demography and population studies. Often it is not easy to properly measure this dimension because of its double nature (statistical and geographical process). The article proposes a new way of measuring the spatial concentration of the population based on the graphical representation o...

The growing processes of the socioeconomic inequality resulting from the neoliberal political model are evident in large Spanish cities, with a spatial dimension that allows us to visualise its contradictions with great clarity. These social contradictions are particularly marked among the most vulnerable and foreign population groups. For this rea...

Some European countries, such as Greece and Spain, were severely hit by the 2008 economic crisis whereas others, such as Germany, were practically spared by it. This divergence allowed us to implement a difference in differences research design which offered the possibility to observe the long-lasting effects produced by the crisis on European life...

This paper offers an analysis of the supply of Airbnb accommodation in Rome, one of the main tourist destinations in the world, the third-largest city in Europe, by the number of Airbnb listings. The aim is to focus on the recent spatial trend of Airbnb listings, including the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight the main housing and soci...

We investigated the demographic impact of past earthquakes on local communities, coupling damage, assessed by MCS Macroseismic intensities, with long term demographic parameters. We started with two case studies, both from Southern Italy and occurring several decades ago. The results of this work depict a general framework of demographic distress i...

Studies on fertility determinants have frequently pointed to the role that socio-economic, cultural and institutional factors play in shaping reproductive behaviours. Yet, little is known about these determinants at an ecological level, although it is widely recognised that demographic dynamics strongly interact with ecosystems. This research respo...

Sri Lankans constitute one of Italy’s oldest foreign communities. A comparative geographic study of Sri Lankans’ settlement patterns in three main municipalities of South Italy (Naples, Palermo, and Catania) is performed in the present work. The uniqueness of the analysis relies on the fact that, to the authors’ knowledge, no other existing studies...

Southern European studies of migrants’ spatial distribution within metropolitan cities (MCs) are increasingly relevant to understanding residential segregation and marginalisation, particularly of foreign nationals. This paper leverages original and partially unpublished data to examine overall and foreign national specific segregation over two dec...

Immigration flows and social inequalities reflect increased social and multi-ethnic segregation in contemporary urban Europe. For a better understanding of these processes, the present study investigates the main strengths of the multi-group residential indices, testing sensitivity and reliability under different metropolitan contexts in five Europ...

This study analyzes at a local level (i.e. census tract) the spatial patterns and main contextual factors related to the electoral resurgence of the extreme-right party (VOX) in Southern Spain (Andalusia) in 2018 and 2019. The 2019 electoral data was associated with the percentage of total foreign-born population, degree of territorial concentratio...

The location quotient (LQ), a ratio of ratios, is a widely known geographic index (Isard, 1960). It is used to measure and map relative distributions or relative concentrations of a character in a sub-area compared to the area as a whole (Wheeler, 2005). It has been recently proposed as a local index in the study of residential segregation of forei...

Migration is an obvious response to political, economic, socio-demographic, and ecological crises. In recent decades, several crises have occurred in the Mediterranean region; consequently, migration has intensified, the geography of flows has been altered, and the roles of some countries within the Mediterranean migration system have rapidly chang...

An original approach to spatial economic analysis is here proposed with reference to Italy. A granularity approach is applied on microdata related to a panel of firms that have been active during 2007–2017. At each firm is therefore associated a coefficient of exposure to the economic cycle of four major foreign economies: Germany, UK, USA, and Chi...

This essay considers the rural-to-urban transition and correlates it with urban energy demands. Three distinct themes are inspected and interrelated to develop awareness for an urbanizing world: internal urban design and innovation, technical transition, and geopolitical change. Data were collected on the use of energy in cities and, by extension,...

The authors have requested that this preprint be removed from Research Square.

In above mentioned article first and family names in the author group have been published in reversed order.

Since the early 1990s, persistently low fertility in Mediterranean countries has attracted the interest of empirical research aimed at identifying factors associated with demographic change in what were traditionally high-fertility contexts. Most of these studies have been carried out at the national scale, while spatial analyses of sub-national pa...

Fertility is a key process shaping long-term population dynamics. Distinctive fertility trends have characterized demographic transitions, exhibiting sequential periods of spatial convergence and divergence. This descriptive study investigates the spatiotemporal evolution of Total Fertility Rate (TFR) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR) at different geograp...

This paper investigates the meso dimension of the Italian territorial capital. Multivariate explorative analysis was carried out on Italian municipalities using several original statistical indicators. We detected two latent dimensions on which three clusters of municipalities were identified: the prevalence of cultural endowments and typicality, t...

Reflecting a broader form of neo-liberal urban policy underlying the progressive return of capital investment, gentrification is a key issue in urban studies. Although earlier definitions of “gentrification” focused mostly on socio-cultural processes, recent works have qualified gentrification as a mixed political–economic issue. Clarifying whether...

Taylor’s law states that the variance of population density in a given set of areas is a power function of its mean. When the exponent is equal to 2, the distribution of population densities between areas remains unchanged; when it is less than 2, the distribution converges toward the uniform distribution; when it is greater than 2, the densities b...

In 1885, Ravenstein formulated his “laws” of migration, based on the experience of the British Isles. In a further 1889 paper, he extended his analysis as a tour d’horizon of migration and population changes in other nations, including Italy. Even if social and economic processes including globalisation and rising mobility have changed the world si...

Metropolitan regions in Europe experienced intense demographic change from accelerated population expansion sustained by high fertility and immigration to zero (or negative) growth and aging. Such transformations are particularly complex in Southern Europe and lead to a shift from the impressive urban growth driven by industrialization to a more re...

Population decline is a major issue impacting environmental sustainability, economic growth and social well-being. Although earlier studies evaluated demographic factors, social forces and economic aspects associated with population decline in Europe, the role of territorial factors was less considered when investigating the spatial linkages betwee...

Density-dependent population growth regulates long-term urban expansion and shapes distinctive socioeconomic trends. Despite a marked heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of the resident population, Mediterranean European countries are considered more homogeneous than countries in other European regions as far as settlement structure and proce...

Studies on residential segregation of foreign population in Southern Europe usually focus on capital cities, omitting the metropolitan dimension and paying less attention to use of comparable analysis’ spatial scales. These issues, together with the dominant use of two-group segregation indexes, prevent identification and classification of metropol...

The relationship between population dynamics and desertification risk in advanced economies is increasingly dependent on the mutual interplay of socioeconomic forces at regional and local scales. Assuming that specific, long-term demographic dynamics are associated with a given level of desertification risk, the present study investigates populatio...

The foreign population has become a structural trait of Italian society, and its territorial integration a key factor in social sustainability. Mixed couples, an emerging phenomenon in the Italian context, are leading to a change in social space and residential geography of the local environment. Encouraging an improvement in the level of territori...

Aging, European Union consolidation, and human mobility across countries are three entangled processes making the Mediterranean region of Europe an attractive retirement place thanks to mild climate and lower costs of living. Residential mobility of retired workers in Europe has grown rapidly since the 1980s because of increased wealth, transportat...

This chapter deals with demo-migratory characteristics and settlement models of the main communities of citizens of countries belonging to the former Soviet Union (FSU) resident in Italy. The data used come from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and Eurostat and refer to population statistics at different territorial levels in th...

One of the challenges on disasters’ understanding is the assessment of impact from a more global perspective, adding to their scenario of injuries, deaths, homeless and economic losses, those effects that are mostly widespread and could last for a long period of time, driving to a serious disruption of a community or a society. Seismic disasters ar...

The object of this book is intra-urban mobility, namely the diverse forms of mobility occuring within a city: from residential mobility to daily mobility, the latter understood both as commuting and as urban travel for leisure. The specific aim of the volume is to explore mobility in the city at different times, from the XVIIth century to today, an...

Population movements (international and internal migration) and changing fertility and mortality patterns have significantly affected demographic structures. Investigation of the relationship between (evolving) population structures and economic downturns is a key issue in economic demography. Analysis of compositional changes in regional populatio...

The paper presents an original application of the Gini’s centre of population (MC) and its Standard Deviational Ellipse (SDE) in the field of spatial distribution of foreigners. The proposed measures have been applied to the top five foreign communities (and Italians) counted in 2011 Italian demographic census in the municipality of Rome and Naples...

in Tintori, G., Alessandrini, A., Natale, F., Diversity, residential segregation, concentration of migrants: a comparison across EU cities. Findings from the Data Challenge on Integration of Migrants in Cities (D4I), EUR 29611 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2018, ISBN 978-92-79-98732-8, doi:10.2760/823648, JRC115159.

The demographic trends affected both the actual and future population size and structure. At the end of the twentieth century, birth reduction and life expectancy increase in European countries have determined a negative or stable growth rate (Coleman, Rowthorn 2011). Immigration counteracted in a certain measure these processes and contributed to...

Salvo diversa indicazione la riproduzione è libera, a condizione che venga citata la fonte. Immagini, loghi (compreso il logo dell'Istat), marchi registrati e altri contenuti di proprietà di terzi appartengono ai rispettivi proprietari e non possono essere riprodotti senza il loro consenso.

What are the spatial residential patterns of the main foreign groups residing in some large Italian cities? Using data from the last Italian demographic census (2011) at sub-municipality level, the study investigates on this research question. A spatial approach is applied to analyze the geographical distribution of the main foreign groups enumerat...

In this essay, we tackle the issue of the international mobility of young Italians in relation to regional disparities. Our intention is to determine if and to what extent a relationship exists between regional development and the international mobility of young people. We analyze the international migration of Italian citizens aged 15-34 who left...

Although still needing a definite theoretical status, spatial justice represents an inspiring framework for geographical analysis and for planning. In this paper we try to operationalize the concept through a geo‐demographic approach. By using demographic and social differences as proxy of the concept at the urban level we define five socio‐territo...

Animal ecology has devoted a great deal of effort to the study of the relations between the variance (V) and the average (M) of the density of a group of sub-populations (pi) belonging to the same territorial system, and thus, it has been possible to develop several ‘laws’. Among these laws, one of the best known is Taylor’s power law (TL), which p...

Family and young children interaction constitutes an intricate piece of the reconstructed human behaviors and relations that dominate the current sociodemographic transition in Albania. We argue here that the recent macro demographic and social changes, which indicate an entry into the second demographic transition, are also articulated in the fami...

Abstract Animal ecology has devoted a great deal of effort to the study of the relations between the variance (V) and the average (M) of the density of a group of sub-populations (pi) belonging to the same territorial system, and thus, it has been possible to develop several ‘laws’. Among these laws, one of the best known is Taylor’s power law (TL)...

In the last decade (2001–2011) foreign population in Italy as tripled showing, from one hand, a strong tendency to become a structural phenomenon and, on the other hand, clear spatial patterns of distribution. Quite surprisingly just few study analyze foreign presence in Italy taking into account in a direct form the spatial dimension. Thanks to a...

Le dinamiche migratorie e i processi di integrazione sono ormai diventate un elemento costitutivo della società italiana. A questi temi i ricercatori e gli associati dell ' Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche hanno dedicato il presente volume, analizzando i due fenomeni dai seguenti p...

In the last 60 years Italy experienced a nearly continuous population growth (about 25%), switching from 47 in 1951 to almost 60 millions of people in 2011. Such a dynamic took place differently in the various territorial contexts. The analysis of the transition phases in seven local urban systems allowed to shed some lights on the heterogeneous ev...

The potential economic distress of households is a phenomenon bound up with a very broad set of economic, demographic and social factors. This paper is concerned with the identification of these factors and of how their spatial variability influences the spatial variability of the Share of Households in Potential Economic Distress (SHED). To this e...