William A.V. Clark

As a geographer and demographer my primary research interests are the study of residential mobility, urban segregation and the broader social structure of cities. I have carried out a sustained research program to show how life course events are linked to residential mobility behavior, the ways in which selection and sorting across the urban mosaic creates the neighborhood structures of our cities, and in turn how neighborhoods are linked to the labor market. With colleagues and students my research now focuses on neighborhood inequality and social outcomes, and their impact on the intention to move or stay in the neighborhood. A recent jointly edited book (The Sage Handbook of Housing Studies) brings together a group of geographers, economists, planners and demographers and lays out the central issues in, mobility, segregation, housing and neighborhood choice. The research on segregation provided some of the first empirical tests of the Schelling models of choice. Those papers showed that the theoretical tolerance distributions outlined by Schelling could be generated from survey data. Most recently the Schelling model has been translated into an agent based model with survey preferences as the basis for the predicted outcomes.