Exposing cybernetic assumptions in urban demographic models
How racial entropy came to shape school segregation and spatial justice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11229463 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E De Freitas (0000-0003-0795-8804, Adelphi University, corresponding author), Matthew Curinga (Adelphi University), Matthew X Curinga (0000-0002-9046-5551, Adelphi University) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-15 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0159-6306 • E-ISSN: 1469-3739 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/01596306.2025.2599737 |
| OpenAlex | W7116934134 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 42 |
This paper is focused on the impact of cybernetics on social theories of segregation. We historically trace cybernetic models as they moved from information theory into sociology, where they were used to justify de facto segregation as part of ‘self-organizing’ emergent tendencies in urban environments. Our work is intended to support the fields of spatial justice, Black geographies, and critical quantitative methodologies, by exposing how cybernetic ideas shaped sociological demographic models that racialized urban space. We discuss how the concept of ‘racial entropy’ and other spatial concepts (evenness, isolation, exposure) emerged as part of a stochastic image of racialized population dynamics. Our objective is to expose how cybernetic ideas came to problematically influence our current discourse about school segregation. These cybernetic ideas were part of a paradigm shift in sociological theories of race relations in the 1970s, when information theory generated a new image of urban space, race, and community
Cybernetics · Economic Justice · Ethnography · Racial bias · Social justice · Critical Race Theory in Education · Education Discipline and Inequality · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
How We Became Posthuman
Close Up at a Distance
Algorithms of Oppression
Measuring school segregation
On the measurement of inequality
Spatial Segregation Measures
Racial Residential Segregation of School-Age Children and Adults
QuantCrit
Contemporary patterns and issues of school segregation and white flight in U.S. metropolitan areas
Beyond design
A note on the measurement of racial integration of schools by means of informational concepts
Dynamic models of segregation
The cybernetics of learning
The Random Spatial Economy
Income Segregation Between Schools and School Districts
Separate Remains Unequal
From Resegregation to Reintegration
Entropy-Based Segregation Indices
A Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indexes
Measures of Spatial Segregation
Central City White Flight
Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs
School Desegregation and White Flight
Against the Dark
A Method for Studying Differences in Segregation Across Time and Space
The Strength of Weak Ties
Measuring the Permeability of Occupational Structures
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |