Looking for a New Approach to Measuring the Spatial Concentration of the Human Population

Abstract 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 Spatial Gini Index, is then computed by using two different kind of territorial partitioning methods: MaxMin (MM) and the Constant Step (CS) distance. In this framework an ad hoc extension of the Rey and Smith decomposition method is then introduced. We apply this new approach to the Italian and foreign population resident in almost 7,900 statistical units (Italian municipalities) in 2002, 2010 and 2018. All elaborations are based on a new ad hoc library developed and implemented in Python.