Unequal Everyday Geographies in the Fragmented Medium-Sized City: Spatial Practices and Urban Inequality in Lleida, Spain

Abstract

Urban fragmentation is often approached through residential patterns, spatial distance and the uneven distribution of urban resources. However, in Southern European medium-sized cities, where socially contrasting neighbourhoods may be located in close physical proximity, fragmentation may operate through less visible everyday mechanisms. This article examines how selective spatial practices reflect and may reproduce unequal access to places, activities and opportunities, and how this perspective may inform debates on spatial governance and urban planning. Drawing on GPS tracking, in-depth interviews and mental maps, it analyses daily mobility, activity spaces and lived spatial boundaries in two socially contrasting neighbourhoods of Lleida, Spain. The article contributes to debates on urban inequality, understood as the structurally conditioned unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, capacities and recognition by conceptualising differentiated everyday geographies as both manifestations of this inequality and mechanisms through which it may be reproduced. The findings show how spatial practices and cognitive representations structure urban experience beyond residential segregation: physical proximity does not necessarily translate into shared urban experience: as some participants develop broader and socially legitimised relations with the city, whereas others display more restricted and symbolically bounded patterns of urban engagement. The article therefore advances practised accessibility as an analytical and planning perspective that incorporates the temporal, modal, cognitive and symbolic conditions that shape everyday access to urban opportunities beyond their informal availability.