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Although residential sorting along socio-economic lines has increased in many cities across Europe, few studies have examined what drives changes in segregation over time. This study looks at the role of school choice expansion in shaping patterns of spatial inequality. We adopt a longitudinal perspective and investigate how the increasing availability of private primary schools is related to the dynamics of socio-economic segregation in German cities. Drawing on a uniquely compiled data set for the years 2005 to 2014 that includes 74 large and medium-sized cities with over 3500 districts, we estimate linear panel regression models with city fixed effects. The analyses show that an increase in the share of private primary schools is associated with a decrease in the segregation of poverty in West German cities but not in East German ones. The association in West Germany is particularly pronounced in local contexts characterised by growing rates of poor residents and growing proportions of young children. Results imply that school choice availability may promote residential integration and at the same time reinforce school segregation.

In this article, we focus on ways in which ‘internal migration industries’ shape the housing location of refugees in cities. Based on empirical studies in Halle, Schwerin, Berlin, Stuttgart and Dresden, we bring two issues together. First, we show how a specific financialised accumulation model of renting out privatised public housing stock to disadvantaged parts of the population has emerged that increasingly targets migrant tenants. With the growing immigration of refugees to Germany since 2015, this model has intensified. Second, we discuss how access to housing is formed by informal agents. While housing is almost inaccessible for households on social welfare, the situation is even worse for refugees. This situation has given rise to a new ‘shadow economy’ for housing that offers services with dubious quality for excessive fees. Bringing these two issues together, we argue that housing provision to refugees has become a new business opportunity. This has given rise to a broad variety of ‘internal migration industries’ that provide the housing infrastructure, but also control access to housing. This not only results in new opportunities for profit extraction, but actively shapes new patterns of segregation and the concentration of refugees in particular types of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002347 bundesministerium für bildung und forschung https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002347

This article analyses the spatial distribution of foreigners living in the city of Milan, based on data from the civil registry and relying on theories and methods from the residential segregation literature, exploring the dimensions of evenness, exposure, concentration, centralisation and clustering, as well as analysing migrants’ over/under-representation in specific areas through maps of their location quotients. Despite the low degree of ethnic residential segregation detected, we highlight the presence of persistent dynamics that exclude ethnic minorities from the wealthiest areas of the city. The most relevant case is that of the Chinese, clustering in some peripheral areas north of the historic centre, where they have established an enclave economy, often making their residence coincide with their workplace and running commercial activities mostly directed towards their compatriots. The Egyptians, constituting the most numerous foreign group in the city, show a completely different settlement pattern, being more integrated into the social tissue and more scattered throughout the city. In the context of a city strongly polarised between a wealthy centre and progressively deprived peripheral belts, the only foreign groups with a marked presence in the city core are those traditionally employed in domestic work, which are however excluded from life in the public places in which they reside. Overall, the class dimension seems to prevail over the ethnic in shaping population settlement patterns within the city.

Ethnic segregation is consolidated by differences between ethnic groups with regard to their moving decision. Using unique registration data on population flows between neighbourhoods, the paper shows that native Dutch living in neighbourhoods where ethnic minorities are overrepresented are more likely to move than minority ethnic residents. Moreover, they move much more often to 'White' neighbourhoods. Urban policies in the Netherlands focus on countering this tendency to segregation, but are based on simplified assumptions with regard to the causes of residential segregation. Relatedly, the optimism about the positive effects of social mix is hardly substantiated by empirical research. Postprint