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Supplemental Material for The conflicting geographies of social frontiers: Exploring the asymmetric impacts of social frontiers on household mobility in Rotterdam by Dan Olner, Gwilym Pryce, Maarten van Ham, Heleen Janssen in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Mid-twentieth-century large housing estates, which can be found all over Europe, were once seen as modernist urban and social utopias that would solve a variety of urban problems. Since their construction, many large housing estates have become poverty concentrating neighbourhoods, often with large shares of immigrants. In Northern and Western Europe, an overlap of ethnic, social and spatial disadvantages have formed as ethnic minorities, often living on low incomes, settle in the most affordable segments of the housing market. The aim of this introductory chapter is to synthesise empirical evidence about the changing fortunes of large housing estates in Europe. The evidence comes from 14 cities—Athens, Berlin, Birmingham, Brussels, Budapest, Bucharest, Helsinki, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Moscow, Prague, Stockholm and Tallinn—and is synthesised into 10 takeaway messages. Findings suggest that large housing estates are now seen as more attractive in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. The chapter also provides a diverse set of visions and concrete intervention measures that may help to improve the fortunes of large housing estates and their residents.

In the 1960s and 1970s, all over Europe housing estates emerged that were very similar with respect to construction methods and urban design. At the same time, housing estates across Europe did not all follow the same trajectory after their completion. This divergence occurred because the main reasons for their deterioration and social degradation are exogenous factors, not internal factors. Of course, it makes a difference whether the physical quality of the dwellings was good and whether the spatial planning was adequate. But even well-designed housing estates are subject to social degradation due to competition with newer neighbourhoods that are usually added at the top of the market and more geared to contemporary housing preferences. In Western Europe, this process of relative depreciation is further exacerbated by the prioritisation of owner-occupation leading to residualisation of the social rented sector. The social and ethnic transformation of large housing estates is not only the consequence of planning and housing policies but also of external factors like immigration and economic decline. Most European countries have witnessed a substantial inflow of immigrants in the previous decades, and many of these find their way to large housing estates. Next to that, the social decline of housing estates is often related to a shrinking local economy. Policies aimed at reversing the decline hurt the sitting population more often than it helped them.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/ 2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. 615159 (ERC Consolidator Grant DEPRIVEDHOODS, Socio-spatial inequality, deprived neighbourhoods, and neighbourhood effects), from the Marie Curie programme under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/Career Integration Grant n. PCIG10-GA-2011- 303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE According to the neighborhood effects hypothesis, there is a negative relation between neighborhood wealth and youth’s problem behavior. It is often assumed that there are more problems in deprived neighborhoods, but there are also reports of higher rates of behavioral problems in more affluent neighborhoods. Much of this literature does not take into account relative wealth. Our central question was whether the economic position of adolescents’ families, relative to the neighborhood in which they lived, was related to adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. We used longitudinal data for youth between 12–16 and 16–20 years of age, combined with population register data (N = 926; 55% females). We employ between-within models to account for time-invariant confounders, including parental background characteristics. Our findings show that, for adolescents, moving to a more affluent neighborhood was related to increased levels of depression, social phobia, aggression, and conflict with fathers and mothers. This could be indirect evidence for the relative deprivation mechanism, but we could not confirm this, and we did not find any gender differences. The results do suggest that future research should further investigate the role of individuals’ relative position in their neighborhood in order not to overgeneralize neighborhood effects and to find out for whom neighborhoods matter. Publisher PDF

Neighborhood decline is a complex and multidimensional process. National and regional variation in economic and political structures (including variety in national welfare state arrangements), combined with differences in neighborhood history, development and population composition, makes it extremely difficult to identify a unilateral process of neighborhood decline over time. Some scholars have tried to develop all-encompassing models to explain neighborhood decline; others have studied more deeply the relevance of a limited number of factors and developments in processes of decline. The literature has paid little attention to the influence of economic development on neighborhood development, and surprisingly, few studies have focused on the effects of the economic crisis on urban neighborhoods. The recent global economic and financial crisis affected many European and North-American cities in terms of growing unemployment levels and rising poverty in concentrated areas. At the same time, urban investments such as urban restructuring and neighborhood improvement programs have decreased, or come to a halt altogether. By reviewing existing literature, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of neighborhood decline in light of the economic crisis. By formulating ten hypotheses about the ways in which the economic crisis might interact with processes of neighborhood decline, this paper aims to push the debate on neighborhood decline forward and calls for more contextualized research on neighborhood change. We will highlight challenges for future research and point to factors that need to be taken into consideration in a post-crisis society.

In the past few decades, urban regeneration policies have taken firm root in many Western European countries. Underlying these regeneration policies is a strong belief in the negative neighborhood effects of living in areas of concentrated poverty, often neighborhoods with a large share of social housing. In Europe, great importance is attached to creating a more diverse housing stock (in terms of tenure and dwelling types) as a means to establishing a more socially mixed neighborhood population. Mixed-housing strategies are embraced explicitly by governments in Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The idea is that mixing homeowners with social renters will create a more diverse socioeconomic mix in neighborhoods, removing the potential of negative neighborhood effects. By far the largest tenure-mixing operation in Europe is the Right to Buy (RTB) scheme in the United Kingdom. Since the 1970s, more than 2.7 million socially rented houses have sold at large discounts, mainly to sitting tenants. In this article, we synthesize the outcomes of RTB with regard to neighborhood effects: residualization, neighborhood stability, tenure and social mix, social interactions, and dwelling maintenance. Although we acknowledge substantial socioeconomic benefits of RTB for many individual residents, we find that the neighborhood outcomes of RTB are by no means solely beneficial. Publisher PDF

The extent to which socioeconomic (dis)advantage is transmitted between generations is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. However, few studies have investigated whether there is a spatial dimension to this intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. Drawing upon the concept of a neighbourhood biography, this study contends that there are links between the places individuals live in with their parents and their subsequent neighbourhood experiences as independent adults. Using individual level register data tracking the whole Swedish population from 1990 to 2008, and bespoke neighbourhoods, this study is the first to use innovative sequencing techniques to construct individual neighbourhood histories. Through visualisation methods and ordered logit models, we demonstrate that the socioeconomic composition of the neighbourhood children lived in before they left the parental home is strongly related to the status of the neighbourhood they live in 5, 12 and 18 years later. Children living with their parents in high poverty concentration neighbourhoods are very likely to end up in similar neighbourhoods much later in life. The parental neighbourhood is also important in predicting the cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods over a long period of early adulthood. Ethnic minorities were found to have the longest cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods. These findings imply that for some groups, disadvantage is both inherited and highly persistent.

Neighbourhood effects research is at a crossroads since current theoretical and empirical approaches do not seem to be moving the debate forward. In this paper, we present a set of ten challenges as a basis for a new research agenda which will give new direction to the neighbourhood effects debate. The ten challenges are: 1) Future work should concentrate on explaining what is in the black-box of the 'neighbourhood effect' by deriving and testing clear hypotheses on causal neighbourhood effect mechanisms; 2) Studies should explicitly investigate the relationship between neighbourhood context and individual outcomes; 3) Alternative outcome variables such as subjective well-being should be considered; 4) We should move away from point-in-time measures of neighbourhood characteristics and take into account people's neighbourhood histories; 5) More attention is needed for the intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood effects; 6) We need to understand neighbourhood selection and to incorporate neighbourhood selection explicitly in models of neighbourhood effects; 7) We need a better operationalization of neighbourhood; 8) Neighbourhood effects researchers need to broaden their horizon to include other spatial contexts which might matter, in addition, or in place of the residential neighbourhood; 9) We need bespoke data to investigate neighbourhood effects; 10) The tenth and final challenge is to combine qualitative and quantitative methods into one research design.

Most studies investigating residential segregation of ethnic minorities ignore the fact that the majority of adults live in couples. In recent years there has been a growth in the number of mixed ethnic unions that involve a minority member and a white member. To our knowledge, hardly any research has been undertaken to explicitly examine whether the ethnic mix within households has an impact on the residential choices of households in terms of the ethnic mix of destination neighbourhoods. Our study addresses this research gap and examines the tendencies of migration among mixed ethnic unions in comparison with their co-ethnic peers. We used data from the Longitudinal Study for England and Wales. Our statistical analysis supports the spatial assimilation theory: ethnic minorities move towards less deprived areas and to a lesser extent also towards less ethnically concentrated areas. However, the types of destination neighbourhood of minority people living in mixed ethnic unions varied greatly with the ethnicity of the ethnic minority partner.

In this chapter we investigate the process of ethnic minority segregation in English social housing. Successive governments have expressed a commitment to the contradictory aims of providing greater choice – through the introduction of choice based letting – for households accessing an increasingly marginalised social housing sector whilst also expressing a determination to create more mixed communities and neighbourhoods. We consider the concept of choice in the context of a heavily residualised social housing sector, arguing that, for social housing tenants at least, the concept of real choice is a misnomer. We draw on research that has utilised unique administrative data and analysed the moves of all entrants into and movers within the social renting sector over a ten year period in England. The conclusion is that the introduction of choice based letting has influenced the residential outcomes of ethnic minorities and resulted in highly structured neighbourhood sorting that has segregated minority populations into the least desirable neighbourhoods of English cities.

The idea that living in a deprived neighbourhood negatively affects the occupational mobility of residents has been embraced enthusiastically by many policy makers and academics. As a result, area based initiatives are now widely used to improve an individual's life course through the diversification of the neighbourhood in which they live. However, these area based initiatives have received increasing criticism from academics stating that there is no solid evidence base that neighbourhood effects really exist. One of the main problems is that many studies use cross-sectional data which does not allow the separation of cause and effect. We use longitudinal data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) to investigate the influence of neighbourhood context on employment outcomes. The SLS allows us to follow individuals between 1991 and 2001, using linked records from both Censuses. Using this data we examine whether, for employed individuals, living in a deprived neighbourhood reduces occupational mobility using ISEI scores; for individuals out of work, we examine whether living in a deprived neighbourhood reduces their chances of obtaining work. Using regression models, we control for a range of individual and household characteristics. All other things being equal, those individuals living in more deprived communities should experience significant negative effects accrued from their neighbourhood if the neighbourhood effects thesis is to be confirmed.

Conceptually, adopting a life course approach when analysing residential mobility enables us to investigate how experiencing particular life events affects mobility decision-making and behaviour throughout individual lifetimes. Yet although a growing body of longitudinal research links mobility decision-making to subsequent moving behaviour, most studies focus solely upon examining year-to-year transitions. As a result of this 'snap-shot' approach, little is known about how pre-move thoughts and subsequent mobility relate over longer periods within the context of dynamic life course trajectories. Current research therefore fails to distinguish ephemeral moving desires from those which are persistently expressed. This study is one of the first to move beyond investigating year-to-year transitions to explore the long term sequencing of moving desires and mobility behaviour within individual life courses. Using innovative techniques to visualise the sequences of a panel of British Household Panel Survey respondents, the study demonstrates that the meanings and significance of particular transitions in moving desires and mobility behaviour become apparent only when these transitions are arranged into individual mobility histories. We uncover previously ignored groups of individuals persistently unable to act in accordance with their moving desires. Visualising mobility histories also highlights the oft-neglected importance of residential stability over the life course.

Large scale suburbanisation is a relatively recent phenomenon in East Central Europe and responsible for major socio-spatial changes in metropolitan areas. Little is known about the ethnic dimensions of this process. However, large minority population groups, mainly ethnic Russians, remained into the former member states of the Soviet Union after its dissolution in 1991. We use individual level Estonia Census data in order to investigate the ethnic dimensions of suburbanisation. The results show that ethnic minorities have a considerably lower probability to suburbanise compared to the majority population, and minorities are less likely to move to rural municipalities – the main sites of suburban change – in the suburban ring of cities. Individual characteristics that measure strong ties with the majority population and host society exert a positive effect on ethnic minority suburbanization, and on settling in rural municipalities.

In addition to neighbourhoods of residence, family and places of work play important roles in producing and reproducing ethnic segregation. Therefore, recent research on ethnic segregation and contact is increasingly turning its attention from residential areas towards other important domains of daily interethnic contact. The key innovation of this paper is to clarify the role of immigrants' pre-hire exposure to natives in the residence, workplace and family domains in immigrant exposure to natives in their current workplace. The study is based on Swedish population register data. The results show that at the macro level, workplace neighbourhood segregation is lower than residential neighbourhood segregation. Our micro-level analysis further shows that high levels of residential exposure of immigrants to natives help to reduce ethnic segregation at the level of workplace establishments as well.

The research reported in this paper examines the nature and extent of socio-spatial mobility in the United Kingdom. In contrast with previous studies, we do not only investigate who moves out of deprived neighbourhoods, but our models cover the entire spectrum of neighbourhoods and provide a more complete interpretation of the process of mobility across socio-spatial structures. We use the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) to classify neighbourhoods defined as small areas containing approximately 1500 people. We use the data from all available waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to trace moves between these neighbourhoods, classified into deprivation deciles. We define upward socio-spatial mobility as moving to neighbourhoods with lower levels of deprivation. The focus on residential choices and the outcomes – residential sorting – allows us to measure the fluidity of the British social structure. We show that restricted ability to compete for the better neighbourhoods combines with residence in neighbourhoods with relatively high degrees of deprivation to limit opportunities for social mobility. The analysis shows that education and income play critical roles in the ability of individuals to make neighbourhood and decile gains when they move. There are also powerful roles of being unemployed and being (and becoming) a social renter. Both these latter effects combine to seriously restrict the possibilities for socio-spatial movement for certain groups. The results suggest serious structural barriers to socio-spatial mobility in British society, barriers which are directly related to the organisation of the housing market.

Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a 'local event', the literature argues that self-employed workers and entrepreneurs are 'rooted' in place. This paper tests the 'residential rootedness'-hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the self-employed are less likely to move or migrate than employees. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and accounting for transitions in employment status we found little evidence that the self-employed in Germany and the UK are more rooted in place than employees. Firstly, the self-employed are not less likely to move or migrate over the period 2001–08. Secondly, those who are currently self-employed are also not more likely to have remained in the same place over a period of three years (2008–06 and 2005–03) as compared to those who are currently employed. Thirdly, those who are continuously self-employed are not less likely to have moved or migrated over a 3-period than those in continuous paid employment. Fourthly, in contrast to the prevalent 'residential rootedness'-hypothesis in economic geography and regional studies, we found that the entry into and the exit from self-employment are associated with internal migration.

International marriages are both a result and a driver of higher levels of global mobility and interconnectivity. Increasing ease of air travel for work and leisure, rising numbers of individuals studying, working and travelling abroad, and the emergence of international partnering websites have expanded traditionally local marriage fields – the geographical areas where people meet the partner – to global proportions. This expansion has increased the chance of meeting a potential partner from abroad resulting in an increase in international marriage migration. Recruiting a partner from abroad is surrounded by prejudice and stigma. ‘Knowledge’ about the characteristics of the individual ‘importing’ a partner from abroad is often based on anecdotic evidence and myths. In this paper we explore the factors that determine the probability that a native Swede recruits a partner from abroad. Along with various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the Swede we will pay specific attention to the geographies of marriage migration: the opportunity structure. This study uses longitudinal population data for the whole of Sweden, containing information on all individuals who lived in Sweden between 1994 and 2004. The results from multinomial logistic regression models shed a unique light on gendered and geographic patterns of partner recruitment.

This paper seeks to unpick the complex effects of migration, country of birth, and place of residence in Scotland on individual success in the labour market. We pay specific attention to the labour force experience of English-born residents in Scotland, whom the cross sectional literature suggests are more likely to achieve high occupational status than the Scottish born residents. Using data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study – linking individual records from the 1991 and 2001 Censuses – and logistic regressions we show that those living in, or moving to Edinburgh, and those born in England and Wales are the most likely to experience upward occupational mobility.

The number of studies investigating neighbourhood effects has increased rapidly over the last two decades. Although many of these studies claim to have found evidence for neighbourhood effects, most 'evidence' is likely the result of reversed causality. The main challenge in modelling neighbourhood effects is the (econometric) identification of causal effects. The most severe problem is selection bias as a result of selective sorting into neighbourhoods. This paper argues that in order to further our understanding of neighbourhood effects we should explicitly incorporate neighbourhood sorting into our models. Neighbourhood effect studies are in the situation where the processes behind one of its key methodological problems (selection bias) are also critical to fully understand the neighbourhood context itself. It is thus remarkable that residential mobility and neighbourhood sorting has been almost completely ignored in the neighbourhood effects literature.

Brussels’ urban and suburban landscape has changed considerably since the 1980s. The consolidation of socioeconomic fractures inside the city, a reinforcement of long-lasting disparities between the city and its prosperous hinterland, as well as the increasing diversification of migration flows—both high- and low-skilled—contributed to these disparities. Recent evolutions of these patterns, however, have not been investigated yet and therefore remain unknown. Besides, the extent to which segregation is primarily related to economic inequalities and to migration flows—or a combination/interaction between the two—so far has not been studied. This chapter offers a detailed overview of the socio-spatial disparities in the Brussels Functional Urban Area. Our analyses relied on fine-grained spatial data, at the level of statistical sections and of individualised neighbourhoods built around 100 m x 100 m grids. We analysed socioeconomic segregation measures and patterns, as well as their evolution between 2001 and 2011. Socioeconomic groups were defined based on individuals’ position with respect to national income deciles. In line with previous research, our results show very marked patterns of socioeconomic segregation in and around Brussels operating both at a larger regional scale and at the local level.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the socioeconomic evolution of large housing estates in Brussels, Belgium, in particular their role in shaping residential segregation in the city. As in many European countries, modernist and functionalist ideas of the mid-twentieth century led to the raising of large housing estates in Brussels, in an attempt to offer middle-class households affordable yet modern and comfortable dwellings. However, contrary to other countries, the development in Belgium was marked by general housing policies that promoted homeownership, with limited investment in social housing, and a lack of laws and political vision related to spatial planning Whereas some public ensembles were conceived by modernist architects, most of Brussels’ large housing estates were built by private contractors in peripheral neighbourhoods and were aimed at homeownership of the lower middle class. In this chapter, we first present a brief historical perspective of the policies, ideologies and territorial processes that made it possible for housing estates to develop and spread in Brussels. Next, we analyse how large housing estates evolved since the 1990s in terms of socioeconomic composition and the role they play in segregation. We finally discuss the challenges, current perspectives and political awareness with respect to large housing estate. Our findings point out that Brussels’ housing estates are spatially scattered and have only a limited impact on the concentration of deprivation and foreign nationals. However, the trends identified in our study indicate that housing estates can become important socioeconomic fractures at the local level.

The contingent of large housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s accounts for almost a half of all high-rises in Finland. The primary ideology in their genesis was to combine industrially prefabricated urban housing development with the surrounding forest landscape—together with a policy of spatial social mixing—to prevent social disorder and segregation. These policies seemed to work as intended until the early 1990s, but have since proved to be insufficient. With Western integration and new information and communication-based economic growth, new trends of population differentiation have emerged. As new wealth has moved out to the fringes of cities, the large housing estates have declined socio-economically—and have been enriched ethnically. This differentiation is structurally produced, works through the regional housing market and, as such, is beyond the scope of the preventive policies pursued. Recent attempts at controlling the regional markets and new forms of spatial social mixing have so far proved difficult. The contingent of large housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s accounts for almost a half of all high-rises in Finland. The primary ideology in their genesis was to combine industrially prefabricated urban housing development with the surrounding forest landscape—together with a policy of spatial social mixing—to prevent social disorder and segregation. These policies seemed to work as intended until the early 1990s, but have since proved to be insufficient. With Western integration and new information and communication-based economic growth, new trends of population differentiation have emerged. As new wealth has moved out to the fringes of cities, the large housing estates have declined socio-economically—and have been enriched ethnically. This differentiation is structurally produced, works through the regional housing market and, as such, is beyond the scope of the preventive policies pursued. Recent attempts at controlling the regional markets and new forms of spatial social mixing have so far proved difficult.

The seminar series ‘Entrepreneurship in Homes and Neighbourhoods’ this volume draws on is funded by the ESRC grant ES/L001489/1 to Darja Reuschke, Colin Mason, Stephen Syrett, Maarten van Ham and Duncan Maclennan.