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In the 1990s, Istanbul regained its long-forgotten role as a regional gateway between Asia and Europe. With the growing importance of the city in global flows, hypotheses concerning the global city and social/spatial polarisation were advanced for Istanbul, arguing that it could best be characterised as a ‘divided city’. This paper suggests that despite the city's growing integration with global dynamics, the degree of segregation is not on the rise but even registered a slight fall between 1990 and 2000. The distinct nature of social mobility that provided the poor with the opportunities for upward mobility generated an easily legible pattern of segregation. In the mid-1990s these dynamics changed and the forces acting upon segregation became too diversified to be reduced to a single factor, generating unpredictable results in parts of the city. Our findings indicate that the mobility of the existing population and locational choices of newcomers work in opposite directions as far as their impacts on segregation are concerned, with the former increasing and the latter decreasing the existing levels of segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revealing the genetic population structure in abundant avian species is crucial for understanding speciation, conservation, and evolutionary history. The Red-backed Shrike Lanius collurio, an iconic songbird renowned for impaling its prey, is widely distributed as a breeder across much of Europe, Asia Minor and western Asia. However, in recent decades, many populations have declined significantly, as a result of habitat loss, hunting along migration routes, decrease of arthropod food, and climate change e.g., severe droughts in Africa. Within this context, gene flow among different breeding populations becomes critical to ensure the survival of the species, but we still lack an overview on the genetic diversity of the species. In this paper, we analyzed the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene (mtDNA) and the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 gene (mtDNA) of 132 breeding Red-backed Shrikes from across the entire breeding range to address this knowledge gap. Our results revealed consistent genetic diversity and 76 haplotypes among the Eurasian populations. Birds are clustered in two major groups, with no clear geographical separation, as a direct consequence of Pleistocene glaciations and apparent lineage mixing in refugia. This has led to genetic panmixia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]