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The present study investigates the relation between urban form and the socio-economic patterns of the resident population in three southern European cities ( Athens, Lisbon and Rome) featured by different processes of urban diffusion. The paper goes beyond the literature on sprawl focused on (residential, income and ethnic) segregation and the different features of the inhabitants of the suburbs and those of the inner cities residents. By integrating multivariate statistics and spatial analysis, a methodology is proposed, based on morphological and socio-economic indicators available at a fine geographical scale. Results show how urban diffusion processes vary widely according to the context, as does the socio-economic profile of the actors, stressing the need to think about different 'southern European alternatives' of sprawl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing mainly on qualitative evidence gathered from interviews with migrant handymen and with labour-using households in the UK, this paper analyses how this migration typifies economic and social divisions within Europe and embodies conflicting tensions between economic and social policies at an interpersonal level. By supplying household services, migrant handymen enable labour-using households to alleviate time pressures and conflicts in time priorities arising from tensions between economic expectations regarding working hours and work commitment, and social expectations regarding contemporary ideas of active parenting. Similarly to the outsourcing of feminized domestic labour and care, these tensions are in part resolved for labour-using households by extending class divisions across national boundaries while leaving gender divisions changed but not transformed and in some instances exacerbating work/ life tensions among the migrants. These broad findings are complicated by differential desires and capabilities around fathering practices among fathers in labour-using households and among the migrants, and economic differentiation among the migrant population. Although we cannot tell from our study whether such movement reinforces or redresses uneven development, what we can say is that existing cohesion policies are insufficient to redress uneven development, and individual responses including migration can reinforce existing social divisions. Further, existing social policies for promoting gender equality fail to recognize or redress the deeply embedded gendered norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT It is increasingly becoming common knowledge that one of the major effects of the Single European Act 1986 will be to increase freedom of movement for some within the internal borders of the 12 European Community member States from 1993, while correspondingly restricting the influx of 'outsiders'. What is still lacking, however, is informed research on the extent of this 'exclusion' and the likely impact of such exclusionist policy on the policing and movement of 'refugees' and migrants from South to North and East to West. It is the intention of this paper to address some of these issues. The main rationale behind these restrictionist and exclusionist policies is, on the one hand, a fear concerning floods of refugees invading the West from both the South and the East, due to either internal strife or poverty or simply economic disparity. On the other hand, a 'tightening-up' of the asylum regulations and procedures is felt necessary on the official ground of 'too many bogus applications' being made to circumvent visa restrictions. This raises two problems in particular. Firstly, if the EC member States are becoming increasingly exclusionary, what happens to the refugee 'flood'? Secondly, when is an 'economic migrant' not a refugee, or a refugee not a migrant, or even a 'refugee' not a suitable case for asylum? Moreover, even though it is realized at the political level that a long-term strategy for 'social and economic progress in the home countries represents the most important precondition to give the people in those countries a new professional and social perspective, which will encourage them to stay in their home countries' it is nevertheless the case, unfortunately, that through Schengen and other EC inter-governmental structures, the emphasis on control policy would seem to be dominant. Now that Hungary has joined the Council of Europe, has been a party to the 1951 (UN) Geneva Convention and the 1967 New York Protocol since March 1989, and together with Czechoslovakia and Poland has applied to join the EC, one has to wonder whether the 'Cold War' border between East and West is being shifted further East to become a 'Closed' border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]