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AbstractThe article investigates how policies systematically exclude Roma women from accessing decent housing. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with Roma women in Brno, Czech Republic, the study aims to expand the concept of housing precarity along two dimensions: ‘permanent temporality’ and ‘forced urban nomadism’. The research describes key actors and institutions, including the state and its policies, regional, city, and municipal regulations, the housing market, and the rise of private hostels driven by the ‘poverty business’. The study highlights how structural and local conditions shape the housing experiences of Roma families, emphasizing their active role in navigating precarious housing situations. It particularly focuses on the coping strategies of Roma women, such as reliance on multigenerational households and frequent relocations between various types of substandard housing. This research contributes to ongoing discussions about housing by offering a nuanced understanding of how systemic forces and individual strategies interact to produce and perpetuate housing precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service providers' crucial roles in securing housing for refugees in Canada is a topic scantly addressed in the broader literature. A focus on frontline workers in the housing and settlement sectors offers a productive analytic lens to map the critical link between service provision and housing access for refugees. Based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with service providers across nine organizations in Toronto, Canada, this study illuminates housing access barriers, such as lack of affordable housing and perceived housing discrimination. Furthermore, this paper unearths the intersectional praxis of frontline workers. Broadening the analytical frame to include an intersectional lens centring race, class, immigration status, and gender, this paper enriches current scholarship on 1) housing inequality, 2) refugee settlement, and 3) intersectionality. This paper also makes an epistemic intervention in the evolving field of housing studies at critical junctures. While this research was conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, this study reflects on the added complexity of the pandemic to refugees' housing access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractDespite its reputation as a ‘paradise for renters,’ housing seekers in Vienna also face increasing difficulties in finding affordable housing, especially in the private rental housing market. We examine how competitive housing search, application, and allocation shape the subjectivities of housing seekers. Drawing on interviews with landlords, real estate agents and housing seekers in the Viennese private rental market, we analyse the suggestions of subjectivity housing seekers face and how they appropriate—enact, negotiate, or contest—these subjectivities. The study shows that housing seekers must sense and enact an ideal tenant to increase their chances of successfully accessing housing. The various modes of subjectification clustered around this image of the ideal tenant—being solvent, caring for the apartment, not being a foreigner, and invoking a good ‘gut feeling’—show that increased competition not only makes access to affordable housing more difficult, but also has normative effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Integration into a community after homelessness, while often difficult, can foster positive outcomes such as housing retention and improved health. However, research has understudied the roles of spiritual practices in community integration after homelessness. Methods: We conducted a grounded analysis of these processes using qualitative interviews with 27 supportive housing residents in Miami. Results: Even after moving into supportive housing, many of our interviewees grappled with long-term impacts of trauma, discrimination, and stigma, which oftentimes prevented them from joining conventional congregations. While some turned to solitary prayer, others used strategies such as joining alternative congregations, creating new locations of practice, and using technology to sustain social ties and a sense of belonging. Conclusion: We argue that researchers, supportive housing providers, congregation leaders, and administrators should pay more attention to barriers and strategies that impact residents' ability to practice spirituality in ways that meet existential, emotional, and social needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social mix is a key dimension of housing policy to reduce segregation in different urban contexts, but it is frequently associated with a strategy of gentrification linked to the neoliberal restructuring of housing systems. Prior studies, however, tend to overlook the political and institutional mechanisms that influence the practices and outcomes of social mix. Building on fieldwork in a former working-class municipality in Paris suburbs, I draw on the theory of gradual institutional change to examine the politics of social mix. I show that evolving power relations among housing policy actors, fostered by political alignment and multiple office-holding processes, pave the way for gradual institutional changes based on conversion. These modifications to the local institutional arrangement shape new directions in housing policy that lead to the restructuring of the built environment and neighbourhood socioeconomic ascent. Overall, I contend that contextualized institutional and political processes are key to explaining the practices of social mix and their link with neoliberalisation and gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When correcting policies to tackle rising housing inequality, certain principles of housing justice are necessary. Recently, the capability approach to justice has attracted the attention of housing scholars, as promising guidance to compensate for problems in conventional policy approaches. However, the practicality of its policy application remains uncertain. This article suggests how to manage the issues creating gaps between the philosophy of the capability approach and housing policy practices, along the chain of essential questions of justice theories (which ideal institutions, metrics of justice, and distributive pattern rules?). Building on this reasoning, the article proposes that housing policy be guided by the changes in unjust housing situations in terms of people's capability for housing, instead of by absolute principles of distribution, or characteristics of welfare state/housing regimes. For evaluating housing capability, this article proposes to assess housing opportunities, housing securities and housing abilities. The article concludes with implications for the roles of comparative housing research in implementing the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Households with children have been suggested to play a key role in ethnic residential segregation. One possible mechanism is that school district boundaries affect their segregation patterns, but direct evidence on this is scarce. This study investigates the role of school catchment areas for ethnic residential segregation among different types of households in the city of Helsinki, Finland, using individual-level register-based data covering the complete population of the city between 2005 and 2014. The analyses consist of three steps: a description of ethnic segregation among different types of households with segregation indices, an analysis of mobility flows between school catchment areas, and a boundary discontinuity analysis of the causal effects of the boundaries of catchment areas on the mobility of different types of Finnish-origin households. The analyses show that ethnic segregation is stronger among households with children than among childless households and the residential mobility of higher-income Finnish-origin households with children is particularly affected by the school catchment area boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much valuable research has been carried out on the patterns and determinants of immigrant distribution in residential space, nuanced longitudinal studies that focus on the interdependencies between housing and neighbourhood mobility are rare. In the current study, we examine the residential integration of immigrants in the Helsinki metropolitan area by studying the overlap between housing mobility (entering homeownership) and neighbourhood mobility (moving to above-average income neighbourhoods) in the context of complex anti-segregation and mixing policies. The results reveal that the overlap between housing and neighbourhood mobility in such a policy context is weak; while moving to a wealthier neighbourhood is relatively easy, it is much more challenging to enter homeownership. It follows that successful policies of residential integration of migrants should emphasize both housing mobility and neighbourhood mobility, including how the two are related to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the last decade, the notion of a housing crisis emerged as a key issue on national political agendas across nation-states. The overall decline in homeownership is even sharper along racial lines. The way race/ethnicity is captured in housing research has important implications for how racial disparities are explained and addressed. This paper uses a critical discourse analysis to examine how ethnicity and race are represented in New Zealand housing research published between 2013 and 2019. The analysis reveals a lack of attention devoted to explaining racial disparities in housing research. Only one article from a sample of 103 referenced the concepts 'racism' and 'institutional racism' to explain institutional barriers that adversely affect Indigenous people engaging with home-lending institutions. This paper argues that housing scholarship is an important space for understanding how policies institutionalize racism to exclude marginalized bodies, especially through predatory lending practices, loan denial, and segregation. This paper concludes with a discussion of the social implications of race-neutral explanations of housing-related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between housing tenure and educational opportunities in the Paris metropolitan area. Using census microdata, we show that the middle classes face uneasy trade-offs between housing tenure and access to attractive educational resources. Living in high-quality school contexts is associated with renting, whereas access to homeownership mostly unfolds in poor-performing school areas. This tension is not observed for other social strata. Based on fieldwork conducted in Paris suburbs, we highlight the interweaving of middle-class housing and school choices. Some families may use the rental sector to live close to attractive schools. In mixed neighbourhoods, homeowners either choose the local school or opt for circumvention strategies. Because of the dramatic increase of housing prices, the interplay between housing tenure and the unequal geography of education is crucial to understand social stratification and social mobility patterns in large cities, particularly among the middle classes, as well as to improve public policies aimed at reducing housing and school inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the 'overlap' or to which degree tenure form patterns are similar to socio-economic segregation patterns. The issue has been discussed concerning mixing policies; does mixing of tenure hinder socio-economic segregation? If mixing tenure is to be an effective policy against segregation, the overlap has to be understood. Using Swedish register data, we cross tenure-type landscapes with patterns of high/mixed/low-income and with European/non-European/Swedish-born. To what degree is there overlap among tenure, income and country of birth? Is the overlap related to geographical scale and polarization? Is the overlap of tenure forms with socio-economic characteristics consistent across regions? We find strong overlap of large-scale cooperative tenure landscapes with very high incomes as well as with Swedish-born. Small-scale tenure-landscapes provide mixing opportunities for incomes wherever they are located; however, these landscapes have a small non-Swedish-born population nearby. Some tenure-type landscapes vary in characteristics depending on location; e.g. public rental concentrated areas are high-income in urban cores but low-income in urban peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple-home ownership has become an increasingly common phenomenon in Chinese cities. In addition to the purposes that have been widely discussed, such as leisure and investment, households may also choose to purchase additional homes for their children. Whether families adjust the consumption of multiple homes according to the gender of their children has a profound impact on housing inequality and gender inequality. Using household-level data from urban China, we investigate how and why having sons and daughters differentially affects the household tenure choice of multiple homes. We found a robust and positive impact of having sons on multiple-home ownership. Having at least one unmarried son of marriageable age significantly increases a family's consumption of and demand for additional homes. The results are mainly heterogeneous across families with different levels of intra-family resources. We confirm the mechanism behind the positive effect of adult unmarried sons on multiple-home ownership reflects the differentiated strategies developed by parents for the marriage of their sons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The persistence and severity of the gap between black and white wealth, and the role of housing discrimination in creating and sustaining this gap are both well documented. But given the chronological and spatial limits of national data sets, we have little direct empirical evidence about the local mechanisms shaping race, housing and wealth in the era when most of the damage was done. We employ the newly available 1940 full count census and the archival records of the St. Louis Assessors office to traced housing values, tenure, and disposition for a sample of 1940 owners and addresses. We show that sustained residential segregation carved the City into zones with very different trajectories of housing opportunity, and trapped African-American homeowners into long tenures of ownership in distressed and depreciating neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of tenure mix have received renewed interest as many have suggested that neo-liberalization has made way for gentrification of neighbourhoods and increasing segregation. Yet, few scholars have studied country-wide changes in tenure mix, due to the lack of data and appropriate methods. In this article, we propose to use tenure type landscapes to analyse changes in housing policy. We do so while acknowledging the evolution of housing policies in Sweden since 1990. Using individualized and multi-scalar tenure type landscapes to measure change in neighbourhoods, we analyse housing clusters in 1990 and 2012. We show that the tenure landscape in 1990 at the height of the welfare state was fairly diverse and mixed. During the next 22 years, however, the landscape changed to become more homogenized and dominated by ownership through tenure conversions and new housing. We argue that awareness of these changes is essential to understanding present and future segregation and gentrification processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants' neighbourhood choices are key to understanding today's dominant socio-territorial dynamics, especially in urban areas. We analysed the factors involved in the housing search at the early stages of the economic migrant influx in Seville, Spain (Andalusia region, Europe's southern border) and their impact on the development of residential segregation in this city. Using a qualitative methodology approach based on focus groups, unstructured interviews and discourse analysis, the implicit and explicit social determinants that influence economic migrants' residential behaviours were examined. In line with previous studies, the results highlight the importance of socio-economic determinants and a trend towards self-segregation. Social discourse analysis reveals how the host society's ethnoracial preferences and prejudices – from the outset of the economic migrant influx – translate into barriers to accessing the housing market, which plays a crucial role in understanding economic migrant residential mobility and its impact on and consequences for the residential segregation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those who have been convicted of crimes are subjected to a stigma that affects many aspects of their social lives. The "felon" label brings collateral consequences that make it difficult to obtain basic human needs, including housing. This study uses the audit method to examine the effects of race, gender, and criminal history on housing outcomes. Testers, exhibiting characteristics suggestive of race and gender and disclosing one of three offenses, placed phone calls to rental property owners across the Midwest to inquire about renting a property. We found powerful negative effects for those with a criminal record seeking apartments, regardless of whether the offense was sexual or drug-related. However, we found no differences between minority and non-minority testers. We explain these findings in the context of housing as an essential resource for formerly incarcerated individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how non-economic inter- and intra-group relationships are reflected in residential pattern, uses a mixed methods approach designed to overcome the principal weaknesses of existing data sources for understanding micro residential dynamics. Micro-macro qualitative and quantitative analysis of the infrastructure of residential dynamics offers a holistic understanding of urban spaces organized according to cultural codes. The case study, the Haredi community, is composed of sects, and residential preferences of the Haredi sect members are highly affected by the need to live amongst ‘friends’ - other members of the same sect. Based on the independent residential records at the resolution of a single family and apartment that cover the period of 20 years the study examine residential dynamics in the Hassidic area of Stamford-Hill, reveal and analyze powerful Schelling-like mechanisms of residential segregation at the apartment, building and the near neighbourhood level. Taken together, these mechanisms are candidates for explaining the dynamics of residential segregation in the area during 1995-2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nordic countries rank high on measures indicating tolerant views on immigrants. Yet, ethnic residential segregation is stated as being a major social problem in these countries. Neighbourhood flight and avoidance behaviour among the native born could be a sign of less tolerant views on minorities, but could of course be restricted to native-born residents in areas of high-ethnic concentration. So far, no research in these countries has explicitly focused on the majority population’s view on segregation, and we know little about how native-born residents in different neighbourhood contexts view ethnic segregation or how own residential experience shapes decisions on staying or leaving; this paper aims to help fill this research lacuna. In a survey targeting 9000 native-born residents in three Nordic capital cities—stratified into neighbourhood movers and stayers and into neighbourhoods having different proportions of non-Nordic-born residents—we answer three questions: do native-born respondents prefer a neighbourhood ethnic mix? Do they see ethnic segregation as a problem? Do they prefer lower, current or higher shares of ethnic minorities in their own neighbourhoods? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I examine the failure of fair housing policy to desegregate public housing in the USA. The article reviews major federal actions toward public housing segregation, as well as broader public housing segregation patterns and trends in the USA. It then draws on a variety of archival sources to present an in-depth case study of public housing segregation and desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Unlike previous studies of the subject, this article provides a detailed investigation of the relationship between local public housing tenancy policies and changes in racial occupancy across Louisville's housing projects spanning the last 50 years. The article argues for the importance of research on local-scale policy implementation for our understanding of fair housing policy, and it draws from its investigation of Louisville some conclusions about the inability of fair housing policy in the USA to realize its stated objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes the term familification to describe one type of gentrification: the process of neighborhood change by families moving into a neighborhood. This study, drawing upon in-depth interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic observations, focuses on an urban familification program--one city's attempt to benefit families by restricting participation in its downtown housing programs. The paper first describes the programs and then explores how leaders, program participants, and neighbors understand the programs' intentions and effects. While family is not prominent in the programs' grant proposals, leaders indicated that promoting traditional families was a central objective. Implementing these programs revealed difficulties in defining family and in managing the programs' outcomes. Implications for fair housing laws are considered, and it is argued that fostering diversity in family life course stages may be a compelling government interest to promote neighborhood stability, and an inclusive strategy for urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to review the literature on negative neighbourhood spillovers connected to fourvoluntaryhousing mobility programs: Gautreaux 1 and Gautreaux 2 (Chicago), the Moving to Opportunity Fair Housing Demonstration (five cities) and the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program. Although these four programs involve voluntary moves, a great deal may be learned from them because of (1) efforts to forestall community opposition and (2) special counselling and supportive programs provided to ease adjustment into destination neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, the available research often falls short in providing evidence for or against negative spillover effects. Nevertheless, our review indicates that screening out multi-problem families, limiting the number of housing voucher families moving into particular neighbourhoods and providing both pre- and post-relocation counselling to program participants can minimize the risk of negative neighbourhood spillovers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of residential segregation has been on the Swedish political agenda since the early 1970s. This paper analyses the background for this interest, presents some basic features of socio-economic and ethnic residential segregation, and discusses some fundamental contextual properties regarding the Swedish welfare state, its institutional set-up and changes in housing and other policies that have affected the conditions for segregation processes. Three more specific anti-segregation policies are also identified and analysed: housing and social mix policy (first initiated in the 1970s); the refugee dispersal policy (initiated in the 1980s); and the area-based urban policy (initiated in the 1990s). Of these three, the last two have a clear ethnic focus while mix policies primarily aim for socio-economic and demographic mix. The analysis shows that none of the policies have managed to affect levels of segregation more than marginally, the reasons being ineffective implementation (the mix policy), failures in the design (the refugee dispersal policy) or conflicting aims inherent in the policy (area-based interventions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, a Housing Act, called Solidarite et Renouvellement Urbain (Solidarity and Urban Renewal), came into force in 2000. Its main aim is to challenge segregation in housing and to strengthen solidarity among citizens. It promotes a tenure mix through legal requirements: in urban areas, every commune should reach a minimum of 20 per cent social housing in its housing stock before 2020. This paper attempts to explain why policy makers believe in the virtues of a tenure mix. The second aim is to assess the discrepancies between the rhetorical level of policy aims and the pragmatic level of policy outputs, raising methodological issues on the relevance of the communal scale for the measure of segregation and social mix. The conclusion raises paradoxical issues: social class segmentation resists social mixing more strongly than ethnic segmentation; the French social mix policy strengthens ghettos and hinders the right to decent housing for the very poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persistent segregation in deprived inner areas of British cities can be seen as both a symptom and a cause of ethnic inequalities, and as an indicator of the failure of minority ethnic groups to integrate into wider society. This paper takes an historical perspective, tracing shifting emphases of political discourses and policy approaches to minority ethnic residential segregation and inclusion, and setting these alongside broader understandings of governmental social control. The paper reflects on episodes of post-1945 intervention into settlement patterns and housing circumstances, and highlights key problematic experiences associated with certain kinds of 'top-down' interventions going beyond ethnicity. It is concluded that neither demolitions nor dispersal are very likely to generate social integration, unless they reflect and reinforce positive adaptation strategies that minority ethnic households already tend to pursue. The keys to constructive social development lie primarily outside the realms of housing renewal and governmental strategies for social engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Area-based urban restructuring policy can be considered an important measure in combating residential segregation. The demolition of the social-rented sector is a crucial element of area-based restructuring policy in the Netherlands. As a consequence, many residents, most of whom have a low income, are forced to move to another dwelling. By means of an analysis of the dispersal pattern of displaced households in the Dutch cities of The Hague, Utrecht and Leiden, this paper gives insight into the effect of urban restructuring on segregation. The main conclusion is that displaced households do not concentrate in a small number of neighbourhoods, but follow a dispersed pattern. However, displacees seem to have a tendency to move to neighbourhoods with a high percentage of non-Western minorities and a large proportion of social-rented dwellings. This tendency indicates that concentrations might become apparent in neighbourhoods that match these characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing and residential marginalisation in Southern European cities represents the most critical and controversial of urban conditions for the settlement and inclusion of immigrants. However, these issues are conspicuously under-researched in both the international and Southern European comparative literature. The complexity of ethnic housing hardship and segregation is often de-problematised and misleadingly attributed solely to market mechanisms or inevitable polarisation dynamics. This paper reviews the distinctive features of ethnic residential segregation within wider societal and urban contexts, drawing on an analysis of eight Mediterranean cities with a special focus on the role of housing systems and processes of ethnic and social differentiation. Problems and drivers are reconceptualised within an holistic, comparative framework. It is demonstrated that low levels of ethnic spatial segregation conceal a real problem of social residential marginalisation. This paradox predominantly originates from macro-scale mechanisms of differentiation rooted in the welfare redistributive arrangements and dualist housing systems. It is additionally reinforced by current urban renewal strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the differences between fair housing law and practice in the US and the UK. Both nations have faced issues associated with the rapid growth of minority populations in urban centers and challenges associated with discrimination in housing. The paper finds that the US could learn from the UK experience with ‘indirect discrimination’ and the UK could learn from the US experience with testing for housing discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gated communities are normally presented in highly negative terms, based on the common assumption that they are a major factor in the intensification of social segregation. In contrast to received wisdom, this paper argues that the theory of club goods can be used to understand gating as a response to both real and perceived issues of crime, vandalism and anti-social behaviour. It is suggested that gating can help to foster social cohesion in an area or neighbourhood by involving a wide spectrum of communities and income groups to create management vehicles which can: reduce crime, protect parked vehicles, increase safety and enhance the local environment by preventing unsolicited entry. Through two case studies, the paper explores how communities struggling with neighbourhood problems including crime are using gating as a way of improving their environment rather than abandoning poorer areas of the city to find a safer home in more residentially segregated affluent neighbourhoods. If housing and planning policy makers are to take seriously a commitment to resident democracy and local participation, such concerns should not be dismissed out of hand as examples of 'isolationism' or 'particularistic consumerist interests'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anecdotal evidence suggests that 'gated communities' are growing in popularity. This paper uses empirical evidence to profile the location and characteristics of gated development in England and details the relative integration of residents. The paper also attempts to think through the wider theoretical and urban policy impacts of gating. In contrast to the view that gated communities provide an extreme example of residential segregation we go further and argue that the time-space trajectories of residents suggest a dynamic pattern of separation that goes beyond the place of residence. Gated communities appear to provide an extreme example of more common attempts by other social groups to insulate against perceived risk and unwanted encounters. Patterns of what we term time-space trajectories of segregation can thereby be seen as closed linkages between key fields, such as work and home, which enable social distance to be maintained and perceived risks to be managed by elite social groups. We conclude that gated communities further extend contemporary segregatory tendencies in the city and that policy responses are required which curtail the creation of such havens of social withdrawal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the housing segregation literature major disagreements have developed over two fundamental issues: (1) the role that whites' aversion to racially mixed neighbourhoods plays in causing modern segregation in the US; and (2) the factors that underlie this aversion, including the effects of inter-racial contact on whites' neighbourhood racial preferences and whether these preferences reflect neighbourhood stereotyping as opposed to pure racial prejudice. Extant evidence on these issues is either old or indirect. This paper provides direct evidence on these issues using new data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality. The results suggest that (1) whites' neighbourhood racial preferences play an important role in explaining the racial composition of their neighbourhoods; (2) inter-racial contact in neighbourhoods and workplaces leads to a greater willingness among whites to live with blacks; and (3) although younger and more educated whites express a stronger taste for integration than other whites, the magnitude of these differences leads to only a small increase in the black percentage of the neighbourhood. In addition, the results provide no evidence in support of the hypothesis that whites stereotype black neighbourhoods rather than blacks per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalisation has been associated with the development of 'command node' cities in the global economy (Friedman, 1986; Sassen, 1991). Some scholars have argued that the social and spatial structure of such cities has been polarised, because of changing demand for labour and land. A number of debates have developed around this hypothesis, challenging the general applicability of these socio-economic trends to all global cities (e.g. Bruegel, 1996; Hamnett, 1996), while the spatial changes in the housing markets of global cities have been shown to be varied (Marcuse & van Kempen, 2000). They are heavily dependent on local context, but always associated with increased segregation of rich and poor, whether through displacement of the poor from the urban core (Smith, 1989) or through their displacement within it (Lyons, 1996). The present paper suggests that much can be learnt about urban change in an era of globalisation, from analysis of the differences between global and other cities. The hypothesis is that spatial restructuring of housing markets in London, a global city, is likely to have important similarities with those of other cities in England, which occupy lower positions in a global urban hierarchy. A comparison of the extent of socio-spatial clustering of home ownership in London, with six English cities at various levels of the urban hierarchy is presented, which partly supports the hypothesis, comparing change over a 20-year period, based on cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of ONS Longitudinal Study data for the years 1971, 1981 and 1991. Findings were that, despite its more socially polarised labour market, London's home ownership market was less spatially segregated than that of other cities in the sample. Implications for global city theory, and for the interpretation of the dynamics of other urban markets, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of residential segregation in Northern Ireland have traditionally focused on historical accounts of its development, geographic measures of spatial distance and on ethnographic descriptions of enclaved communities. Analysis of the quantity, meaning and development of religiously integrated housing has received comparatively scant attention from academics and policy-makers. This paper reviews the extent of integrated housing, how it has been maintained in the social rented sector and looks at the possibilities for developing it as a specific policy objective. The paper concludes by suggesting that retarding sustained rates of segregation could connect housing in Northern Ireland to the task of closing social distance, equality and embedding the transition to post-conflict stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many contemporary cities have a diverse ethnic-cultural mix as a result of different international migration streams, with implications for the residential distribution of various ethnic groups within those cities. Boal recently suggested a series of scenarios against which the pattern in any one place could be evaluated. These are applied to Sydney in 1996, when over 34 per cent of the residents reported a birthplace outside Australia and 30 per cent reported using a language other than English at home. Lacking data on ethnic status, the birthplace and language data are used to explore Sydney's residential geography at two spatial scales, and to identify the degree of residential segregation of each birthplace and language group. Regression analysis, used to assess the relevance of human capital to observed levels of segregation, suggests that Boal's assimilation scenario accounts for most of the observed geographies, with some additional pluralism but little evidence of polarisation. These results suggest that the dynamics of Sydney's housing market facilitate movement into most areas of demand, subject only to labour market constraints; differential access to sections of the labour market, and hence to housing market sections, is a major factor in the residential segregation of birthplace and language groups in Sydney. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'undivided city' has become a major policy aim of today's local urban politicians. Therefore, adequate insight in the relevant dimensions affecting the urban social divide seems to be required, if only to be able to formulate proper policy strategies. However, whereas the literature reveals that various factors are responsible for the rise of divided cities, with perhaps global economic restructuring processes and welfare state differences as the most central elements to the understanding of divisions in cities, local politicians tend to focus on local (area-based) policies. These relevant dimensions, their relative position and the potential of local-based urban policies are the subjects of this special issue. Special attention will be given to the local economic revitalisation and local housing redifferentiation strategies. A simultaneous consideration of relevant dimensions at local, national and global level seems to be required to attain a better understanding of (un)divided cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the role of officer discretion and looks at the way that differing local institutional discourses of racial and ethnic difference affect the way that housing outcomes are produced. Examination of how and why black people in London, England lose out in the provision of social housing.

Provides a more detailed perspective on the segregation of blacks in Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA) public housing. Proof of racial segregation; `Ghettoisation' of black tenants in MTHA housing; Reasons for the segregation of blacks and other visible minorities within particular parts of the public housing sector; Blacks in MTHA housing in 1971 and 1986.