In recent decades growing inequality and polarization have been reshaping the social landscape of Canada’s metropolitan areas, changing neighbourhoods and negatively affecting the lived realities of increasingly diverse urban populations. This book examines the dimensions and impacts of increased economic inequality and urban socio-spatial polarization since the 1980s. Based on the work of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership, an innovative national comparative study of seven major cities, the authors reveal the dynamics of neighbourhood change across the Canadian urban system. By mapping average income trends across neighbourhoods, they show the kinds of factors – social, economic, and cultural – that influenced residential options and redistributed concentrations of poverty and affluence. While the heart of the book lies in the project’s findings from each city, other chapters provide critical context. Taken together, they offer important understandings of the depth and the breadth of the problem at hand and signal the urgency for concerted policy responses in the decades to come.

A multidisciplinary team of specialists list historical and contemporary research on suburbanization with particular emphasis on the UK, North America, Australia and South Africa.

This report follows the progress of twenty very different neighbourhood organisations across three countries to explore the opportunities and challenges of neighbourhood renewal from a community perspective. A free pdf version of this report is available online at www.jrf.org.uk

What are the consequences of staying in or moving out of a socioeconomically disadvantaged neighbourhood? In European urban sociology, research has mostly focused either on lower class ethnic minorities, or on white ethnic majority middle classes. By contrast, studies on upwardly mobile ethnic minorities are scarce, a gap that this book fills by looking at upwardly mobile Turkish-Germans living in Berlin. Those Turkish-Germans in Berlin, who decide to move out of a low status neighbourhood, mostly in order to find a better educational infrastructure for their children, show various strategies to keep ties back to their old neighbourhood. Moreover, the movers now living in neighbourhoods with a high share of native-German residents, where they stand out as the other, keep ties to other people with a Turkish background, not only through socializing with co-ethnics, but also through various forms of voluntary involvement. Hence, a move presents a spatial withdrawal from a socioeconomically weak and ethnically diverse neighbourhood, but it does not imply that this neighbourhood no longer plays a role in Turkish-Germans’ daily practices or as somewhere with which to continuously identify. Barwick’s sophisticated study shows that moving and staying are both active decisions and they both have positive and negative consequences. Thus, movers and stayers alike develop coping strategies for their respective situation, and develop particular daily practices and forms of identification with place.

Many policies in several Western European countries and the U.S. aim to counter spatial concentrations of deprivation and create more socio-economically mixed residential areas. Such policies are founded on the belief that neighbourhoods have a strong and independent effect upon the well-being and life-chances of individuals. The adequacy of the evidence base to support this position has been the subject of spirited debate on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to this policy-relevant discussion by presenting new scholarship from many countries that rigorously quantifies various sorts of neighbourhood effects through the use of cutting-edge social scientific techniques. The secondary purpose of this book is to introduce these techniques to a wider array of housing and planning researchers and to show how a variety of disciplines have offered insightful, synergistic perspectives. Research on neighbourhood effects has over the last 15 years led to a body of knowledge extending far beyond the sociological urban research where it originated. The problem of quantifying neighbourhood effects and the use of associated methodologies (like multi-level analysis, instrumental variables) has attracted scholars from criminology, sociology, social geography, economics and health science, and thus serves as a critical locus for interdisciplinary scholarship. This book was previously published as a special issue of Housing Studies.

This rare interdisciplinary combination of research into neighbourhood dynamics and effects attempts to unravel the complex relationship between disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the life outcomes of the residents who live therein. It seeks to overcome the notorious difficulties of establishing an empirical causal relationship between living in a disadvantaged area and the poorer health and well-being often found in such places. There remains a widespread belief in neighbourhood effects: that living in a poorer area can adversely affect residents’ life chances. These chapters caution that neighbourhood effects cannot be fully understood without a profound understanding of the changes to, and selective mobility into and out of, these areas. Featuring fresh research findings from a number of countries and data sources, including from the UK, Australia, Sweden and the USA, this book offers fresh perspectives on neighbourhood choice and dynamics, as well as new material for social scientists, geographers and policy makers alike. It enriches neighbourhood effects research with insights from the closely related, but currently largely separate, literature on neighbourhood dynamics.

This edited volume critically examines the link between area based policies, neighbourhood based problems, and neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics. Over the last few decades, Western governments have persistently pursued area based policies to fight such effects, despite a lack of evidence that they exist, or that these policies make a difference. The first part of this book presents case studies of perceived neighbourhood based problems in the domains of crime; health; educational outcomes; and employment. The second part of the book presents an international overview of the policies that different governments have implemented in response to these neighbourhood based problems, and discusses the theoretical and conceptual processes behind place based policy making. Case studies are drawn from a diverse range of countries including the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the USA.