Urban Studies

To achieve a better understanding of life conditions in the suburbs (banlieues) that erupted in the 2005 riots, segregation in France is here evaluated for the first time. The apparent reduction in class segregation between two most recent full censuses and the contrary rise in ethnic segregation are shown. Using longitudinal data and observing the residential mobility of residents in the ‘sensitive neighbourhoods’, it is shown that: most who move out are upwardly mobile; Africans find it harder to move out and are three times more likely to move into the least-advantaged neighbourhoods; the more the neighbourhood is disadvantaged, the more its residents move into another equally disadvantaged neighbourhood.

Previous research on the impact of immigration on urban socio-spatial inequalities has focused on cities with long immigration histories where successive waves of new arrivals impacted on segregation patterns established by preceding waves, usually in a context where immigrants in each wave were poor and had low education. This paper focuses on Dublin as an example of a city where immigration is new and recent, is dominated by the well educated and occurs against a backdrop of a mono-ethnic existing population. In that context, it examines the impact of immigrant settlement patterns on socio-spatial inequalities in the city in the years 1996—2006, a period of economic boom. It finds that, while immigrants in Dublin were segregated to a certain degree, with a slight tendency to cluster in disadvantaged areas, clustering provided a small element of social lift to disadvantaged areas and generally contributed to a significant reduction in socio-spatial inequalities that occurred in the city in the period.

Chinese cities have experienced rapid growth and restructuring in recent times. This paper examines the evolving residential and employment locations and the changes in the patterns of commuting in Guangzhou, China. Tabulations derived from household surveys conducted in 2001 and 2005 show rapid suburbanisation of both residence and employment. Intrazone traffic today dominates the commuting scene in both the central core and the suburbs. The mean commute distance and mean commute time have increased, but the increases are quite modest. Estimation of residential and employment density gradients reveals differential decentralisation of different population groups. Multivariate analysis indicates that commute distance generally increases with income and occupational status. Males in Guangzhou used to have appreciably shorter commutes than females; but the difference has decreased in recent years, suggesting convergence in commuting behaviour between the Chinese and Western cases.

The assimilation of immigrants and their impact on the labour market of the host country have become a growing subject of study in recent literature. This is a topic of particular interest in countries like Spain, where immigration has become one of the main challenges of government policy in recent years. The Madrid region has experienced one of the highest increases in the number of foreign residents between 1996 and 2007. The intensity of this inflow in such a short period of time has led to restrictions on the ability of the residential and labour market to absorb all these newcomers, limiting their choice set of available dwellings and jobs. In this paper the spatial mismatch hypothesis for the Madrid region is tested by exploring the relationship between immigrants’ residential location and employment accessibility as measured by commuting times. The findings reveal that immigrants from eastern Europe, Africa, Ecuador and Colombia are significantly more likely to experience higher commuting times when compared with natives. These differences in commuting times can be attributed to different preferences regarding dwelling and employment optimal decisions. However, they could also be seen as symptoms of residential segregation and the difficulties in employment accessibility experienced by immigrant groups.

Personal insolvency rates vary considerably across local areas of England and Wales but the reasons for this have barely been explored. This paper presents an empirical study of the factors determining variations in personal insolvency rates in 2006 utilising newly available data. The results suggest that a number of economic and demographic factors are important including income, social benefits, age, occupation, public-sector and armed forces employment and level of local entrepreneurship. Significant spatial autocorrelation is evident in the dataset and three sub-regional clusters of local authorities are identified; one in the South West is characterised by adjacent areas with a high insolvency rate and two others in Wales and the North West that are characterised by low insolvency rates.

This paper examines recent responses to ‘problematic street culture’ in England, where increasing pressure has been exerted to prevent people from begging and street drinking in public spaces, with rough sleeping also targeted in some areas. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with enforcement agents, support providers and targeted individuals, it assesses the extent to which the strategies employed are indicative of a ‘revanchist expulsion’ of the deviant Other and/or an expression of ‘coercive care’ for the vulnerable Other. It concludes that, whilst the recent developments appear, at first glance, to be symptomatic of revanchist sanitisation of public space, closer examination reveals that the situation is actually much more complex than a revanchist reading of the situation might suggest, and perhaps not as devoid of compassion.

Large swings in real estate prices that end in devastating crashes have been witnessed by many countries in the past two decades. To curtail the damage of these crashes, it is imperative that we understand their causes. This study proposes a model that associates market crashes with periodically collapsing speculative bubbles. Unlike the conventional literature, the identification of the bubble does not rely on assumptions about fundamentals, but on some ‘fingerprints’ of speculation. These fingerprints, theoretically, may also serve as predictors of market crashes. In practice, however, a number of factors may hinder the accuracy of the prediction.

This paper estimates the valuation effects from new construction of low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) projects on neighbouring single-family homes in Polk County, Iowa. The evaluative models estimate the impact from LIHTC project locations on assessed values using a 1999—2007 panel of neighbours and their matches, while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. The results suggest that the siting of new low-rise, concentrated low-income LIHTC projects is associated with a 2—4 per cent slower rate of nearby single-family home valuation and that these effects persisted for five or more years after project approval. On the other hand, no clear valuation effect is detected when the LIHTC project is high quality and targeted to mixed-income groups. It is also found that new construction LIHTC projects serving the elderly, including assisted living, are associated with a 2—4 per cent faster rate of growth in neighbouring single-family home values, although the acceleration appears to be short lived. It is concluded that concentrating low-income renters in subsidised housing projects has negative consequences for neighbouring property values that might be avoided with tenant income mixing and improved site planning and design.

This paper examines three controversies that revolve around the Hong Kong government’s efforts to privatise components of its property assets in the years following the Asian financial crisis in 1997. While the rolling back of welfare and privatisation of public goods are typical features of the ‘neo-liberal turn’, the consequences of and responses to these processes are highly contingent upon specific historical experience and social practices. By examining the narratives of different actors over the course of these controversies, this paper aims to elucidate the contradictions and mutual entanglements between the ideology of neo-liberalism and everyday discourse and how the contestation in each of the three cases worked to reshape and ultimately to preserve the existing regime of legitimation. It also illustrates how the long-running ‘laissez-faire’ principles of Hong Kong’s colonial period have contributed to the ongoing absorption of political critique, thus exposing the limits of ‘people power’.

This paper examines the relationships between the built environment—both ‘neighborhood’ design characteristics and relative location—and motor vehicle ownership and use in a rapidly motorising, developing city context, that of Santiago de Chile. A vehicle choice model suggests that income dominates the household vehicle ownership decision, but also detects a relationship between several built environment characteristics and a household’s likelihood of car ownership. A second model, directly linked to the ownership model to correct for selection bias and endogeneity, suggests a strong relationship with locational characteristics like distance to the central business district and Metro stations. Elasticities of vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT), calculated via the combined models, suggest that income plays the overall largest single role in determining VKT. In combination, however, a range of different design and relative location characteristics also display a relatively strong association with VKT.