Segregation, Choice Based Letting and Social Housing: How Housing Policy Can Affect the Segregation Process (discussion paper)

In this chapter we investigate the process of ethnic minority segregation in English social housing. Successive governments have expressed a commitment to the contradictory aims of providing greater choice – through the introduction of choice based letting – for households accessing an increasingly marginalised social housing sector whilst also expressing a determination to create more mixed communities and neighbourhoods. We consider the concept of choice in the context of a heavily residualised social housing sector, arguing that, for social housing tenants at least, the concept of real choice is a misnomer. We draw on research that has utilised unique administrative data and analysed the moves of all entrants into and movers within the social renting sector over a ten year period in England. The conclusion is that the introduction of choice based letting has influenced the residential outcomes of ethnic minorities and resulted in highly structured neighbourhood sorting that has segregated minority populations into the least desirable neighbourhoods of English cities.OTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen

Stressed out? An investigation of whether allostatic load mediates associations between neighbourhood deprivation and health

Deprived neighbourhoods have long been associated with poorer health outcomes. However, many quantitative studies have not evidenced the mechanisms through which place ‘gets under the skin’ to influence health. The increasing prevalence of biosocial data provides new opportunities to explore these mechanisms and incorporate them into models of contextual effects. The stress pathway is a key biosocial mechanism; however, few studies have explicitly tested it in neighbourhood associations. This paper addresses this gap by investigating whether allostatic load, a biological response to chronic stress, mediates relationships of neighbourhood deprivation to physical and mental health. Data from UK Understanding Society is used to undertaken a multilevel mediation analysis. Allostatic load is found to mediate the association between neighbourhood deprivation and health, substantiating the biological mechanism of the stress pathway. More deprived areas are associated with higher allostatic load, and in turn worse allostatic load relates to poorer physical and mental health. Allostatic load is a stronger mediator of physical health than mental health, suggesting the stress pathway is more pertinent to explaining physical health gradients. Heterogeneity in the results between physical and mental health suggests more research is needed to disentangle the biosocial processes that could be important to health and place relationships.OLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Complexity of multiscale residential context: Where do neighbourhood effects end?

OLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Biosocial health geography: New ‘exposomic’ geographies of health and place

Investigating biologically plausible mechanisms for the embodiment of context is a key thoroughfare for progressing health geographies of place. Expanding knowledge of bio-processes such as epigenetics is providing a platform for appreciating the dynamic embedding of social relations in bodies over the lifecourse, and so to tracing the development of health inequalities. By providing a geographic lens on the biosocial, health geographers have key contributions to make regarding the theorisation of place. We put forward the exposome as a holistic framework in which to situate a biosocial health geography, placing ideas of dynamic exposure, plasticity and temporality as central.OLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Size matters? Exploring scale for neighbourhood effects

OLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Experienced and Inherited Disadvantage: A Longitudinal Study of Early Adulthood Neighbourhood Careers of Siblings

Longer term exposure to high poverty neighbourhoods can affect individual socio-economic outcomes later in life. Previous research has shown strong path dependence in individual neighbourhood histories. A growing literature shows that the neighbourhood histories of people is linked to the neighbourhoods of their childhood and parental characteristics. To better understand intergenerational transmission of living in deprived neighbourhoods it is important to distinguish between inherited disadvantage (socio-economic position) and contextual disadvantage (environmental context in which children grow up). The objective of this paper is to come to a better understanding of the effects of inherited and contextual disadvantage on the neighbourhood careers of children once they have left the parental home. We use a quasi-experimental family design exploiting sibling relationships, including real sibling pairs, and "synthetic siblings" who are used as a control group. Using rich register data from Sweden we find that real siblings live more similar lives in terms of neighbourhood experiences during their independent residential career than synthetic sibling pairs. This difference reduces over time. Real siblings are still less different than synthetic pairs but the difference gets smaller with time, indicating a quicker attenuation of the family effect on residential outcomes than the neighbourhood effectOLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Multiscale contextual poverty in the Netherlands

OLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Trajectories of Neighborhood Change: Spatial Patterns of Increasing Ethnic Diversity

Western cities are increasingly ethnically diverse and in most cities the share of ethnic minorities is growing. Studies analyzing changing ethnic geographies often limit their analysis to changes in ethnic concentrations in neighborhoods between two points in time. Such a static approach limits our understanding of pathways of ethnic neighborhood change, and of the underlying factors contributing to change. This paper analyzes full trajectories of neighborhood change in the four largest cities in the Netherlands between 1999 and 2013.Our modelling strategy categorizes neighborhoods based on their unique growth trajectories of the ethnic population composition, providing a longitudinal view of ethnic segregation. Our results show that the ethnic composition in neighborhoods remains relatively stable over time. We find evidence for a slow trend towards deconcentration of ethnic minorities and increased (spatial) population mixing in most neighborhoods. We show how residential mobility decreases segregation, while natural population growth tends to reinforce segregation. While the ethnic minority presence in cities grows, there is a substantial share of neighborhoods which can be identified as white citadels; characterized by a stable large native population, with high incomes and high house values. These neighborhoods seem to be inaccessible to ethnic minorities, which illustrates the spatial manifestation of exclusionary elitism in increasingly ethnically diverse cities.OLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Freedom from the Tyranny of Neighbourhood: Rethinking Socio-Spatial Context Effects

Theory behind neighbourhood effects suggests that different geographies and scales affect individual outcomes. We argue that neighbourhood effects research needs to break away from the tyranny of neighbourhood and consider alternative ways to measure the wider socio-spatial context of people, placing individuals at the centre of the approach. We review theoretical and empirical approaches to place and space from a multitude of disciplines and the geographical scopes of neighbourhood effects mechanisms. Ultimately, we suggest ways in which micro-geographic data can be used to operationalise socio-spatial context for neighbourhood effects, where data pragmatism should be supplanted by a theory-driven data exploration.Unexpectedly, children who lived in an affluent neighbor-hood throughout childhood were most likely to engage in delinquent behavior.OLD Urban Renewal and Housin

Brexit in Sunderland: The production of difference and division in the UK referendum on European Union membership

There is a growing narrative that the outcome of the UK referendum on European Union membership was the product of disenfranchisement and disillusionment wrought by the uneven consequences of economic restructuring in different UK regions, cities and communities. Those most likely to vote ‘leave’ were concentrated among those ‘left behind’ by globalisation, whilst those voting ‘remain’ were clustered within more affluent areas and social groups. These uneven geographies of leave and remain voting have been taken to reveal two diametrically opposed groups in British politics, obscuring the messy and contradictory ways in which votes are cast. In seeking to bring these complexities to light, this paper explores the motivating factors behind the Brexit vote amongst older working-class white men in Sunderland, England. The paper shows how economic stagnation and the experience of different forms of marginality led to a nostalgia for times past and a mistrust of political elites amongst this cohort. The paper documents how the feelings expressed by research participants became linked to the European Union project and its real and perceived impacts on the local area. In doing so, it shows that the referendum shaped and changed the electorate by asking them to align themselves with those either for or against Britain’s membership of the EU. The paper concludes by reflecting on the possibilities for creating an inclusive form of politics that treats different responses to the referendum question as the basis for an open conversation about democracy and democratic ideals.OLD Urban Renewal and Housin