Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities

East Meets West

Tiit Tammaru, Maarten van Ham, Sako Musterd, Szymon Marcińczak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367870201
• eBook ISBN: 9781317637479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Growing inequalities in Europe are a major challenge threatening the sustainability of urban communities and the competiveness of European cities. While the levels of socio-economic segregation in European cities are still modest compared to some parts of the world, the poor are increasingly concentrating spatially within capital cities across Europe. An overlooked area of research, this book offers a systematic and representative account of the spatial dimension of rising inequalities in Europe.

This book provides rigorous comparative evidence on socio-economic segregation from 13 European cities. Cities include Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, London, Milan, Madrid, Oslo, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna and Vilnius. Comparing 2001 and 2011, this multi-factor approach links segregation to four underlying universal structural factors: social inequalities, global city status, welfare regimes and housing systems. Hypothetical segregation levels derived from those factors are compared to actual segregation levels in all cities. Each chapter provides an in-depth and context sensitive discussion of the unique features shaping inequalities and segregation in the case study cities.

The main conclusion of the book is that the spatial gap between the poor and the rich is widening in capital cities across Europe, which threatens to harm the social stability of European cities. This book will be a key reference on increasing segregation and will provide valuable insights to students, researchers and policy makers who are interested in the spatial dimension of social inequality in European cities.

Chapters 1 and 15 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

1 A multi-factor approach to understanding socio-economic segregation in European capital cities¹

Tiit Tammaru, Sako Musterd, Maarten van Ham and Szymon Marcińczak

Abstract

Growing inequalities in Europe, even in the most egalitarian countries, are a major challenge threatening the sustainability of urban communities and the competiveness of European cities. Surprisingly, though, there is a lack of systematic and representative research on the spatial dimension of rising inequalities. This gap is filled by our book project Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities: East Meets West, with empirical evidence from Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, London, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna and Vilnius. This introductory chapter outlines the background to this international comparative research and introduces a multi-factor approach to studying socio-economic segregation. The chapter focuses on four underlying universal structural factors: social inequalities, global city status, welfare regime and the housing system. Based on these factors, we propose a hypothetical ranking of segregation levels in the thirteen case study cities. As the conclusions of this book show, the hypothetical ranking and the actual ranking of cities by segregation levels only match partly; the explanation for this can be sought in context-specific factors which will be discussed in-depth in each of the case study chapters.

Introduction

Although it is often claimed that socio-economic segregation is increasing in European cities, there is no recent internationally comparative and systematic research into changing levels of this form of segregation. Most research on segregation focuses on ethnic rather than socio-economic segregation, and although the two are related, the latter deserves more attention in light of increasing levels of inequality in Europe, which is also likely to be expressed spatially. Governments all over Europe fear that in the future such socio-economic segregation may lead to social unrest, referring to recent riots in several European cities. Although often openly ethno-religious, the deeper underpinnings of such urban unrest stem from rising socio-economic inequalities that are also clustered into urban space (Malmberg et al. 2013). This book will be the first to rigorously compare levels of socio-economic segregation for a large number of European cities, and to use a multi-factor approach to understand segregation that combines structural factors with a context sensitive presentation of each case study city. We ask whether rising inequalities in Europe lead to what Kesteloot (2005) suggests is a shift from a city of social class divisions to a city of socio-spatial divisions, with top, middle and low socio-economic groups being increasingly separated from each other in urban space.

By socio-economic segregation we mean residential segregation of population groups based on occupation and income. In the last three decades we have seen some remarkable changes in advanced capitalist countries, characterised by a transformation from industrial to post-industrial societies, accompanied by growing levels of liberalisation and globalisation of capital and labour flows. These changes have impacted on occupational structures and have led to wage inequalities even in the most egalitarian European countries (Sachs 2012; European Commission 2010). The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 integrated many former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (East Europe hereafter²) into ongoing globalisation and neoliberalisation processes. The combination of these processes with transformations from centrally planned to market economies brought about a rapid decline in real per capita income between 1988 and 1993: minus 41 per cent in the Baltic states and minus 25 per cent in the Visegrad countries (Deacon 2000: 148). Before 1989/1991, wage inequalities in East European countries were small but have grown dramatically since (Słomczyński and Shabad 1996; Tsenkova 2006). In addition, in most East European countries housing was supported by state patronage under socialism, but during the 1990s more than 90 per cent of the housing stock was privatised as states withdrew from the costly housing sector (Hegedüs 2013).

These fundamental changes were the inspiration for formulating the overarching goal of this book: to provide new insights into the spatial dimension of growing socio-economic inequalities in Europe, in the light of the processes of globalisation, neoliberalisation and welfare state retrenchment. The book delivers a set of theoretically informed, methodologically sound, and policy and planning relevant systematic comparative studies that provide new evidence of the changing levels and patterns of socio-economic segregation across a diverse set of European cities: Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, London, Milan, Madrid, Oslo, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna and Vilnius. We focus on these economic and political capital cities because they have been the most influenced by globalisation (Beaverstock et al. 2015). Especially in East Europe, many important changes induced by globalisation occurred in the capital cities first (Marcińczak et al. 2015; Stanilov 2007; Smith and Timár 2010). Although the case study cities are diverse in size, they do share similar positions in their countries as important locations for government services, as centres for education and jobs, and for international investments.

The study is based on a multi-factor approach that focuses on key structural indicators shaping socio-economic segregation: globalisation, social inequalities, welfare regimes and housing systems, as well as the occupational structure of cities (Hamnett 1994; Kemeny 1995; Marcińczak et al. 2015; Musterd and Ostendorf 1998; Sassen 1991). This approach is combined with more nuanced institutional and contextual approaches that have found their way into studies of residential segregation (Burgers and Musterd 2002; Kazepov 2005; Maloutas 2012; Van Kempen and Murie 2009). The latter approaches emphasise the role of local institutional, morphological, historical and spatial contexts in mediating effects of more universal/generic structural factors on patterns of segregation. Since such city-specific factors are very important, along with the more generic ones for understanding segregation, each chapter of this book will deliver a detailed account of the unique features of a given case study city.

The next section of this introductory chapter contains a literature review on the key structural factors that shape socio-economic segregation. Because cities in East Europe are still understudied with respect to inequalities and segregation (cf. Van Kempen and Murie 2009), we will briefly elaborate on the urban experiences in the formerly state socialist countries in a separate section. The main focus here will be on the legacies of central planning and some distinct features of the socialist city that are important for understanding socio-economic segregation. The importance of context will be discussed in more detail in the next section. Then we will develop a multi-factor analytical framework that guides the analyses of the thirteen cities in the rest of the book. The operationalisation of this framework leads to a hypothetical ranking of our case study cities by their expected levels of socio-economic segregation. We will then present the data and methods behind our analysis in the next section. In a separate section we introduce the rest of the book chapters, which will each deliver a contextually sensitive and empirically detailed account of socio-economic segregation in one of the thirteen cities in 2001 and 2011 (corresponding with the years of the census in many countries). Finally, we will reflect on the expected levels of segregation in our case study cities. Taken together, this introductory chapter, the thirteen case studies and the concluding chapter of this book will provide new perspectives and insights on the evolution of socio-economic segregation and its contributory factors in major European cities.

Literature review: structural factors shaping socio-economic segregation

Cities are both the main drivers of innovation and economic growth, as well as places where the biggest diversity and largest social inequalities can be found. In this review, we focus on the key structural factors that link social and spatial inequalities. Research on patterns of socio-economic residential segregation has followed four important phases: the ecological approach; research on the relationship between social and spatial inequalities inspired by a global city thesis; studies that begin with the impact of welfare regimes on residential segregation; and, most recently, studies that emphasise the importance of the contextual embeddedness of residential segregation (Maloutas 2012; Marcińczak et al. 2015; Musterd and Ostendorf 1998; Van Kempen and Murie 2009).

Charles Booth’s (1887) detailed social and spatial description of Tower Hamlets in London could be considered as the beginning of a more systematic research on segregation. Extending from description to explanation, scholars from the Chicago School provided a human ecology framework of invasion and succession to explain the evolving segregation patterns in cities (Park et al. 1925). The ecological approach explained the evolution of segregation by referring to natural forces that are the same in all cities. Consequently, cities develop towards similar spatial structures with different social and ethnic groups clustering into different parts of the city (Häusserman and Haila 2005). The Chicago School developed an important toolbox of segregation indices that are still used in segregation research today (Massey and Denton 1988; Marcińczak et al. 2015; Peach 2009). Applying these indices to real data typically reveals a U-shaped segregation pattern across occupational groups, with the biggest spatial distance being between the highest and lowest social categories or occupations (Duncan and Duncan 1955; Ladányi 1989; Morgan 1975; 1980). The ecological approach developed into a factorial ecology during the post-war positivist research tradition (Berry and Kasarda 1977), and later into GIS-based studies of segregation and advanced spatial modelling (Wong 2003).

Methodologically, these studies stressed that for a rigorous spatial analysis, the units used should be internally homogeneous so that the variation of interest, for example the distribution of socio-economic groups across the city, becomes visible between the units as an ecological variation (Janson 1980). This indicated the problem of how to define neighbourhoods (known as the modifiable area unit problem) and raised the question of how the conceptualisation of neighbourhoods affects segregation measures (Fotheringham and Wong 1991). Following the research by Kish (1954) on within-unit and inter-unit variation of a given phenomenon in and across neighbourhoods, Manley et al. (2016) make an important methodological contribution to this book by extending the ecological tradition into a multilevel research setting. It should also be noted that in parallel with the advancements of the ecological approach, behavioural (Wolpert 1965) and institutional (Rex and Moore 1967) approaches towards studying segregation started to emerge. These are beyond the scope of this book.

Income inequalities started to grow in advanced capitalist countries in the 1980s (Piketty 2013) and in Eastern Europe in the 1990s (Sztompka 1996), and this reinvigorated the interest in relations between social inequalities and socio-economic segregation. These relations play a major role in the social polarisation versus professionalisation debate (Manley and Johnston 2014; Hamnett 1994; Sassen 1991). The concentration of higher-order management and coordination and service functions of multinational corporations into large cities is a direct result of globalisation and economic restructuring. According to the global city thesis this leads to social polarisation; a class of well-paid workers in the financial and other higher-order services emerges on the one hand, and since they require consumer services this provides jobs for many low-skilled workers on the other hand (Sassen 1991). Others argue that professionalisation rather than polarisation takes place in the global cities (Hamnett 1994; Préteceille 2000).

The widespread pursuit of free market efficiency in the housing sector in Europe in tandem with globalisation and economic restructuring since the 1980s, and the retrenching of welfare states, implied significant cuts in universal housing subsidies, privatisation of part of the social housing stock and the promotion of home ownership (Arbaci 2007). Major changes in the housing sector started in the UK with the right-to-buy policy in the 1980s, which led to an increase in home ownership and a decline of the social housing sector, residualising this sector and increasing socio-housing divides (Kleinhans and van Ham 2013). This trend of decreasing importance of social (or public) housing subsequently spread across Western Europe (Jones and Murie 2006), while at the same time people with a lower social status became increasingly overrepresented in social housing (Van Kempen and Murie 2009; van Ham and Manley 2009; Manley et al. 2013). Since social housing is often concentrated in certain parts of cities, the developments in the housing market combined with a growing social polarisation, ceteris paribus, should lead to rising levels of residential segregation.³ Globalisation and economic restructuring ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities
• Regions and Cities
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 A Multi-Factor Approach to Understanding Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities
• 2 Occupational Segregation in London: A Multilevel Framework for Modelling Segregation
• 3 Changing Welfare Context and Income Segregation in Amsterdam and its Metropolitan Area
• 4 Socio-Economic Segregation in Vienna: A Social-Oriented Approach to Urban Planning and Housing
• 5 Widening Gaps: Segregation Dynamics During Two Decades of Economic and Institutional Change in Stockholm
• 6 Economic Segregation in Oslo: Polarisation as a Contingent Outcome
• 7 Socio-Economic Segregation in Athens at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century
• 8 Socio-Economic Divisions of Space in Milan in the Post-Fordist Era
• 9 Economic Crisis, Social Change and Segregation Processes in Madrid
• 10 Urban Restructuring and Changing Patterns of Socio-Economic Segregation in Budapest
• 11 The Velvet and Mild: Socio-Spatial Differentiation in Prague after Transition
• 12 Occupation and Ethnicity: Patterns of Residential Segregation in Riga Two Decades after Socialism
• 13 Large Social Inequalities and Low Levels of Socio-Economic Segregation in Vilnius
• 14 The ‘Market Experiment’: Increasing Socio-Economic Segregation in the Inherited Bi-ethnic Context of Tallinn
• 15 Inequality and Rising Levels of Socio-Economic Segregation: Lessons from a Pan-European Comparative Study
• Index