Abstract
Socio-economic inequality is on the rise in major European cities as are the worries about that, since this development is seen as threatening social cohesion and stability. Surprisingly, relatively little is known about the spatial dimensions of rising socioeconomic inequality. This paper builds on a study of socio-economic segregation in twelve European cities: Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, London, Madrid, Oslo, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna, and Vilnius. Data are used from national censuses and registers for the years 2001 and 2011. The main conclusion is that socio-economic segregation in Europe has grown. This paper develops a rigorous multi-factor approach to understand segregation and links it to four underlying universal, partially overlapping, structural factors: social inequalities, globalization and economic restructuring, welfare regimes, and housing systems. The paper provides an in-depth discussion of these factors to come to a better understanding of the differences between the hypothesized and actual segregation levels measured. It is suggested that introducing time-lags between structural factors and segregation outcomes improve the theoretical model.
Highlights
Introduction and questionsIncreasing attention is being paid to inequality at the global, European, and national levels
We focus on socio-spatial inequality in particular, which we refer to as socioeconomic segregation, by which we mean residential segregation of population groups based on occupation, income, and/or education
There is increasing awareness that the factors and interactions play out differently in different national and local contexts, but how this functions is mostly unclear (Kemeny, 1995; Marcińczak, Musterd, van Ham, & Tammaru, 2016; Musterd & Ostendorf, 1998). To fill this knowledge gap, this paper addresses two questions: (1) How has the level of socioeconomic segregation changed in the last decade in a selection of European capital cities?
Summary
Increasing attention is being paid to inequality at the global, European, and national levels. In the second empirical section, we confront the theoretical model of socioeconomic segregation based on the four abovementioned factors with the actual segregation levels in 2001 and 2011, and examine the predictive power of each factor This is followed by a section in which we aim to arrive at a better understanding of the differences through a discussion of additional context-specific factors, which we argue must be included in the analytical framework. We first present the structural and institutional factors and their relationship to socioeconomic segregation This information was used to construct the first stage model of the theoretically expected levels of segregation for the cities studied, by assigning particular values to the cities based on theoretical assumptions about their standing with regard to each of the factors. They compared the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam and showed that Amsterdam was better connected and higher ranked as a
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