Social Mix Policies Research Articles

Social mix and social interaction: evidence from Los Angeles County

Research shows that policy tools to reduce residential segregation are also effective to reduce economic inequality and, for decades, achieving the adequate level of 'social mix' has been an important policy goal in housing and community policy fields. Yet whether social mix creates social interactions, thus producing favourable social outcomes, is still disputed. This study aims to expand the empirical record on the modus operandi of social mix and its policy viability, and to provide useful information on relevant contextual factors to prescribe effective social mix policies to improve social interaction. We fit interactive linear models to data from Los Angeles County in California, USA, to test the hypothesis that social mix (measured via residential income mix) promotes social interactions (in the form of civic, daily-life, and political activities and group memberships), and to examine whether arts and recreation centres (i.e. the places where social interactions occur to produce social mix) moderate the effect of residential income mix on favourable social outcomes. Results show that while residential income mix is negatively associated with social interactions, recreation centres help income-mixed communities increase social interactions among their residents. We also find evidence that communities with higher income mix levels manifest higher social interaction as there are more arts and recreation centres in their communities. Our findings shed light on why social mix policy works in some communities but does not work in others, elucidating why previous research displays conflicting claims.

Social mix with a twist: Exploring new ways to alleviate pressure on stigmatized lower-class neighbourhoods

Social mix policy normally leads to the gentrification of poor neighbourhoods, which is neither beneficial for their original residents nor urban diversity. Conversely, in search of a possible way to ease mounting pressure on stigmatized neighbourhoods the article aims to uncover the middle class's attitude towards the construction of buildings with cheap rentals, a precondition of social mix policy. To this end, an innovative digital survey was conducted in 2020 in two recently developed inner-city neighbourhoods in the mid-sized Swedish city of Västerås. First, drawing on earlier research, our data confirms that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between young middle-class families, on the one hand, and their willingness to share “their own backyard” with presumptive low-income newcomers, on the other. Second, the analysis brings to the fore the fact that attitudes to social mixing are not just dependent on gender, but even on why one wants to move. Third, the predominance of an apparent elitist conception of housing is challenged by female and older residents who seek diversity. In sum, the findings imply that socially mixing certain kinds of middle-class neighbourhoods is possible if politicians fulfil three preconditions.

Reframing Social Tectonics with the Sociology of Everyday Life: Insights from the Public Spaces of a Mixed Housing Neighbourhood

Social mix policies aim to integrate residents living in diverse forms of housing. While numerous studies have showcased the limitations of social mix in achieving this objective, explanations for this tendency remain incomplete. Accordingly, this qualitative case study adopts insights from the sociology of everyday life and interaction ritual theory to elaborate on academic understandings of (non)-interaction between disparate groups in mixed housing communities. It draws primarily from observational fieldwork and semi-structured interview data gathered in the public spaces of a transitioning mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. The findings report how everyday encounters among and between the urban poor and wealthier residents (re)produce patterns of group solidarity and conflict. The continued application of micro-sociological perspectives to housing mix research can chronicle and perhaps mend the gaps between government housing policy objectives and the experiences of residents living within relevant legislative jurisdictions.

Urban marginality and institutional effects: Disinvestment, inefficacy, and stigmatization in Santiago de Chile

ABSTRACT “Neighborhood effects” research, which maintains that poverty concentration generates a variety of social problems, has been questioned for concealing the role of powerful institutions. As an alternative, we focus on external institutions’ practices in marginal neighborhoods and their impact on the emergence of social problems. Through a qualitative case-study of three neighborhoods in Santiago, we observed institutional practices and identified three distinct mechanisms. Through disinvestments, these neighborhoods have been turned into “Red Zones,” because of public, private, and civil institutions’ refusal to establish themselves and to deliver their services there. Through inaction and inefficacy, public intervention has been deeply intermittent, negligent, and uncoordinated. Finally, through territorial stigmatization, these neighborhoods have almost become no-go areas. Several material and symbolic consequences have resulted from these practices, including direct and indirect connections with social problems. These have implications for the debate on “neighborhood effects” and for social mix policies.

Application of Social Marketing Mix Strategies During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Social marketing tends to use commercial marketing tools and strategies to change people’s behavior for the betterment of the individual. Social marketing campaigns are used to deliver messages tothe target groups. Social marketing campaigns disseminate information to the target groups to bring awareness about social causes or issues. The campaign provides messages to modify the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour of a large proportion of the population. This paper discusses the 8 Ps of social marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion, public, policy, partnership, and purse strings) and its application during the global pandemic of COVID-19. The comprehensive qualitative synthesis did of previously published information. The original research articles were extracted from google scholar in November 2021 by using search keywords “social marketing” OR “social marketing mix” AND“COVID-19” OR “ Coronavirus Disease 2019”. The study’s primary finding of this paper was that social marketing mix strategies (8 ps) had significantly applied to increase public awareness during the global pandemic of COVID-19. In addition, the research paper identifies some emerging areas for future research. The quantitative review techniques would be a valuable future extension such as systematic,bibliometric, and meta-analysis. This research paper offers an application of social marketing mix strategies to prevent such a pandemic and provides a guide for future research on social marketing mix.

Heimat Wilhelmsburg: Belonging and resistance in a racialized neighborhood

ABSTRACT Considering how Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg has been stigmatized for decades, and recently targeted for redevelopment, you would hardly guess from the outside that the neighborhood is beloved by racialized long-time residents, and considered to be a warm, welcoming Heimat: a space of belonging, where you do not have to justify your presence. This identification is tied to the neighborhood’s racialization; the qualities that have been labeled as problems to be transformed through social mix make it a space of relative safety and security, in a context in which many residents experience attempted exclusions from German identity. Based on interviews with racialized long-time residents, contextualized within racialization in Germany, the racialized displaceability embedded in social mix policy, the contested meaning of Heimat, and the experiences of Wilhelmsburg residents with migrantization, I argue that this emphatic claim is a strength that is threatened by the current process of social mix gentrification.

공공주택 공급 관련 법제에 관한 연구

Public housing refers to housing that is built, purchased, or leased and supplied by a public housing business entity under the Special Act on Public Housing with financial support from the State or local governments or the Housing and Urban Fund. Public housing can be broadly divided into public rental housing and public sale housing. Public rental housing is divided into eight types: permanent rental housing, national rental housing, happy housing, and etc.. In addition, so-called public-private self-owned housing was introduced in 2021. Korea's public rental housing system has changed according to the policy regimes of governments on public rental housing, and with these changes, new types of public rental housing have been introduced and the supply of certain types of public rental housing has increased or decreased. And there were also changes in the name and legal basis of public rental housing. The integrated public rental housing type was introduced in 2020 to unify the various types of public rental housing and simplify the occupancy qualifications. Follow-up measures are needed for the establishment of the integrated public rental housing type. Meanwhile, there are doubts about the effectiveness of so-called public-private self-owned housing, such as accumulated equity housing unit for sale and profit-sharing housing unit for sale, introduced in 2021. And until now, public housing was supplied by the State and LH Corporation, but now there is an opinion that the social housing supplied by local governments and social economy entities should be revitalized. However, due to the nature of social housing, social economy entities will experience financial difficulties just like LH Corporation, and these difficulties will eventually be resolved only with the support of the State or local governments. However, such support for social economic entities would be a burden to the State or local governments, and therefore, social consensus on such support should be preceded. In addition, social conflicts are occurring due to the supply of public housing, and social mix policies are being attempted to solve this problem, but another type of social conflict is occurring as a result. Ultimately, social conflicts caused by public housing can only be resolved when there is a social consensus on the overall public housing policy.

Rent gap governance

While gentrification in some contexts has been analysed as a profit-driven process best explained by the rent gap, state governance, e.g. through social mixing, has elsewhere been seen as the main driver of this urban process. With the concept of rent gap governance, the aim of this article is to show that profit and governance can be mutually constitutive parts of gentrification in the neoliberal city. Even when gentrification is a political premise, the rent gap can remain important, but its formation and closure might be unconventional. Empirically, the article centres on Denmark’s 2018 ‘Ghetto Law’, a social-mix policy aiming to govern a racialized surplus population by reducing non-profit housing in stigmatized areas through privatization of housing and land and new-build. Building on recent elaborations of rent gap theory, I suggest three mechanisms for rent gap governance in the Danish case: increased potential rent, depressed ground rent, and subsidized and envisioned rent gaps. I ground this model with a case study of the sale of the non-profit housing complex Schackenborgvænge. I analyse rarely-available qualitative and quantitative data and consider the immediate social consequences of the sale. The result is a murky picture of localized rent gap governance.

Searching for new ways to achieve mixed neighbourhoods

This article examines the relationship between housing mix and population mix, which is often assumed to exist in social mix policies. As urban form has been suggested as an alternative factor related to population mix, this feature is also considered. In Sweden, one of the main ways to achieve population mix is through housing mix by the densification of already established neighbourhoods. Thus, a salt-and-pepper-like housing mix policy has emerged, which has been adopted to various extents by the (in this respect, rather autonomous) municipalities. Accordingly, in the present study, the grades of mixes are calculated at a detailed geographical level using an entropy index, and then aggregated to the 124 urban (≥10,000 inhabitants) localities in Sweden. However, correlations between the urban localities' grades of housing/tenure mixes and population mixes cannot be found. Yet, significant correlations can be established between urban form and urban localities' various population mixes. Therefore, it is argued that urban form deserves more attention in future studies of population mix. Future research on both population mix and its extension, mix policies, may benefit from more consideration of urban contexts.

Social mix in context: Comparing housing regeneration programs in Australia and Israel

ABSTRACT During the past 30 years, social mix has been on the policy agenda of many countries as a tool for deconcentrating urban disadvantage and enhancing social inclusion. However, these projects often take diverse forms in different institutional and policy contexts. In this article, we compare two separate studies of current urban regeneration programs in Australia and Israel. The comparative analysis reveals major similarities and differences regarding the physical and social outcomes of social mix. Our findings suggest that although both projects did not declare to create socially mixed communities, the resulting resident makeup was mixed. Despite differences in the projects’ physical designs, both resulted in two communities living side-by-side but not interacting meaningfully, and therefore not gaining from the possible benefits of social mix. We argue that international comparative studies of social mix policies in different contexts allow for a better understanding of the practicalities of social mix processes for policymakers and planners.

Re-scaling social mix: Public housing renewal in Melbourne

ABSTRACT Social mix is a widely used component of urban housing policy in post-welfare states. Problematizing homogenous areas of disadvantage, social mix policies purportedly aspire to increase socioeconomic diversity within defined areas. In Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, a major program of public housing renewal has been underway since the early 2000s, justified by a social mix agenda. This paper investigates the discursive and scalar mechanisms used to justify and advance this policy scheme. First, the paper examines the discursive framing of social mix, demonstrating how this conceals both the commercial real estate drivers and continued government withdrawal from public housing. We then quantify the social mix outcomes of redevelopment, showing that estate renewal actually decreases mix at the neighborhood scale. In the midst of a serious housing crisis in Melbourne, the paper questions the purported social goals of public housing estate renewal and contributes to ongoing debates about social mix and public housing.

Refugees and Asylum Seekers Dispersed in Non-Metropolitan French Cities: Do Housing Opportunities Mean Housing Access?

Since 2015, policies for resettling asylum seekers and refugees in European cities have renewed the debate over the governance of migration, while not only metropolises but also small towns and mid-sized cities emerge as, although not new, at least specific arrival spaces. National dispersion policies are assigning these asylum seekers and refugees to small and mid-sized cities that are presumed to provide housing opportunities. However, little is known about access to housing and residential trajectories in these specific urban and socio-economic contexts. This article analyses how the housing providers—either state agencies, managers of temporary accommodation centres or social housing organisations—are adjusting to the arrival and needs of asylum seekers and refugees in cities where there is usually less ethnic diversity. We demonstrate that access to housing and residential trajectories tends to be determined by dispersion and mainstream social mix policies, from national to local arrangements. However, we argue that some pragmatic local practices have reframed this pattern to provide housing solutions that may be contrary to national policies. Our article will be based on 84 in-depth interviews conducted with housing providers, NGOs and with asylum seekers and refugees in three small and mid-sized French cities.

Social Mix Policies in the French Eco-Districts: Discourses, Policies and Social Impacts

In the 1960s, France built large high-rise developments to house poor and immigrant populations. This policy led to the rise of crime and violent unrest in those developments. Responding to that failure, France has tried, especially since the eighties, to promote a social mix policy in its new housing developments. In the first decade of the twenty first century, France elaborated an eco-district (eco-quartier) program whose guidelines emphasize the goals of this social mix policy together with affordability in public social housing. In light of these developments, this paper focuses on the socio-economic aspects of French eco-districts, especially with respect to low-income populations. The eco-quartier housing distribution has shown that social mix goals are barely reached. In affluent cities, where property prices are high (such as Paris, its middle-class suburbs and some large cities), the municipalities build eco-quartiers in substandard neighborhoods, to attract middle class families. In average cities, some municipalities have implemented more social housing than planned, to provide developers with access to State subsidies and loans – but can still privilege the middle-class in the allocation of the resulting housing. In the poorest French towns, eco-quartiers can improve living conditions for local residents but do not effectively promote social mixing.

Love thy neighbor? Remnants of the social-mix policy in the Kolenkit neighborhood, Amsterdam

In the mid-1990s, one of the main objectives of housing policy in the Netherlands was to stimulate the integration of diverse socio-economic groups through housing strategies, with the goal being to create social cohesion and to address the problems encountered in low-income neighborhoods. Existing literature has studied the impact of social mix policies and policy interventions, concentrating on such outcomes as the spatial consequences of these policies in post-war neighborhoods; macro scale transformations in social mix areas; or shared perceptions of community in gentrifying neighborhoods. Taking a different perspective, this paper studies the impact of such policies at the individual interaction level to assess whether social mix policies can lead to new forms of interaction between the existing residents and newcomers, and consequently, to further cohesion in the area or city from a broader perspective. The paper studies the interaction between new and former neighbors inside out in a special area, Amsterdam Nieuw West neighborhood, Kolenkitbuurt Zuidelijk Veld 1–2, which is recognized as being one of the most deprived neighborhoods in the country. The research of the Kolenkitbuurt case shows clearly that social interactions between the Dutch-Turkish and the new native Dutch residents have been limited to more casual or neither positive nor negative interactions.

The renewable energy consumption by sectors and household income growth in the United States

ABSTRACTIn the United States, and in most countries, the real Gross Domestic Product grows at a faster pace than the real household income, thus the two indicators could potentially pose dissimilar information. Hence, the study considers the suitability of modeling the United States real disposable personal income (per capita) with the renewable energy consumption across the main sectors: electric and power, industrial and transportation, and residential and commercial. By employing the dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, there is a significant and long-run increase in income (real disposable income) growth caused by a percent increase in the renewables consumed by the industrial sector during the examined period 1973:Q1-2018: Q2. The growth observed in the real growth disposable income with respect to the respective increase in renewable energy consumption in residential and commercial, electric and power is significantly more than the income growth. Similarly, the short-run dynamic is significant, like the Granger causality with feedback between income growth and industrial consumption. Granger causality also exists from the real disposable personal income to electric and powers sector consumption of renewable energy with feedback. The study proffers sustainable social and renewable energy mix policies for the United States.

Nuancing the international debate on social mix: evidence from Copenhagen

Whilst the political rhetoric of social mix has been similar across countries, asymmetries in their housing and planning systems and institutions owing to dissimilar underlying values, norms, and cultures has defined national and municipal practices of implementation. The purpose of this article, based on a literature review and semi-structured interviews with government, local officials, and academics, is twofold. First, to investigate why and how city planners in the municipality of Copenhagen have used strategies of social mix in the fields of housing and land-use planning, and how these policies have evolved to deal with recurrent shortages of affordable housing. Second, to highlight the contingent nature of social mix and argue the need for more context and more sensitive analysis of social mix policies and practices. Whilst many have claimed that social mixing is a euphemism for gentrification, this article argues that the concept can contribute to a more progressive housing and urban planning agenda.

Mezcla social e integración urbana: aproximaciones teóricas y discusión del caso chileno

Social mix, in general terms, denotes the social diversity of a certain geographic area, being this economic, racial, ethnic, cultural, etc. Social mix is an old and persistent ideal of planning (marked by normative pretensions), has been achieved through different means, has been proposed to reach a wide variety of goals, and has been used interchangeably to refer to concepts like 'integration', 'mixed-income communities', 'poverty deconcentration', 'balanced communities', etc. There has been abundant literature from the 1990s, to the extent that it is one of the most researched topics in urban studies. At present, the discussion on social mix revolves around five key concepts: contact hypothesis, social networks, social control, role models, and geographies of opportunity. In Chile, from 2006 there have been social mix policies, with the expectation that physical proximity between different social groups could facilitate integration. In this article we review the concept of social mix from a historical and comparative perspective, and then we study Chilean policies under the five mentioned concepts, showing the low efficacy that these projects have had in meeting the proposed goals.

서울시의 공공임대주택정책 목표와 발전 방향

The seriousness of the housing problems in Seoul Metropolitan City has been aggravated since the global economic crisis. Excessive housing expenses in Seoul and outflow of young people in their twenties and thirties are the causes that reduce the long-term growth momentum. Though the public rental housing policy of Seoul has earned more positive reviews than that of other local governments, no effective housing support is realized as the actual situation, targets, and the plan such as accurate targets for demand, scale, and classification of supported and unsupported households are not clear. Accordingly, we present the following improvement plan for public rental housing policy:BR First, the public rental housing policy should be carried out within the framework of supply plan establishment and execution, and policy evaluation. Second, housing service suitable for the public rental house occupants (college students, job seekers/startup seekers, newly married couples, senior citizens, and so on) should be provided. Third, the housing programs promoted by the main bodies of social economy such as community housing, social housing and so on should be supported to expand inexpensive public housing. Fourth, social mix policy for public rental houses should be actively executed and the problems of the occupants arising from operation and management should be improved. Fifth, following the increase in the total inventory of public rental houses, support for public rental houses to enable them to have a long service life and repair history management of public rental houses are required.

‘Exotic commerce’, French universalism, and the disruption of white space in Paris’s ‘Little Africa’

Abstract Paris’s working-class Château Rouge neighbourhood is popularly referred to as ‘Little Africa’ for its concentration of Afro-Caribbean shops, and derisively labelled an ‘enclave’ by politicians and white middle-class French residents who desire to replace the ‘exotic commerce’ with ‘traditional’ ‘French’ and ‘Parisian’ businesses. Urban spaces such as Château Rouge are thought to challenge French universalism, which simultaneously seeks to erase differences between French citizens and marks any attempt to distinguish individuals or groups from the universal French nation as disruptive. Drawing on interviews with residents and archival documents, I demonstrate how urban planning and social mix policies have shifted from a focus on residential mix to a desire for commercial mix following decades of urban renewal in the neighbourhood. I argue that gendered and racialised French republican discourse is reproduced through local municipal planning aimed at maintaining an ideal ‘mix’ of white and non-white populations.

Residential Satisfaction Among Public Housing Residents Living in Social-Mix Housing Complexes: The Case of the Seoul Metropolitan Area, Korea

This study asks how a social mix policy that mixes public housing with private housing in the same housing complex is associated with residential satisfaction among public housing residents in Korea. We also ask if mixture types between public and private housing make a difference in the residential satisfaction of public housing residents. By analyzing the 2011 Korea Housing Survey for Public Housing Residents, we find that living in the independent type that includes only public housing and the random-mix type that randomly mixes public housing with private housing in the same building is positively related to residential satisfaction among public housing residents. The empirical analysis also shows that the levels of social conflict among residents are the lowest in the random-mix type.