Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development

... Apart from the Polish concentration (which might be labelled an `ethnic neighbour-hood' ), no ... recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants will probably face the same problems as black ... the as-sumption that ethnic origin is strongly associated with socioeconomic situation, the fear ...

ABSTRACT By and large the tenure change literature has focused on the shift from renting to owning. The converse process, the move from ownership to renting, has received less attention. In this paper we provide a context for examining who 'drops out' of the home owner market. The results show that families with children are less likely to be able to remain in the home owner market than couples and, conversely, that two income earners are more likely to be able to stay in the market or buy another dwelling after a spell in renting than a one income earner. Although those results are somewhat expected, we provide additional new information on the nature of temporary moves out of the home owner market and returns at a later time, and on the seemingly greater role of accidental effects on exit from the home owner market than entrance into that market.

A wide variety of segregation measures are used in scientific research. However, the usual measures are not suitable for use at micro-geographical scale level, for example, to evaluate the magnitude of spatial attraction or separation between pairs of ethnic groups within multi-ethnic residential neighbourhoods in Amsterdam. In this paper we examine the social importance of possessing such knowledge for these areas, we discuss the deficiencies of the usual segregation measures as regards this level of analysis, and we draw attention to a recently developed spatial segregation measure, the so-called M measure, which does happen to be suitable for this goal. We apply the M measure to some of these residential neighbourhoods which existed in Amsterdam on 1 January 2003. The conclusion is that although neighbourhoods can have a very similar ethnic mix, the spatial attraction or avoidance between certain pairs of groups may be quite different between these neighbourhoods.

Societies are aging and the number of households with heads or even all members over 65 is increasing rapidly. Many of these households are well established in the housing market and occupy housing at the apex of the housing choice process. These houses are large, nearly always owned and with substantial equity value. The households that occupy such dwellings have lower mobility rates than households in general and are likely, with low mobility rates, to continue to occupy their houses even when they no longer need the same space as when they were raising families. The paper examines the extent of this phenomenon in the Netherlands and traces under what circumstances older households are exchanging these large houses. The data, derived from the Housing Demand Survey in the Netherlands, reveal that older households occupy very spacious housing, that they have relatively long durations of stay, and that owners over 60 are nearly certain to be ‘over-consuming’ housing with respect to equilibrium consumption. At the same time, when older households do move, they reduce the amount of space they consume. The issue for society at large is whether the low mobility rates create a bottleneck in access to spacious housing by younger families.

ABSTRACT When households move they obviously weigh both the quality of the house and the quality of the neighbourhood in their decision process. But, to the extent that housing quality and neighbourhood quality are inter-twined it is difficult to disentangle the extent to which households are more focused on one or another of these two components of the choice process. This paper uses both cross-tabulations of the neighbourhood choices, and logit models of the actual choices, to examine the relative roles of neighbourhoods and houses in the choice process. The research is focused on the question of the extent to which households trade up in house quality, or neighbourhood quality or both, as outcomes of residential mobility. The research measures neighbourhood quality in both socio-economic and environmental dimensions. The study shows that many households not only move up in housing quality, but quite consistently also make gains in neighbourhood quality, often independently of gains in housing quality. Not surprisingly, the largest gains in neighbourhood quality are related to households who make the city/suburban transition in their housing moves. The research adds another dimension to the growing and extensive literature on neighbourhoods and their role in residential choice.

Networks of urbanization managing relations and thus service provision between inhabitants and the local state differ in means and modes across different socio-economic collectivities and differently urbanized spaces. This issue is often overlooked in discussions about governance, citizen participation and urban development in Indian cities. First, the article outlines an approach for studying the city as a conjecture of various social processes facilitated by various networks and a sociology of structural and cultural holes. Then the article outlines and compares the structure and practices of three different networks of urbanization in Kalyan–Dombivli and Mira–Bhayandar: clientelist, rent-seeking, and cor- porate. These networks render the categorization of these cities as either ‘bourgeois’, ‘subaltern’, or ‘inclusive’ problematic.

To move urban livelihoods approaches beyond description to strategic action, its core concepts of livelihoods, capitals and livelihood outcomes (termed here as trajectories) need a more comprehensive and sociological conceptualisation. First, social structures are unpacked to show how livelihoods need to be thought of in terms of livelihood arrangements. Then, the problems with the present use of capitals, assets and resources (CARs) are discussed and their substantive, relational–contingent and embodied aspects outlined. Lastly, the article sketches a Sayer–Bourdieuian inspired approach.

Municipal Councilors are important agents of change and obstruction in processes of urban D/ development. This is presented by first discussing both the capitalist creative destruction side and targeted social program side of development in Urban India before moving on to Municipal Councilors’ working environment and daily governance activities. Using an analytical framework which combines Lipsky’s concept of street-level- bureaucrats, Chatterjee’s political society and Burt’s structural holes, I argue that Municipal Councilors are friend and foe both to the urban poor and to the middle-classes and capitalists trying to world-class the region. Those interested in empowering the poor should endeavor to make common cause with these actors.