Neighbourhood Change in a Comparative Context: a Social-Mobility Approach

Project Information

Neighbourhood Change

Grant agreement ID: 702649

DOI

10.3030/702649

Project closed

EC signature date 17 February 2016

Start date 12 September 2016

End date 11 July 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 162 798,90

EU contribution

€ 162 798,90

Coordinated by

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT DELFT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Neighbourhood Change (Neighbourhood Change in a Comparative Context: a Social-Mobility Approach)

Reporting period: 2016-09-12 to 2018-07-11

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The socioeconomic status of urban neighbourhoods can change over time due to multiple processes. Some of these processes operate at the urban level, which cause neighbourhoods to change relative to one another within the urban area. The movement of neighbourhoods up and down the urban socioeconomic hierarchy is often related to their life cycle and stage of development; many neighbourhoods decline as they age, and at some point might be subject to renewal processes which lead to an upward trajectory. Beyond the urban level, neighbourhood socioeconomic conditions are also affected by structural processes that involve regional, national and global levels. These processes can generate changes in the distribution of socioeconomic characteristics of the population in an urban area, which can translate into neighbourhood change. Two different ‘structural’ effects change the distribution of neighbourhood average incomes in the urban area: The ‘growth/decline’ effect which increases or decreases incomes among all neighbourhoods in the urban area, and the ‘inequality’ effect which increases the disparities among them.

The way neighbourhood change has been measured in most research on neighbourhood socioeconomic change does not enable to distinguish between these different components of change. The commonly used measures of change, which rely on the relative positions of neighbourhoods within the cit-context, exclude the effect of overall growth or decline and confound the effects of urban positional exchanges with the effect of increase in inequality. By using the standard practices it is impossible to estimate the effects of structural processes on neighbourhoods. It is also impossible to systematically compare processes of neighbourhood change across cities, while accounting for the absolute conditions in neighbourhoods.

This research project introduces an application of a method to decompose total neighbourhood socioeconomic change measured in absolute terms into its contributing components. The method was originally developed for understanding income mobility of individuals. The approach enables to take account of all distributional processes that generate neighbourhood socioeconomic change, while distinguishing between them. The method promotes systematic analysis and is used to substantiate the role of inequalities in urban socio-spatial change. The project also aims at applying the method to various case studies in order to provide empirical evidence on underlying processes of neighbourhood change and their effect on urban socio-spatial structures.

The applications of the proposed method demonstrates the need to move beyond relative measures of neighbourhood change due to its overcoming of two main problems of contemporary research. First, it highlights the importance of measuring change in absolute terms, which gives a more complete picture on socio-spatial dynamics. Secondly, it demonstrates how the effect of inequality can be distinguished, and how the separation of this effect is critical to drawing valid conclusions about neighbourhood change processes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The methodological part of the project has been accomplished by developing the application of the decomposition method from the field of income mobility to neighbourhood change. The application included some theoretical work related to the conceptual distinction between the different underlying processes and their links to different types of distributional change. In addition, it included the description of how the method is to be applied in the context of neighbourhood change, with the particular data involved in such analysis. The methodological component of this research project was published as a journal article, combined with the first of three empirical studies that were carried out using the method, which are listed below:

1) The first empirical study focuses on 22 metropolitan areas in the US. In comparing the components of change across all urban areas, the findings indicate that structural processes can be most substantial in generating change. Neighbourhood socioeconomic change in ‘superstar cities’ is mostly generated by the growth in overall incomes, with a relatively low contribution of increasing inequality. Conversely, in declining cities it is mostly driven by overall decline and increasing inequality.
2) A second empirical analysis focuses on the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area in Israel. The findings indicate that both within-urban development processes and increasing inequality within the urban area had a substantial role in reinforcing an existent north-south socioeconomic divide.
3) The third empirical study focuses on four city-regions in the Netherlands. The results indicate a quite large variation among Dutch cities in the components of neighbourhood socioeconomic change, but compared to the US settings the variation is much less striking. The welfare regime can explain some of the findings. The relatively large and counter-intuitive role of inequality in Amsterdam, for example, compared to leading cities in the US, can be attributed to the still large proportions of social housing in the city, that 'locks' in lower income households and prevents them from being 'priced out' of the urban area.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

By using the standard practices in neighbourhood change research it is impossible to systematically compare processes of neighbourhood change across cities, while accounting for the absolute conditions in neighbourhoods. The change in absolute conditions is a most relevant outcome to socio-spatial processes; in contemporary urban areas, change in absolute conditions may exceed substantially the change associated with the move across city-relative positions. The empirical study of urban areas in the US demonstrates this clearly. In some cities, most of the change neighbourhoods experienced during a period of four decades is attributed to the overall growth in incomes in the city, which can only be accounted for by observing absolute incomes. The practice of using relative measures has developed in order to compare urban dynamics across cities. But currently, it masks an important source of change. The method introduced in this research project makes possible the use of absolute measures without compromising the comparability of results. It also enables to distinguish the role of inequality from that of positional exchange, which standard measures of change confound. The use of the method provides insights into the underlying processes of neighbourhood change in a comparative context.

The empirical studies based on the decomposition method highlight the role of increasing inequalities in determining neighbourhood fortunes. The findings stress that neighbourhoods, to a large extent now, reflect the story of increasing overall inequality which translates into increasing disparities within and among cities. In this context, it seems no longer plausible to ignore the roles of overall income growth and of inequality in neighbourhood change processes. Neighbourhoods cannot be viewed as only part of their respective urban systems; they are deeply embedded in higher-level contexts and are greatly affected by the contemporary reality of increasing inequalities at multiple spatial scales. This project's conclusions call for a revision in how neighbourhood change is measured and analysed in contemporary research.

This image demonstrates the conceptual distinction between processes underlying neighbourhood change