This review is framed around the exploration of a central hypothesis: A shift in public investment towards secondary towns from big cities will improve poverty reduction performance. Of course the hypothesis raises many questions. What exactly is the dichotomy of secondary towns versus big...

Under apartheid, black South Africans were severely restricted in their choice of location and many were forced to live in homelands. Following the abolition of apartheid they were free to migrate. Given gravity, a town nearer to the homelands can be expected to receive a larger inflow of people...

In the last few decades, urban restructuring programs have been implemented in many Western European cities with the main goal of combating a variety of socioeconomic problems in deprived neighborhoods. The main instrument of restructuring has been housing diversification and tenure mixing. The...

Neighbourhood socioeconomic change is a complex phenomenon which is driven by multiple macro- and micro-level processes. Most theoretical and empirical work has focused on the role of urban-level processes, such as filtering, life-cycle, and social dynamics. For individual neighbourhoods, these...

The socio-economic mosaic of urban neighbourhoods changes under the influence of three distinctive distributional processes: reordering of the socio-economic position of urban neighbourhoods; changing levels of inequality between neighbourhoods; and an overall growth or decline in income levels...

Many studies of urban and neighbourhood change investigate changes in the relative positions of neighbourhoods within an urban region, without looking at the underlying processes. Often, changes in socio-spatial structures reflect intensifying socio-spatial divisions caused by both increasing...

Concentration to disadvantaged neighbourhoods may hinder immigrants' opportunities for social integration, so equal chances of translating available economic resources into mobility to less disadvantaged neighbourhoods are important. This paper adds to existing research on exits from poor...

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...

There is increasing evidence that our societies are polarizing. Most studies focus on labour market and educational outcomes and show a socioeconomic polarization of the bottom and top ends of the population distribution. Processes of social polarization have a spatial dimension which should be...

The aim of this paper is to get new insight into the complex relationship between social inequalities and socioeconomic segregation by undertaking a comparative study North and South European cities. Our main finding shows that during the last global economic cycle from the 1980s through the...