Cooperative Housing and Social Cohesion: The Role of Linking Social Capital

Abstract

The article examines the role of housing cooperatives for social cohesion in the city by introducing linking social capital which grasps the vertical dimension of social capital. Housing cooperatives represent a crucial intermediate level between residents and urban housing policy, thus providing opportunity structures for bottom-linked citizen participation. Drawing on the case of Vienna, a large-scale household survey and interviews with key informants provide empirical evidence on the importance of a form of social capital which links actors at different levels in the spatial hierarchy: residents, housing managers and political decision-makers. The findings add to our understanding of the opportunities and problems with resident participation in a policy field structured by multi-level governance. Our two-level analysis shows that the dominant model of governance, top-down as well as neoliberal, has structurally limited the room for participatory practices in cooperative housing. Nevertheless, we argue that professional housing cooperatives have a potential to give residents a voice beyond the neighbourhood. Their strong linkages with public decision-makers at different scales can help leverage ideas and resources of residents.     

The mortgage crisis and evictions in Barcelona: identifying the determinants of the spatial clustering of foreclosures

The article identifies the determinants of the uneven spatial distribution of housing accumulated by banks via foreclosures in the city of Barcelona. Working with a new data source, we geolocalised foreclosed housing and analysed its tendency to spatially cluster. Using the bivariate version of the Local Moran Indicator, we confirmed the spatial correlation between the concentration of foreclosed housing and indicators of the socio-economic vulnerability of the neighbourhoods containing it. We also applied an OLS model to identify and weight the determinants of this clustering at the neighbourhood level. Our findings revealed that the growth of unemployment, the concentration of (non-EU) immigrant population and a greater presence of residents with low levels of studies were the key variables that explain the uneven geography of foreclosures in Barcelona. The results obtained also allowed us to characterize the spatial distribution of the housing accumulated by the banks during the mortgage crisis. As a result of the massive wave of evictions, banks have emerged as large-scale property owners in Spain and key agents for present and future housing policies.     

基于时空间行为的混合住房社区社会分异的研究框架

混合住房社区内的社会分异是城市社会分异的新形式，是城市地理学者面临的新研究议题，也是在促进社会融合过程中亟待解决的问题。以居住区分异为核心的研究范式平均化了“邻里效应”，无法揭示同一居住区内部的社会分异。居民时空间行为研究为揭示社区内部的社会分异提供了理论和方法支撑。本文首先回顾混合住房社区政策的起源、发展及学术界关于居住混合与社会融合关系的争议，然后对目前国内外关于混合住房社区的研究进行综述，接着讨论了从时空间行为视角透视社会分异问题的有效性，并基于已有研究进展构建了基于居民时空间行为的混合住房社区社会分异的研究框架，以期为混合住房社区政策制定和城市社区管理提供参考。     

Narratives of neighbourhood change and loss of belonging in an urban garden village

In studies on the ties between residents and their residential surroundings, it is generally assumed that, over time, residents become more attached to their neighbourhood. However, as neighbourhoods change due to economic, political and social processes at higher spatial scales, so may residents’ relationship to them. A qualitative case study in a working-class neighbourhood in Amsterdam explored the circumstances under which residents come to experience a loss of belonging. In-depth interviews provide insight into the way in which residents perceive, experience and make sense of processes of neighbourhood change. Although a particular group of Villagers express a strong sense of belonging to the neighbourhood, they perceive a process of neighbourhood decline, which they attribute to changing housing regimes, retrenchment of the local welfare state and shifting paradigms in neighbourhood governance. Consequently, the experienced disruption of neighbourhood life and local ways of ‘doing’ neighbourhood also result in feelings of discontent with governing institutions and the wider society. The study therefore draws attention to both the salience of the local in, and the relational nature of, neighbourhood belonging.     

Gentrification Interrupted in Salford,UK: From New Deal to “Limbo‐Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery

This paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low‐income residents’ experiences of contemporary state‐led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state‐led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.     

The importance of housing and neighbourhood resources for urban microbusinesses

Economic research has rarely considered the significance of the home and neighbourhood context of where business owners live for their business. Conversely, urban and neighbourhood research has overlooked how housing and neighbourhood shape business and entrepreneurship outcomes. This paper investigates the importance of housing and neighbourhood resources for microbusinesses using a random sample of microbusinesses in Edinburgh (UK) including those that are informal and home-based, and various characteristics of the neighbourhood in which the business owner lives were attached to the survey records. The data capture whether business owners have business premises outside their homes, and have used neighbourhood contacts, housing equity or space in the house for their business. In short, housing and neighbourhood resources are used by a large majority (82%) of microbusinesses. The findings challenge a number of common assumptions on the separation of commercial and residential functions, how neighbourhoods feature in the evolution of businesses, the nested conceptualization of home within a neighbourhood and on the nature of home-based businesses. It is concluded that multi-use (rather than mixed-use) neighbourhood planning would help foster more flexible and dynamic use of neighbourhoods and urban districts, although recognizing that this is a political issue.     

Gender,Ethnicity, and Hybrid Forms of Community-Based Urban Activism in Vancouver, 1957–1978: The Strathcona story revisited

In the 1960s and early 1970s, residents of the neighbourhood of Strathcona in the city of Vancouver, Canada, successfully fought the grand designs of planners, engineers, politicians and developers to displace residents, demolish homes, clear lands, and rebuild the area. Against all odds, a relatively politically powerless group of residents and their supporters from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds formed a neighbourhood organization, the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) to mount a last-ditch struggle to defend their homes, ways of life, and right to place. This article re-examines existing explanations of these historic events. It identifies the unique activism of ethnic minority women, and introduces the concept of culturally hybrid forms of oppositional practice—the interaction of cultural practices of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural residents of Strathcona with mainstream Canadian political discourse and structures. The article stresses the critical importance of broadening and complicating existing analyses of multi-ethnic women's community-based urban activism as a way of rethinking feminist conceptualizations of movement activism around place and identity.     

‘Highway to Heaven’: the creation of a multicultural,religious landscape in suburban Richmond,British Columbia

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.     

On the Stickiness of Territorial Stigma: Diverging Experiences in Amsterdam’s Most Notorious Neighbourhood

In Western Europe, a select number of “ghettos” are at the forefront of public anxieties about urban inequality and failed integration. These notorious neighbourhoods at the bottom of the moral spatial order are imagined as different and disconnected from the rest of the city. This paper examines how residents in Amsterdam Bijlmer, a peripheral social housing estate long portrayed as the Dutch ghetto, experience the symbolic denigration of their neighbourhood. Interviews show that all residents are highly aware of the negative racial, cultural and material stereotypes associated with their neighbourhood. However, these negative stereotypes are not equally felt: territorial stigma “sticks” more to some residents than others and substantial inequalities are observed in who carries the burden of renegotiating blemish of place. Differential engagement with stigma depends on how residents’ identity and the materiality of their surroundings intersect with stigmatising narratives of place.     

中国大城市保障房社区的邻里效应研究——以广州市保障房周边社区为例

随着我国保障房建设速度的加快,保障房社区将对已有的城市社会空间结构带来深刻影响,其社会效应亟需深入探讨。本文以邻里效应为切入点,基于社区调研数据,采用因子分析、回归分析和质性研究方法,研究广州市保障房社区对周边社区的影响,以及这种影响的形成机制。研究发现,保障房社区并没有为周边社区带来负面的影响,也不存在"贫困同质化"的现象。然而,保障房居民与周边社区居民缺乏人际交往,其社会融合度也比较低。结果表明,提升保障房社区的社会认同度,消除不同社区居民相互间的隔阂,对构建和谐社区具有重要的意义。     

New immigrant settlement in a mid-sized city: a case study of housing barriers and coping strategies in Kelowna, British Columbia

The successful integration of immigrants into a new society is based on their attainment of several basic needs, including access to adequate, suitable and affordable housing. While this has long been a concern in Canadian cities, such as Vancouver, Toronto, and Montréal, it is also increasingly an issue in growing mid-sized cities such as Kelowna, in the interior of British Columbia. While Kelowna's real estate market is one of the most expensive in the country, there is little published data or literature on the housing experiences of immigrants in the city. This study examines the housing experiences and stresses of a small group of immigrants in Kelowna's rental housing market. This study uses data from five focus groups with 34 new immigrants and 20 interviews with key informants, conducted in Kelowna in summer 2008. The evidence indicates that for this group of immigrant newcomers, the housing search process in Kelowna's rental housing market met with significant barriers in locating affordable rental housing. Of these barriers, the most commonly cited were: (a) high housing costs; (b) lack of reliable housing information, including lack of access to organizations that provide housing help (government or not); and (c) prejudice by landlords based on the immigrants' ethnic and racial background.
This study points to the need for more comparative studies on the housing experiences of immigrants in mid-sized cities in Canada to better understand which groups of immigrants are more successful than others in finding affordable housing in these mid-sized cities, and why.     

Environmental Quality and User Satisfaction in Mass Housing Areas: The Case of Istanbul

In a residence environment, housing and housing groups constitute a fundamental life space to meet the needs of the residents, to satisfy them, and to maintain the overall health of individuals and public. Various needs that appear due to the problems caused by housing and residence environment situated in a physical, psychological and socio-cultural environment together with their surroundings affect resident satisfaction and attitude, while directing the overall individual/family and public health, happiness and welfare. Most researchers argue about and try to determine the residents' needs related to their expectations of and satisfaction in housing and residence environment, within the framework of basic needs of human beings. In this study, in order to assess the factors that improve housing and environmental quality satisfaction, the concepts of housing and its environment, and the subject of housing and environmental quality satisfaction have been investigated; the conceptual model of housing and environmental quality satisfaction has been developed, which takes up the subject of user satisfaction in housing and environment quality as a whole; and the factors to increase the level of satisfaction in housing and environmental quality have been specified. A sum of 400 questionnaire inquiries has been made in planned mass housing areas in the Istanbul Metropolitan Area. Applying factor analysis to the data that have been gathered as a result of questionnaire inquiries, the following factors have been determined according to their order of importance to increase the level of user satisfaction in housing and environmental quality. The findings of this study show that, the elements influencing these factor groups include accessibility to various function areas in the inhabited housing area, environmental features of the housing, satisfaction in the various facilities in the inhabited environment, environmental security, neighbour relationships, and the appearance of the housing environment. A logistic regression model has been made to assess whether there are any differences among the factors influencing housing and environmental quality satisfaction for mass housing users on location choice (central districts and peripheral districts) at the metropolitan level.     

基于生命历程视角的郊区居民迁居行为重构——以北京回龙观居住区为例

城市居民迁居行为是城市地理学的重要课题,但以微观手法研究郊区居民迁居行为重构尚不多见。本文基于质性研究方法,以位于北京郊区的回龙观居住区为例,以微观的手法对城区拆迁居民、经历体制转型的中老年人、北京本地年轻人以及外地来京年轻人的迁居历程进行解读,寻找经济、社会和制度变革与个体生命历程的交集,进而洞察郊区居民迁居的一般性特征。在此基础上,从迁居机会供给、住房需求、住房获取能力、迁居决策4个方面归纳郊区居民迁居行为重构特征,并从宏观、中观、微观3个层面阐释重构机制。对郊区居民迁居行为重构的研究,有助于理解北京城市空间重构及郊区化进程。     

Emplacement and the politics of heritage in low-income neighbourhoods of Marseille

Recent scholarship addressing efforts to celebrate heritage in low-income neighbourhoods and housing estates has stressed the importance of attending to the continuity of place-based social relationships as a key factor in residents’ understandings of heritage, and, drawing on Smith’s conception of an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, the ways these understandings differ from hegemonic and generalised expert discourse emphasising the deficiencies of the material environment. In this article, I examine a new object of state intervention in France, ‘the heritage of popular neighbourhoods’, and describe points of convergence and conflict between local heritage work in Marseille and the recent discursive framework established to employ heritage as a tool in reorganising French state policy towards urban peripheral neighbourhoods (the politique de la ville). Drawing on ethnographic research (2007–2014), this article identifies emplacement as a key feature in residents’ performances of neighbourhood heritage, a feature often absent or poorly elaborated in heritage work promoted by French urbanist policy in the past. I describe the ways emplacement has been expressed aesthetically in arts projects, trace the range of social networks and relationships enacted, and describe the political implications of these performances as a tool for promoting solidarity across time and space in Marseille.     

‘We want to be there for everyone’: imagined spaces of encounter and the politics of place in a super-diverse neighbourhood

In the context of increasingly diverse urban populations in European cities, neighbourhood organizations are often seen as offering spaces of encounter that can foster a sense of belonging. As a result, they have formed an important element in urban policies on community identity and social cohesion. Yet everyday encounters in such micro-publics may not necessarily be experienced as positive, and these spaces themselves might become sites of contestation and exclusion. Through an ethnographic study in a super-diverse neighbourhood in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, this paper investigates how residents’ sense of belonging to the neighbourhood is informed by competing claims on a neighbourhood centre. Although envisioned as a collective space, contestations between different groups of residents over the centre as a functional and meaningful place illustrate how governing institutions shape informal politics of place through their own vision for the neighbourhood and their selective support of some initiatives over others.     

Mobile Modernities: A South Asian family negotiates immigration,gender and class in Canada

For the modern Indian immigrant family ‘modernity’ is not necessarily found in the west. Using qualitative data drawn from in-depth interviews with one immigrant Sikh family, conducted in both Vancouver and the Punjab, we draw attention to the mobile and contradictory modernities family members have faced in their migration, settlement and subsequent transnational activities. We explore how class, gender and sexuality have framed the experiences of the members of this family in differential, partial and sometimes ironic ways. In so doing we construct a theoretical argument about the nature and geography of modernity, and how it relates to immigrant settlement in Canada.     

WHAT SCALE MATTERS? EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS' SOCIAL POSITION,NEIGHBOURHOOD CONTEXT AND THE SCALE OF NEIGHBOURHOOD

Over the past few years, neighbourhood effects research has received significant attention from the academic world, not only in the US, where that attention has a longer tradition, but also in Western Europe. There is also substantial interest among policy makers. Most policy makers intend to reduce concentrations of poverty by enhancing the social mix of neighbourhoods. Avoiding high immigrant concentrations in particular neighbourhoods is another issue that fuels political debate and policy intervention in many Western European countries, Scandinavian countries included. However, there are clear gaps in the understanding of the relationship between neighbourhood composition and social outcomes. One of these gaps regards the scale of the neighbourhood; if there would be neighbourhood effects, what scale is it relevant to consider? Is mix good or bad for the social prospects of individuals at a level that is very local, for example a few neighbouring streets, or could mix be helpful at a somewhat higher scale? This article will focus on this issue, applying individual longitudinal data in multi‐level models for the entire active population of the three largest metropolitan areas in Sweden. We will explore the degree to which the social and ethnic composition of geographical districts, at a variety of scales (measured at time t), are statistically related to individual employment and earnings for adult metropolitan residents at time t+1, controlling for relevant personal and household characteristics.     

"Brain Abuse", or the Devaluation of Immigrant Labour in Canada

Many professional and skilled Canadian immigrants suffer from de-skilling and the nonrecognition of their foreign credentials. Consequently, they are underrepresented in the upper segments of the Canadian labour market. Rather than accepting this devaluation of immigrant labour as a naturally occurring adjustment period, I suggest that regulatory institutions actively exclude immigrants from the upper segments of the labour market. In particular, professional associations and employers give preference to Canadian-born and educated workers and deny immigrants access to the most highly desired occupations.
Pierre Bourdieu's notion of institutionalised cultural capital and his views of the educational system as a site of social reproduction provide the entry point for my theoretical argument. I find that the nonrecognition of foreign credentials and dismissal of foreign work experience systematically excludes immigrant workers from the upper segments of the labour market. This finding is based on data from interviews with institutional administrators and employers in Greater Vancouver who service or employ immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia.     

A pretext for plunder? Environmental change and state‐led redevelopment in the Peruvian Amazon

In 2014, the Peruvian federal government declared the low‐income neighbourhood of Pueblo Libre de Belén in the Amazonian city of Iquitos to be in a state of emergency. A federal decree stated that ‘constant inundation’ from the Itaya River had put residents and their homes in jeopardy. Following this declaration, the federal government proposed to resettle residents in a planned community, 13 km outside the city. Drawing from interviews with 77 households in the neighbourhood, this article examines residents' responses to the relocation plan as well as their deep scepticism over the motivations driving it. Considering the state's plans for redeveloping the area as a tourist zone, this case study illustrates how concerns about the future impacts of environmental change – and flooding specifically – can be exploited by state actors for economic and political gain while further disenfranchising vulnerable urban populations.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.