Åsa Bråmå

Selective Migration in Swedish Distressed Neighbourhoods : Can Area-based Urban Policies Counteract Segregation Processes?

Like many other Western European governments, the Swedish government has launched an area‐based urban policy in order to solve the problems of the distressed neighbourhoods in the largest cities. However, in the current policy it is not clear whether the primary aim is to address the problems of individuals, or if the aim is to change the market position of the distressed areas. The intervention might be successful in terms of assisting residents in finding jobs and better education, but that might not improve the general position of the areas targeted, since people who make a socio‐economic career very often move out of the areas, to be replaced by poorer and less well‐established residents. By drawing upon a comprehensive and unique set of data the paper analyses the issues of residential mobility and selective migration, with special focus on distressed neighbourhoods in the Stockholm region. The results clearly indicate that the migration flows of these neighbourhoods are indeed selective. The people who move in are more likely to be unemployed and dependent on social benefits and have on average lower incomes than those who move out and those who remain in the neighbourhoods. This simultaneous outflow of relatively well‐off residents and inflow of weaker and more marginalised groups has the effect of reproducing the distressed character of the neighbourhoods.

Counteracting Segregation: Swedish Policies and Experiences

The issue of residential segregation has been on the Swedish political agenda since the early 1970s. This paper analyses the background for this interest, presents some basic features of socio-economic and ethnic residential segregation, and discusses some fundamental contextual properties regarding the Swedish welfare state, its institutional set-up and changes in housing and other policies that have affected the conditions for segregation processes. Three more specific anti-segregation policies are also identified and analysed: housing and social mix policy (first initiated in the 1970s); the refugee dispersal policy (initiated in the 1980s); and the area-based urban policy (initiated in the 1990s). Of these three, the last two have a clear ethnic focus while mix policies primarily aim for socio-economic and demographic mix. The analysis shows that none of the policies have managed to affect levels of segregation more than marginally, the reasons being ineffective implementation (the mix policy), failures in the design (the refugee dispersal policy) or conflicting aims inherent in the policy (area-based interventions).

The Effects of Neighbourhood Regeneration on the Neighbourhood Hierarchy of the City: A Case Study in Sweden

The focus of this chapter is on the effects of neighbourhood regeneration on the population composition of the regenerated neighbourhood, as well as on the changing position of the neighbourhood in the overall city level hierarchy of neighbourhoods. The impact of neighbourhood regeneration on the wider city environment has received little attention in the literature, and has broad implications for our understanding of processes of neighbourhood change. Using data on a large housing estate in Sweden this chapter shows that regeneration programmes can raise the neighbourhood’s position in the overall hierarchy of neighbourhoods, but that this relative change can also be the result of other neighbourhoods in the city gaining worse reputations. The results of this study have wider implications for our understanding of neighbourhood change As the study shows very clearly how change in a particular neighbourhood in a city cannot be seen separately from developments in other parts of the same city. Neighbourhood regeneration is likely to affect the surrounding neighbourhoods as well as more distant parts of the city, and this should be taken into account in regeneration policy. There is a real risk that regenerating one neighbourhood will cause problems in other parts of the city, thereby reducing the overall effects of investment in neighbourhood regeneration.

The Stockholm Estates—A Tale of the Importance of Initial Conditions, Macroeconomic Dependencies, Tenure and Immigration

In this chapter, we define the concept of housing estates in the Swedish context and provide some information about Stockholm and the historical background to the construction of post-war housing estates. The core research question will then be whether and to what extent initial conditions play a key role for later developments of an estate. Approaching this question, we first provide a statistical overview of developments from 1990 onwards, and then use examples from two estates in Stockholm, one built in the mid-1960s (Bredang) and one built a few years later (Rinkeby), which now have similar problems of ethnic and socio-economic segregation but have arrived at this situation through very different trajectories. We will analyse these trajectories and identify the key moments leading up to present day convergence in terms of the social challenges facing the estates. Until 1990, the socio-economic situation in the 49 estates we analysed was not very different from the average situation in the Stockholm region. However, the economic crisis of the early 1990s had profound effects and initiated diverging trajectories where some estates continued to do well while others did not. We explain this diverging development with reference to tenure composition, geographical context and building period, all important for also understanding the geography of refugee settlement. This set of explanations is based both on the more structural analysis of all 49 estates and on the more detailed study of our two cases. We end the chapter with a discussion of 40 years of recurrent interventions and of how contemporary challenges are perceived and addressed.