Lena Magnusson

Countryside abandoned? Suburbanization and mobility in Sweden

Regional differences have been increasing in Sweden. Over the last five to ten years, several municipalities have lost well over 1 per cent per annum of their population through a net outmigration to metropolitan regions and university cities. Losses of inhabitants normally have a negative effect on the housing market. Prices of owner-occupied dwellings decrease and vacancies occur in the rented sector. This paper aims to analyse the differences between depopulating municipalities. In some cases a net loss in population is compatible with a net migration of elderly households and middle-aged families – even when there is a massive outmigration of young people. A regression model shows that municipalities in a coastal location, with good living conditions and a strong housing market, also have a net inmigration of middle-aged or elderly households. The analysis also shows that a net outmigration is not always in conflict with a dynamic housing market. If there is a reasonably large inmigration of middle-aged or elderly households, the housing market conditions can still be favourable.

A Review of: “Life events and the housing career: a retrospective analysis of time effects”

Life events and the housing career: a retrospective analysis of time effects is a book to thoroughly recommend for researchers in the area of residential mobility. Even politicians and practicians involved in urban and housing policy can learn a lot from the research undertaken by Peteke Feijten. Life events and the housing career is Peteke Feijten’s doctoral thesis in geography at Utrecht University. This thesis is one of the first to analyse the impact of life events on individual housing careers using a life-course approach. The thesis consists of an introduction, five mostly co-authored articles and a final discussion. The overall research question is the following: How do the time aspects of life events and situations affect the development of the housing career, and to what extent are these effects stable over the life course? The focus for this thesis is the life-course approach, a theoretical framework that to a large extent has replaced the traditional lifecycle perspective on residential mobility and housing career. At the same time, few empirical studies have made use of this approach to analyse life events that trigger a residential move. Most of these studies have also analysed only a short time period surrounding a housing career move. To get a full picture of the possible effects of live events on housing careers, Peteke Feijten argues that a longer period needs to be scrutinized. First of all, she argues that life-course events may trigger housing moves with a time lag and, second, effects can be either temporary or permanent. Essential in the life-course approach is the occurrence of a life event, as well as the timing and order of events, and the duration of the resulting housing effects. One example being: does a move to owner occupation take place before or after the birth of a child? Time is a complex concept and can be interpreted in different ways. Peteke Feijten elaborates with three different concepts to structure the time mechanism: biographic continuity, commitment and stability. These concepts are used to formulate hypotheses for the five articles. The hypotheses are tested on three different retrospective surveys for the Netherlands, conducted in the early 1990s and in 2000. The first article (co-author C. H. Mulder) aims at revealing the effects of postponed marriage and childbirth on the timing of a move into ‘long-stay housing’, i.e. a