Ray Hall

Beyond gentrification: the demographic reurbanisation of Bologna

It has recently come into question whether the term ‘gentrification’ can capture the wide array of contemporary demographic processes in the inner city. There is also a need to extend the gentrification debate beyond the Anglo-American context, while understanding the urban implications of contemporary demographic processes. In response to such challenges we examine the changing population geographies of the city of Bologna, with the aim of establishing, whether the concept of ‘reurbanisation’ can provide a more useful encapsulation of its recent sociospatial transformations. Upon investigating the spatial patterns and movements of relevant population structures at various scales within the city, we have found that Bologna is the site of multifaceted and multidirectional demographic trends. In their entirety, these dynamics are leading to the social diversification, ‘residentialisation’, and fragmentation of the urban fabric. Such processes cannot be subsumed under the notion of gentrification because they do not involve major housing renovation and are spread throughout the inner city in a diffused and fragmented manner. ‘Reurbanisation’ is a more appropriate term to describe them.

The rise of living alone in Inner London: trends among the population of working age

The 1980s was a significant decade in the demography of Inner London. Population increase replaced decades of decline, and household numbers grew even faster. One-person households accounted for most of the growth in household numbers, and the greatest increase was among younger and middle-aged adults. The authors examine the characteristics and changing geography of one-person households in Inner London, particularly between 1981 and 1991, within the context of broader demographic and socioeconomic changes during the decade. In particular, the characteristics of those people who migrated to live alone in Inner london are examined, and questions raised about the relationship between household changes, residential mobility, occupational structures, and housing markets. Reference is also made to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets to explain some of the processes underlying household change. One-person households are an integral part of wider economic and social processes underway in large urban areas and form a leading edge of new ways of urban living.

Book reviews : Lawton, R. and Lee, R., editors, 1989: Urban population development in western Europe from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. xvi + 290 pp. £25.00 cloth

This leads them to the settlement periphery of the Northlands of Europe. Examining the cultural traits and times of appearance in the Midland Colonies of Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Alpine Swiss and Finnish settlers, they find physical and archival evidence points to a hearth in the forest pioneering culture of the Savo-Karelian region of Finland and transmitted by way of the Finnskog in Sweden (mostly in Varmland) to New Sweden on the lower Delaware River where Finns had a very early and disproportionate presence. Through ready miscegenation, the Finns’ preadapted forest ways combined with parts of the local Indian culture and rather quickly formed a new Fenno-Indic backwoods adaptive strategy, one that later arriving and partially preadapted highland British folk quickly adopted. In this way, though the basic culture was Finnish, the Scotch-Irish became the dominant genetic element in the backwoods population. The main part of the book is then given over to the painstaking provision of physical and documentary evidence of the Finnish origins of the