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Residential segregation has become an increasingly prevalent feature of many European cities. This paper studies a special type of residential segregation—known as a social frontier—which arises from abrupt spatial divisions between the population composition of different neighboring groups. Although related “borders models” have been previously studied, both theoretically and empirically, the current work presents the first attempt to quantify the capitalization of social frontiers into housing prices by using the hedonic approach. While prior studies have used arbitrary measures and limits to distinguish between neighborhoods, the current study combines a Bayesian spatial conditional autoregressive model with Norwegian register data to identify ethnic social frontiers in the Oslo travel-to-work area, before applying hedonic modeling to individual house sale transaction data in the region. In this way, social frontiers have been identified in the study area, and results show that these frontiers are locally capitalized in housing prices. The paper's main result comes in the identification of price gradients that manifest themselves asymmetrically as one moves towards (or away from) the frontier itself. On the native-dense side of the frontier, prices were lowest in the immediate vicinity of the frontier and rose nonlinearly with increased distance, whereas the opposite was true on the immigrant-dense side of the frontier. Given the importance of housing prices in determining the spatial distribution and residential mobility patterns of peoples, these findings support the notion that a social frontiers framework may help to further our knowledge of the complex landscape of residential segregation.

Previous research has highlighted the limitations encountered in representing the dynamism of language use and contacts. Here, linguistic landscapes from five towns in Northern Sweden are the point of departure for investigating novel perspectives through the geovisualization of multilingualism, with the ultimate aim of understanding how languages in our surroundings help construct public spaces. As an outcome, a web GIS application, based on 6865 thematically analyzed photographs, was developed as an interactive resource for visualizing and sharing the data and enabling new modes of analysis and new research questions. The article describes the data collection and curation processes, app development using GIS software and software-as-a-service, the eventual app design and interaction, and the update and maintenance plans, as well as discussing challenges and considerations related to temporalities, spatialities, and technicalities. The web GIS has potential applications in spatial analysis, research communication, and education.

We explore the decisions in Parliament about the Swedish tax deduction for commuting since the 1980s. The aim is to explain the continuity of the tax regulation despite several attempts from motions in Parliament and public investigations to reform it towards environmental goals, e.g., reduced emissions of CO₂. When reforms have been proposed, the political majority in Parliament has regardless of political colour voted against and retreated to the original motives for the tax deduction; economic growth and the enlargement of regional labour markets. The interests of Swedish mass motorisation succeeded in finding the arguments to slow down reforms and at the same time reinforce the path dependency by adding new legitimacy to the regulation. If the attempts to reform the tax deduction had been part of a broader reform of the transport sector and the tax system, they might have succeeded in breaking with the old path.

In this paper we study the impact of firm relocations on commuting distance and the probability of married couples and cohabiting couples with children separating. We use Swedish register data for the period 2010–16 and select employees of relocating firms with one workplace and more than 10 employees. Focusing on this sample allows us to use plausibly exogenous variation in the commuting distance arising from the relocation. We extend the literature on the effect of commuting on relationship stability by reducing the possibility for unobserved time-variant factors to bias our estimates. While previous literature has focused on the difference between short- and long-distance commuting, we focus on changes in the commuting distance that are externally induced by firm management. We find a small but statistically significant negative effect of increased firm relocation distance on family stability. A 10 km change in commuting distance leads to a 0.09 percentage point higher probability of separation if the commuter remains with the firm for the next five years.

This article explores processes of place-making through the study of the linguistic landscape of a small-size town in Northern Sweden. The analysis of signs is used as a tool for examining the role and visibility of actors in the landscape. For this purpose, we examine who the authors are, what forms of multilingualism can be observed, and who has agency in the place-making of the public space. Our documentation consists of photos and fieldnotes from observations, encounters, and conversations with people during ethnographic fieldwork in 2019. Using a mixed-methods approach, all signs were first analysed quantitatively according to the categories of authors and function. Regression analysis was used to explore correlations between the categories. Secondly, multilingual signs were analysed qualitatively regarding their function and purpose in relation to their contexts. Our results illustrate a city centre with a strong presence of the Swedish language. Multilingual signs target specific groups and are intended for information, advertisement, rules and regulations; moreover, our findings indicate that the opportunities for private actors to influence the linguistic landscape are limited. The form of multilingualism in this context—visible multilingualism present mainly through English—is different from the one we can see in the socio-demographic data.

In most societies, resources and opportunities are concentrated in neighbor-hoods and workplaces occupied by the host population. The spatial assimilationand place stratification theories propose trajectories (the sequences of events)leading to minority and migrant access to or exclusion from these advantageousplaces. However, most previous research on these theories did not ask whethersuch theorized trajectories occur. We apply sequence analysis to decade-long res-idence and workplace histories of newly arrived migrants in Sweden to identify atypology of combined residence-work trajectories. The seven types of trajecto-ries in our typology are characterized by varying degrees of proximity to thehost population in residential neighborhoods and workplaces and by different pat-terns of change in such proximity over time. The pivotal role of socioeconomicgains in spatial assimilation, posited by the namesake theory, is not supported, aswe do not find that migrant employment precedes residence alongside the hostpopulation. The importance of housing-market discrimination for migrants’exclusion from host-dominated spaces, posited by place stratification theory, isonly weakly supported, as we find that migrants from less affluent countries accu-mulate disadvantage over time, likely due to discrimination in both the labor andhousing markets. Our findings also underscore the need for new theories explain-ing migrant residential outcomes which apply to contexts where migrant-denseneighborhoods are still forming.

Documenting and analyzing how multilingualism materializes around us gives insights in the use, hierarchies and inclusions of languages in society. The visualization of these insights, however, is often challenging as characteris- tics of languages, their flows, movements etc. demand contextualization and clar- ifications that can be difficult to render on a visualization model such as a map. This paper discusses the challenges of visualization and the potentials of digital maps in Linguistic Landscape Studies. We suggest to include and integrate vari- ous layers of qualitative and quantitative data in order to strive for rendering the dynamism of language use.