Much has been said, yet little remains known, about the impacts of the changes associated with post-socialist transition on housing inequalities in metropolitan Central and Eastern Europe. To some extent, this depends on the scarcity of 'hard evidence' about the socialist epoch against which the subsequent developments may be gauged. Based on a case study of Bucharest, the Romanian capital and one of the region's major cities, this study investigates various lines of housing inequality using data from a 20% sample of the national censuses of 1992 and 2002. With only minor changes having taken place since the revolutionary events of late 1989, the year 1992 provides an accurate picture of the housing inequalities inherited from the socialist epoch, whereas the new societal order had largely been established by 2002. We use linear regression and binary logistic regression modeling to identify the factors that predict living space and level of facilities. The results suggest that the first decade of transition did not exert any major influences on the housing inequalities inherited from socialism, with the exception of notable improvements at the very top of the social pyramid. This finding is at odds with the literature that highlights the (suggested) effects of socio-economic polarization on the residential structure of cities after socialism. However, the results from 1992 indicate that housing was segmented along socio-economic lines already under socialism, and perhaps more so than one would have expected in the light of the literature on housing inequalities during this period.
Labor migration from the less to the more affluent cities and regions is a defining trait of the patterns of population redistribution in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in the former Soviet Union, where international disparities in income and living standards are particularly manifest. While these macro-trends are well portrayed in the literature, their outcome at the household level seldom figures in the literature. In Ukraine, labor out-migration to Russia is a frequently chosen strategy, not least because of the Russophone background of eastern Ukraine and of many of the major cities, including Kiev and Odessa. This out-migration contributes to urban decline. Using multivariate methods, we analyze the characteristics of population subgroups with and without the experience of working abroad. We also use descriptive statistics to assess the impact of migration events within households on the standard of living of the latter. Our data source is the city of Stakhanov Health Interview Survey 2009 (n = 3,000).
Two themes dominated the study of socio-spatial change in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) after 1990. One was that the development of urban regions in CEE after the demise of socialism is characterized by suburbanization. The second topic raises the issue of growing residential segregation. Unfortunately, studies on patterns of residential segregation are still scarce in the CEE context, in particular those that employ traditional measures of segregation. Relying on solid empirical materials from the 1988 and 2002 National Censuses, the purpose of this paper is to map and analyze the patterns of residential segregation in the Lodz Functional Urban Region, an old industrial urban region in Poland undergoing a rapid deconcentration and shrinkage of the core area. This contribution concludes that the first decade of systemic transition resulted in decreasing residential segregation, as gauged by global measures of segregation. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Scholars have raised concerns about the social costs of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and geographers are particularly interested in the spatial expressions and implications of these costs, including apparently increasing residential segregation. Applying a range of segregation measures to 1992 and 2002 census data, this contribution studies socio-occupational residential segregation in Bucharest. The conclusion is that Bucharest was relatively socio-spatially mixed at both times; in fact, a modest, yet fully legible, decreasing overall trend is observable. This is at odds with many popular assumptions of the past 20 years.
The state of the art in research on residential segregation and concentration in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) largely focuses on process description (e.g., the multitude of works on gentrification and suburbanization). Even though major advances in the conceptualization and measurement of segregation have been made, works that scrutinize the patterns of segregation and/or concentration in CEE are rare, while studies that simultaneously explore and link segregation patterns under socialism and after are virtually nonexistent. Relying on Polish census-tract level data on the educational structure of population in 1978, 1988, and 2002, this study explores the patterns of social segregation and concentration in the three major Polish cities (Warsaw, Cracow, and od), representing different paths of development under socialism and after. The results show that the population of the three major Polish cities was still socially heterogeneous at the census tract level in 2002. The results also reveal that the level of social residential segregation in the three cities has been decreasing steadily since 1978, irrespective of the prevailing economic system
The origins of immigrants coming to Sweden as well as their lifestyles and labour market skills have changed substantially since the early 1990s. The last decades have also resulted in a gradual transition of the Swedish economy from industrial to more service oriented (activities relatedto ‘the new economy’). These two processes inevitably contributed to the pace of segregation in major urban regions of Sweden, regions that have been at the forefront of economic change and that have remained the main destination of many immigrants. So far, the majority of studies on segregation in Sweden have been limited to research the residential dimension only. Yet, it should be emphasised that cities contain clusters of jobs and people and that these clusters together form the socio-economic fabric of urban regions. This paper thus adopts a dynamic approach to exa- mine the evolution of residential and workplace segregation in the ethnically diverse Stockholm Metropolitan Region. Referring to the recent advancements in segregation studies we define the phenomenon of segregation as both process and pattern, and scrutinize them respectively.
In Europe a range of segregation studies can be found in the North, West and South, but hardly any in Central Eastern Europe - a region where the major economic and political changes induced by the demise of socialism in 1989 contributed to new social divisions and related spatial patterns. However, these changes have not been uniform and have resulted in context-specific outcomes. Relying on data on the socio-occupational structure of the population from the National Census 2002 at the census tract scale, this article explores the levels and patterns of social segregation in three major Polish cities: Lodz, Cracow and Warsaw, urban areas that reflect divergent paths of more and less successful post-socialist transformations. This contribution concludes that, more than a decade after the demise of socialism, census tracts still generally contained populations that were heterogeneous with regard to socio-occupational status and that socioeconomic transformations in Poland and the social toll these processes involved have not yet been fully translated into intra-urban spaces.
Immigrant–native segregation is present in the spaces in which individuals from different ethnic/racial groups practice their everyday lives; interact with others and develop their ethnic, social and spatial networks. The overwhelming majority of academic research on immigrant segregation has focused on the residential domain, thus largely overlooking other arenas of daily interaction. The present study contributes to the emerging literature on immigrant residential and workplace segregation by examining changes in patterns of residential and workplace segregation over time. We draw our data from the Stockholm metropolitan region, Sweden’s main port of entry for immigrants. The results suggest a close association between residential and workplace segregation. Immigrant groups that are more segregated at home are also more segregated in workplace neighborhoods. More importantly, we found that a changing segregation level in one domain tends to involve a similar trend in the other domain.
Research on segregation of immigrant groups is increasingly turning its attention from residential areas toward other important places, such as the workplace, where immigrants can meet and interact with members of the native population. This article examines workplace segregation of immigrants. We use longitudinal, georeferenced Swedish population register data, which enables us to observe all immigrants in Sweden for the period 1990–2005 on an annual basis. We compare estimates from ordinary least squares with fixed-effects regressions to quantify the extent of immigrants' self-selection into specific workplaces, neighborhoods, and partnerships, which may bias more naïve ordinary least squares results. In line with previous research, we find lower levels of workplace segregation than residential segregation. The main finding is that low levels of residential segregation reduce workplace segregation, even after we take into account intermarriage with natives as well as unobserved characteristics of immigrants such as willingness and ability to integrate into the host society. Being intermarried with a native reduces workplace segregation for immigrant men but not for immigrant women.