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Concerning migration on a national level, two phenomena emerge: people migrating from one region to another and people moving from the countryside to the cities. The geographical shift of the population between regions in a country is a slow process. In Sweden, only a few percent of the population migrate yearly. Nevertheless, migration has caused and still causes considerable redistribution of the population toward the metropolitan regions in Sweden. This section will emphasize general trends in population concentration through urbanization and migration in Sweden and compare these trends with changes in other countries.

Based on a case study of conversion of real estate complexes built in Turin at the time of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games into public and subsidized housing, the chapter compares policy goals aimed at producing social mix through the mixing of housing tenure, with actual outcomes and thus identifies possible advantages, challenges, and pitfalls of this kind of intervention.

The analysis is based on a survey and semi-structured interviews with residents, in-depth interviews with key actors, and observation of daily interactions in public and shared places.

Regeneration policies and tenure mix seem to be most effective at preventing neighborhood stigmatization and attract private investments in facility development (area-based effects), but not to be “automatically” a source of mixed social relations and positive role models able to limit socially disapproved behaviors (people-based effects).

The practical lesson which can be drawn from this chapter is that the achievement of people-based effects requires long-standing actions which go beyond the construction and allocation of new apartments.

The chapter engages critically with the idea that built environment has deterministic effects on social environment, and social mix resulted from regeneration and housing policies can work as a catch-all solution for activating and rehabilitating human and social resources in the target area. Specifically, we show how these processes require particular organizational and policy conditions that cannot be taken for granted.

In many countries in the Global North, interventions in deprived neighbourhoods have attempted to tackle poverty by spatially deconcentrating it. This has commonly been done through housing restructuring programmes in areas of social housing. Supported by the ‘neighbourhood effects’ thesis, such interventions promote the diversification of housing tenures and housing typologies, based on the idea that a wider mix will result in increased opportunities of interaction across housing tenures and in local social networks becoming more heterogeneous. Using data from interviews, surveys and participant observation in meetings and events organised by local residents in North Peckham, an area in South London which in the 1990s and beginning of 2000s was the site of a large-scale housing restructuring programme, this chapter explores the expectations and experiences of neighbouring of long-term and newer arrival social housing tenants. This chapter shows that their different experiences of the neighbourhood and of physical and social change, as well as their diverging socio-economic characteristics – long-term residents tended to be older and retired while newer residents tended to have more complex needs – highly influenced perceptions of neighbourly relations and the significance attached to them. Despite finding high levels of neighbourly interaction and assistance, it also shows that attitudes and expectations towards neighbours were marked by a sense of nostalgia among long-term social tenants, stigma due to the area’s past and towards newer social tenants and by feelings of alienation due to the perceived residualisation of the social housing tenure and increased housing unaffordability.

Transaction costs, responsive housing supply, rent controls, tenant protection, and access to credit affect residential mobility – these different parts of housing policy are included in what has been defined as housing regimes, which embrace regulations, laws, norms, and ideology as well as economic factors. In this chapter, we investigate how these regimes change by using institutional theories of path dependence. We use Sweden as an example and study three Swedish housing market reforms during the past decades that may have affected residential mobility, each related to one of the main institutional pillars of housing provision: tenure legislation, taxation, and finance. More precisely, we study the development of the rental regulation since the late 1960s, the tax reform in 1991, and the new reforms on mortgages since 2010. What caused these reforms? What were the main mechanisms behind them, and why did they occur at the time they did? We argue, besides affecting residential mobility, these reforms have the common feature of including interesting elements of path dependence and forming critical junctures that have led the development on to a new path. Institutions of tenure legislation, housing finance, and taxation are often claimed to have effects on residential mobility. Although they are seldom designed with the explicit aim of supporting (or counteracting) residential mobility, they may sometimes do so as more or less unintended consequences.

Increasing concern about rising crime rates, high levels of unemployment and the anti-social behaviour of youth gangs that are concentrated within particular regions and neighbourhoods of cities has prompted renewed interest in governments to frame policies to create socially mixed cities. Recent riots experienced on social housing estates, including in France (St Denis, Poissy, Clichy-sous-bois), Australia (Macquarie Fields, Redfern in New South Wales) and Britain (Bestwood, Nottingham) have reinvigorated public and community debate into just what makes a functional neighbourhood. The nub of the debate about dysfunctional neighbourhoods is whether part of the problem is to be found in the lack of social mix of residents, that is, the homogeneity of the neighbourhoods in aspects such as housing tenure, ethnicity and socioeconomic characteristics of residents.

This chapter addresses housing policy in England since 2007 and changes in housing opportunities and inequalities. The credit crunch and its aftermath were experienced across the United Kingdom, and speeded the established trend to greater inequality. Many problems identified in England are relevant elsewhere, but the distinctive housing policies adopted in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not discussed here. The chapter argues that the policy direction adopted since 2010 failed in its ambition to increase housing supply and home ownership and further increased social and spatial inequalities.