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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 in Halle-Neustadt, this chapter examines the changing configuration of social housing provision in a paradigmatic shrinking city in East Germany.

Social housing is under pressure in East Germany due to three developments. First, ‘social housing’ in Germany has always been a temporary affair such that the number of social housing units is decreasing rapidly all over Germany; this development is particularly pronounced in East Germany where most cities are struck by deindustrialization and poverty, and lack the resources for new social housing subsidies. Second, privatization has led to a reduction of the municipally and cooperatively owned housing stock and a growing relevance of financial investors. Third, most cities in East Germany have experienced severe population losses; this has stimulated ‘rightsizing’ policies and 350,000 housing units have been demolished since 2001. These three developments produce new concentrations of households living in poverty, accelerated downgrading and a crowding out of the poor to the least attractive parts of the city.

The chapter demonstrates how developments in different sectors result in the marginalization of impoverished groups in a low-demand environment. It emphasizes the interplay of planning strategies, housing privatization and changes in welfare provision which have had limited research attention.

This is the first study of the changes of social housing provision in the East German context characterized by deindustrialization, low demand, privatization and financialization.

Contemporary urban change is predominantly driven by migration and capital accumulation, with associated urban (re-)development projects – such as new-build gentrification – typically favouring the middle classes. Low-income residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods are often said to be displaced from their homes, either directly or indirectly, or to experience a loss of sense of place induced by the physical and social changes to the area. With the latter in mind, we investigate the perceived opportunities and threats of urban renewal experienced by stay-put communities in the wake of new developments and demonstrate how a loss of sense of place occurs via conflict between neighbours affected by the change. Our focus on transnational spaces comprising co-migrant Kurdish/Turkish communities in the two cities of Istanbul (Turkey) and Vienna (Austria) reveals not only how profoundly the impacts of neighbour conflict are felt as once-close and supportive neighbourly ties are severed but also how well-established neighbourly norms and obligations in transnational spaces accentuate the conflict in the first place. Moral codes that require neighbours to look after one another, along with local power dynamics of support in return for loyalty, set expectations that neighbours will take each other’s side when needed. Our findings reveal that the situatedness of residents to the development projects (in terms of proximity, residential tenure and openness to change) causes neighbours to take opposing sides and that the conflicts generated are accentuated by the perceived failure of neighbours to meet their neighbourly obligations. The result is a loss of sense of place and belonging for all residents – not just those detrimentally impacted by the development – wrought by rising hostility and avoidance among neighbours, and an overall weakening of neighbourly ties.

I would like to be able to report that the film Salmer fra kjokkenet (Kitchen Stories) (dir. Bente Hamer, 2003) was a direct consequence of the powerful arguments I made for the use of ethnography in housing studies almost 20 years ago (Franklin, 1990). Sadly, I cannot! In this touching comedy drama from Norway, a team of Swedish ethnographers working from the Swedish Home Research Institute descend on a remote rural locality in Norway during the 1950s in order to study the kitchen habits and cultures of single living men. It is an improbable quest, until one learns that the same team discovered how Swedish housewives needlessly walk the equivalent distance between Stockholm and the Congo every year as they go about their routine kitchen business; a finding that successfully paved the way for more efficient kitchen design and culture. So it was that the team descended on the very perplexed and uncooperative Norwegian bachelors (the last sub-group in their programme) in order to map out their domestic inefficiencies. Comic tension is built both through their ethnographic props (the researchers were to sit on giant stools in the kitchens, giving them panoptic vision), rules (they were not to talk to respondents, although that proves awkward when lights are turned out by thrifty Norwegians) and living spaces (they were to live in specially designed, round caravans parked outside their respondent's homes). The film would have been a vindication of my arguments not so much because it demonstrates the truth that practical housing outcomes can arise from spending sufficient periods of time studying cultural milleux, but because it also demonstrates that the relationship between researchers and respondents become more productive over time, resulting in more reliable data, better understandings of that millieux and what their problems (and therefore often ‘ours’) actually consist of.

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.

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.

The precise relationships between neoliberalization, financialization, and rising risk are still being debated in the literature. This paper examines, and challenges, the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) developed by Hyman Minsky and his adherents. In this perspective, the level of financial risk builds over time as participants orient their behavior in relation to assessments of past levels of risk performance, leading them to overly optimistic valuation estimates and increasingly risky behavior with each subsequent cycle. However, there are problems with this approach, and many questions remain, including how participants modify their exposure to risk over time, how risk is scaled, and who benefits from changes in exposure to risk. This paper examines such questions and proposes an alternate perspective on financial instability and risk, in light of the history of risk management within Canada’s housing finance sector. The rise of financialization in Canada has been accompanied by shifts in the sectoral and scalar locus of risk within the housing sector, from the federal state, to lower levels of government, third-sector organizations, and finally, private households. In each case, the transfer of risk has occurred as participants in each stage sought to reduce their own risk exposure in light of realistic and even pessimistic (not optimistic) expectations deriving from past exposure, contradicting basic assumptions of Minsky’s FIH. This is the process that has driven the neoliberalization of housing finance in Canada, characterized by the socialization of lender risk while households increasingly take on the financial and social risks relating to shelter.