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Over the past four decades, many urban regions, including the Amsterdam region, have changed from compact monocentric urban entities to - albeit still fairly compact - polycentric urban regions. This has been illustrated frequently and in various ways, for example with daily interaction information. A question relevant to this transformation concerns the implications it poses to the different centres and milieus in the urban region, especially the “old” central city. Is the central city quickly losing position, or is it gaining a new, vital place in the urban region? Can the answer to that be deduced from the population dynamics in the urban region? Is insight into the residential mobility process helpful in understanding the changing residential structure and the functioning of the urban system? This paper addresses these questions, using data that make it possible to analyse urban dynamics.

Over the past decades, residential mobility has received a good deal of attention in the academic world. However, its mutual relationship with urban change has a more recent history. Even so, an increasing number of academic researchers and policy makers who focus on housing processes and urban transformations realize the importance of linking the two together. This is exactly what this special issue is about. Starting from the perspective of one of the working groups of the European Network for Housing Research - the migration, residential mobility, and housing policy group (http://www.enhr.ibf.uu.se), we plan to relate the knowledge on migration and residential mobility to the knowledge of processes of urban change. A range of papers on this topic was presented during the ENHR conference in Cambridge in the summer of 2004.