Font: Upcoming GRITIM-UPF Seminar – GRITIM – UPF.

The urban dimension of migration: from welfare regimes to ethnic segregation

Date: Tuesday 22 January 2012
Time: 12.30-14.00
Venue: room 20.287 (Jaume I building, Ciutadella Campus)
Speaker: Sonia Arbaci, GRITIM – Universitat Pompeu Fabra / Bartlett School of Planning – University College London
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between welfare regimes and ethnic residential segregation across 16 Western European countries until the mid-1990s, including for the first time Southern Europe. It investigates the ways in which the diverse housing systems, embodied in wider welfare regimes, shape and reflect different principles of stratification. Consequently, it reveals the different ways in which the resulting mechanisms of differentiation crucially influence the scale and nature of patterns of ethnic residential segregation, particularly among low-income and vulnerable groups. Spatial and social dimensions of segregation are disentangled in each welfare/housing regime (four ideal-typical clusters – social-democratic, corporatist, liberal, and familiarist), as are their roots in the state-market relationship and entrenched distributive arrangements.
The emphasis on welfare regimes, as an ideal-typical analytical tool, has proven instrumental in building an overarching comparative framework to explore the large diversity of patterns across European cities. It shows that the redistributive arrangements embedded in the housing system and land supply are making the difference. In each welfare cluster, the combination between tenure policies (unitary/dualist systems) and modes of housing provision (promotion, production, land supply), whilst reflecting different principles of stratification, shape different and distinctive mechanisms of social and spatial differentiation, thus of (ethnic) segregation. This study contributes to further expansion of the current European debate on production of inequality, bearing on the renewed focus on the state-market nexus also in segregation studies. It opens further investigative lines towards planning realms, hardly regarded in segregation studies, reinforcing the importance of land in the social and spatial division of urban societies.

See an article by Sonia Arbaci related to the topic of the seminar.
Please confirm your attendance before Monday 21 January 2013 to flora.burchianti@upf.edu.