Urban Restructuring, displaced households and neighbourhood change

Ronald van Kempen, Hanneke Posthumis & Gideon Bolt

Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University

Urban restructuring has become an increasingly important policy in Western cities. In many cases the aim of this policy is to create a social mix in urban areas that are characterised by concentrations of low-income households. A number of researchers have investigated the results of these area-based policies in terms of, for example, housing satisfaction and social cohesion among the old and new inhabitants of the restructured areas. Less attention has been paid, however, to the households that had to move to other neighbourhoods because of the restructuring process. These displaced households may create significant changes in the neighbourhoods they move to, for example in terms of population composition. In this paper we focus on the displaced households and on the neighbourhoods they move to. We try to find out, on the basis of a research project in five Dutch cities, to what kind of neighbourhoods the displaced move and to what extent this causes changes in the neighbourhood population of the receiving neighbourhoods. We will describe the characteristics of (a) neighbourhoods from which many residents moved, (b) neighbourhoods to which many residents moved, and (c) neighbourhoods to which almost no residents moved. We will also examine the correlations between the number of received displaced households in neighbourhoods and several characteristics of the neighbourhoods. We expect that (a) households often move to neighbourhoods close to their former area and (b) to neighbourhoods that strongly resemble the neighbourhoods they used to live in in terms of social and housing characteristics. If this is true, a main result of urban restructuring is an emergence of new spatial concentrations of relatively poor households instead of the much desired social mix. We will pay attention to the possible consequences of this outcome for neighbourhood policies and we will discuss the relevance for neighbourhood change.