Strategies For Housing And Social Integration In Cities

Basado en una amplia serie de experiencias realizadas en los países de la OCDE, este informe examina un conjunto de estrategias que pueden aplicarse en las zonas metropolitanas.

Both European and American cities, in particular major cities with strong and diversified economies, attract immigrants from all over the world. The segregation of migrants within a city as well as the affordability and quality of housing for migrants are central issues that affect the quality of life in general. Finding a place to live is a crucial aspect of the process of successful structural integration of migrants in host societies - besides finding employment and gaining access to good education. On the one hand, the housing conditions and the spatial distribution patterns of migrants in a city can be considered important indicators for the status quo of the structural integration in the receiving society; on the other hand, housing policies are an important part of overall social policy at the local level - with a strong impact on future processes of integration among migrants and their descendants.The Institute for Urban and Regional Research invited prominent scholars from the United States and from throughout Europe to reflect the present situation concerning immigration, the typical housing conditions for migrants and the public policies of local authorities on housing. Behind prejudices it became obvious that local policies can learn from each other. With the establishment of Europe as a research area in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely the transatlantic dialogue is becoming weaker and the cooperation within Europe stronger. This observation turned out as an additional motivation to signal that the Europe-US dialogue is useful and should continue. The current edition makes a contribution to this mutual learning process.

Racial integration, and policies intended to achieve greater integration, continue to generate controversy in the United States, with some of the most heated debates taking place among long-standing advocates of racial equality. Today, many nonwhites express what has been referred to as "integration exhaustion" as they question the value of integration in today’s world. And many whites exhibit what has been labeled "race fatigue," arguing that we have done enough to reconcile the races. Many policies have been implemented in efforts to open up traditionally restricted neighborhoods, while others have been designed to diversify traditionally poor, often nonwhite, neighborhoods. Still, racial segregation persists, along with the many social costs of such patterns of uneven development. This book explores both long-standing and emerging controversies over the nation’s ongoing struggles with discrimination and segregation. More urgently, it offers guidance on how these barriers can be overcome to achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns.

Concern about rising crime rates, high levels of unemployment and anti-social behaviour of youth gangs within particular urban neighbourhoods has reinvigorated public and community debate into just what makes a functional neighbourhood. The nub of the debate is whether concentrating disadvantaged people together doubly compounds their disadvantage and leads to 'problem neighbourhoods'. This debate has prompted interest by governments in Australia and internationally in 'social mix policies', to disperse the most disadvantaged members of neighbourhoods and create new communities with a blend of residents with a variety of income levels across different housing tenures (public and private rental, home ownership). What is less well acknowledged is that interest in social mix is by no means new, as the concept has informed new town planning policy in Australia, Britain and the US since the post Second World War years. Social Mix and the City offers a critical appraisal of different ways that the concept of ‘social mix’ has been constructed historically in urban planning and housing policy, including linking to 'social inclusion'. It investigates why social mix policies re-emerge as a popular policy tool at certain times. It also challenges the contemporary consensus in housing and urban planning policies that social mix is an optimum planning tool – in particular notions about middle class role modelling to integrate problematic residents into more 'acceptable' social behaviours. Importantly, it identifies whether social mix matters or has any real effect from the viewpoint of those affected by the policies – residents where policies have been implemented.

This book equips readers with a deeper understanding of the challenges posed by radical socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural changes due to globalization and describes effective, sustainable solutions to these challenges. The focus is especially on the rapid urbanization processes in countries of the Global South, which are giving rise to dramatic new problems of spatial and social inequality and difficult environmental challenges in relation to climate change. Readers will gain skills and knowledge that will help them to develop an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to planning, design, and management of urban settlements and territories in contexts with a high level of social, economic, territorial, and landscape vulnerability. The coverage includes, for example, strategies to promote social inclusion, improve housing quality, ensure adequate education, protect cultural heritage, enhance risk management, and address issues in the food-energy-water nexus. Among the authors are leading experts from the Polytechnic University of Milan, where a multidisciplinary set of studies and research projects in the field have been undertaken in recent years.

Introduction : alternative approaches to regional equity and racial justice -- The integration imperative -- Affirmatively furthering community development -- The "hollow prospect" of integration -- The three stations of fair housing spatial strategy -- New issues, unresolved questions, and the widening debate -- Conclusion : everyone deserves to live in an opportunity neighborhood

Neighbourhoods of Poverty is concerned with the spatial dimension of urban social exclusion and integration. It draws on research from twenty-two neighbourhoods in eleven European cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, London, Birmingham, Berlin, Hamburg, Milan, Naples and Paris and addresses two questions: - How do different neighbourhoods have an impact upon the opportunities and perspectives of poor individuals and households? - Are these neighbourhood impacts conditioned by national and welfare state contexts, by the wider metropolitan structures and by specific neighbourhood characteristics? Various aspects of poverty, social exclusion and integration are brought together and provide a new assessment of the place of neighbourhood within these wider debates.

For many years Chicago’s looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment—via the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation—has been perhaps the most startling change in the city’s urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? In the most thorough examination of mixed-income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met. They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph’s findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward.