Social Mix and the Neighbourhood Effect. Policy Ambitions and Empirical Evidence

A multilevel study of socio-economic inequalities in food choice behaviour and dietary intake among the Dutch population: the GLOBE study

“…This contrasts with the USA and the UK, where food stores have shown a trend of relocating outside cities into fringe suburbs, where they have more space and lower operation costs, but are less accessible to lower socio-economic groups 26,32 . Third, many city municipalities in The Netherlands have policies preventing the spatial segregation of socio-economic groups 33 by regulating the housing market and making a predefined proportion of housing throughout the city available to low-income people. Therefore, the socioeconomic distribution of areas in most Dutch cities may not be as extreme as in the USA and UK, and this may contribute to some of the null effects of area deprivation found in the current study.…”

State-led Gentrification and the Changing Geography of Market-oriented Housing Policies

“…These assumptions form the core of the "neighbourhood effects" thesis (Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002;Van Ham et al 2012). Although evidence for the existence of substantial neighbourhood effects remains mixed, the thesis has had a major impact on urban policies (Ostendorf, Musterd, and De Vos 2001). It provides a clear-cut legitimation for direct intervention in the social and physical structure of disadvantaged neighbourhoods to facilitate the introduction of more expensive housing and middle class residents, and to disperse lower income residents.…”

Local Social Networks and Social Resources in Two Dutch Neighbourhoods

“…Many neighbourhood studies are driven by the assumption that the relatively heterogeneous population composition in low-income neighbourhoods in European cities and the living conditions in these neighbourhoods might not reach the necessary thresholds of concentrated poverty to evoke processes such as social isolation (Musterd et al, 2006). This argument is thought to be particularly relevant for social welfare states such as the Netherlands (Musterd & De Vos, 2007;Ostendorf et al, 2001): levels of socio-economic and ethnic segregation in Dutch cities have been traditionally low as a result of a large supply of affordable social housing, extensive redistribution programmes of the welfare state and active involvement of the central and local government in low-income neighbourhoods. Indeed, while the case of Transvaal-Noord represents an extreme case of concentrated poverty in the Netherlands, it constitutes a mild case from an international perspective and it is therefore debatable whether social isolation might occur.…”