Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

This article introduces the theoretical approaches of contact, group conflict, and symbolic prejudice to explain levels of exclusionary feelings toward a relatively new minority in the West European context, the immigrant. The findings indicate that even after controls for perceived threat are included in the model, intimate contact with members of minority groups in the form of friendships can reduce levels of willingness to expel legal immigrants from the country. A contextual variable, level of immigration to the country, is also introduced into the model because it is likely that this variable affects both threat perception and exclusionary feelings. While context does not seem to directly affect levels of willingness to expel or include immigrants in the society, it does have a rather powerful impact on perceived threat. Perhaps even more importantly, the findings suggest that contact mediates the effect of the environment, helping to produce lower levels of threat perception in contexts of high immigration.

Anti-Immigrant Prejudice in Europe: Contact, Threat Perception, and Preferences for the Exclusion of Migrants

http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/ross_levine/Papers/2003_JFE_LawEndFin.pdf

Law, endowments, and finance

“The point about the melting pot,” wrote Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the preface to their influential Beyond the Melting Pot, “is that it did not happen.” This “failure to melt” thesis was iconoclastic when the book was published in 1963. But it had become widely accepted already by the end of the decade — well before the post-1965 revival of mass immigration began to transform the American urban landscape. By the 1980s, when the effects of the “new ‘new immigration’” had become unmistakable, earlier conceptions of assimilation seemed to many to have lost all relevance. When Glazer published We Are All Multiculturalists Now in 1997, he was writing as eminence grise, not as iconoclastic intellectual.1 Pluralistic understandings of persisting diversity, once a challenge to the conventional wisdom, had become the conventional wisdom, not only in the US and other classic countries of immigration such as Canada and Australia, but also in much of northern and western Europe.

The return of assimilation? Changing perspectives on immigration and its sequels in France, Germany, and the United States

"The politics of immigration in liberal democracies exhibits strong similarities that are, contrary to the scholarly consensus, broadly expansionist and inclusive. Nevertheless, three groups of states display distinct modes of immigration politics. Divergent immigration histories mold popular attitudes toward migration and ethnic heterogeneity and affect the institutionalization of migration policy and politics....I begin by discussing those characteristics of immigration politics found in all liberal democracies. I then investigate the distinctive modes of immigration politics in the three subsets of Western democratic states with distinctive immigration histories. I conclude by considering whether these three patterns will persist or how they might change as a result of future migration pressures and the further institutionalization of immigration politics and policies in Europe." Comments by Rogers Brubaker (pp. 903-8) and a rejoinder by the author (pp. 909-13) are included.

Modes of immigration politics in liberal democratic states.

Peasants into Frenchmen: The modernization of rural France 1870–1914: Eugene Weber, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1976. Pp. xv + 615. $20·00)

During the last three decades, the countries of the developed world have been engulfed by the 'second demographic transition', which involves new family relations, less and later marriage, declining fertility rates, population ageing, postponement of child-bearing and smaller households, among other trends. It is being increasingly argued that such population dynamics are having a powerful transformative effect on the inner city, by diversifying and redensifying its social landscapes, and creating a 'splintered' urban form. Based on the findings of a recent EU Framework 5 research project, this paper investigates the demographic contingencies of this process-also known as reurbanisation-in four European cities: Leipzig (Germany), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Bologna (Italy) and Leon (Spain). Analyses of census and municipal registry data, as well as on-site questionnaire surveys and interviews, have revealed that the reviewed cities are being populated with, and fragmented by, multiple migration trends and new h...

Splintering Urban Populations: Emergent Landscapes of Reurbanisation in Four European Cities

During the last three decades, the household has become the focus of a wide range of sociodemographic processes, including the destabilization of traditional patterns of marriage, cohabitation and divorce; the growing fluidity of ties of kin and friendship; and increasingly complex transitions through the life course. However, these dynamics - which are often summarized under the common heading of the `second demographic transition' - have been marginalized in the mainstream geographical literature. In this paper, we draw attention to the extensive, albeit fragmented, body of sociological, economic, feminist and geographical insights into the changing social geometry of the household. Recent developments in these domains have affirmed the pivotal role of the household in shaping the geographies of gender, home and everyday life. We underline the importance of households as agents of urban transformation, arguing in favour of the further incorporation of household demography into the interpretation of cont...

Households matter: the quiet demography of urban transformation

European inner city areas are increasingly regaining their residential attractiveness after years of decline. Although the demographic dimensions of such residential shifts are gradually being acknowledged by urban scholars, they still remain under-researched, especially with regard to the role of household-driven processes in the stabilisation of inner-city neighbourhoods and the reshaping of residential perceptions, wants and needs. Given this background, our paper looks at the underlying dynamics of reurbanisation processes in different European cities. Reurbanisation is understood as a process of populating and diversifying the inner city with a variety of residential groups of different ages and socio-economic backgrounds. We discuss why and how reurbanisation is changing inner-city districts, while arguing that the demographic or household-related view can lead to an improved understanding of current urban change. We demonstrate that ??? in contrast to a prevailing tendency to understand reurbanisation as an expression of a ???back-to-the-city??? movement ??? it relates more to city-mindedness as a housing preference rather than to the actual return of suburbanites to the city. A typology of reurbanisation processes (distinguishing between different driving forces, and respective impacts on inner-city area and housing markets) is provided, and the role of both social and demographic factors discussed. In particular, the paper examines overlaps and differences between reurbanisation and the concept of gentrification, arguing that, although they are partly driven by similar dynamics, the two processes are, in a qualitative sense, distinctive. Copyright ?? 2009 John Wiley \& Sons, Ltd.

Philip E. Ogden

Papers

Peasants into Frenchmen: The modernization of rural France 1870–1914: Eugene Weber, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1976. Pp. xv + 615. $20·00)

Splintering Urban Populations: Emergent Landscapes of Reurbanisation in Four European Cities

Households matter: the quiet demography of urban transformation

Emergent Spaces of Reurbanisation: Exploring the Demographic Dimension of Inner-city Residential Change in a European Setting

People, Cities and Wealth. The Transformation of Traditional Society