Ethnic Segregation, Housing Systems and Welfare Regimes in Europe

This paper examines the relationship between welfare and (ethnic) segregation across Western Europe (16 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, and consequently, it reveals the different ways in which the resulting mechanisms of differentiation crucially influence the scale and nature of patterns of ethnic and socio-spatial 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), as are their roots in the state-market relationship and entrenched distributive arrangements. Differences in mechanisms of social and spatial differentiation are sought in each cluster, while weaving together housing tenures and housing provision analyses and identifying land supply arrangements as a common variable. This 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.