Information diffusion between Dutch cities: Revisiting Zipf and Pred using a computational social science approach

News travels fast and far, and the general idea is that the spatial extent of news coverage has increased over time. Information flows are always involved in systems of interdependent cities. This is the reason why George Zipf and Allan Pred, both pioneers of the urban systems literature, were eager to obtain data on these relations to...

Enterprise discourses in Dutch urban policies: a comparison between two cities in the Netherlands

Local governments make use of ‘enterprise language’ to encourage citizens to adopt entrepreneurial behaviour in managing their daily lives and solving problems that emerge in their neighbourhood. In this paper, we examine the use of enterprise language and the promotion of enterprise in Dutch urban policy focusing specifically on how Dutch...

One century of information diffusion in the Netherlands derived from a massive digital archive of historical newspapers: The DIGGER dataset

Previous studies have highlighted the importance of having long term data for the study of cities, but such sources are relatively scarce. This is especially the case for data about relations between cities, which is a crucial aspect of urban dynamics. Over the last two decades, many efforts have been made to digitalize texts, including books...

Lessons Learned from a Pan-European Study of Large Housing Estates: Origin, Trajectories of Change and Future Prospects

Mid-twentieth-century large housing estates, which can be found all over Europe, were once seen as modernist urban and social utopias that would solve a variety of urban problems. Since their construction, many large housing estates have become poverty concentrating neighbourhoods, often with large shares of immigrants. In Northern and Western...

Housing Estates in Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Segregation and Policy Challenges

This open access book explores the formation and socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in Europe. Are these estates clustered or scattered? Which social groups originally had access to residential space in housing estates? What is the size, scale and geography of housing estates, their architectural and built environment...

The Evolution of the Systems of Cities Literature Since 1995: Schools of Thought and their Interaction

The study of relations between cities has long been a major focus in urban research. For decades, this field has grown integrating contributions from many disciplines. But today, the field appears rather fragmented. This study analyses the body of literature that has developed over the last 23 years to identify schools of thought on...

Spatial Segregation and Socio-Economic Mobility in European Cities

Income inequality is increasing in European cities and this rising inequality has a spatial footprint in cities and neighbourhoods. Poor and rich people are increasingly living separated and this can threaten the social sustainability of cities. Low income people, often with an ethnic minority background, can get cut off from important social...

Socioeconomic segregation in European capital cities: Increasing separation between poor and rich

Socioeconomic inequality is on the rise in major European cities, as are concerns over it, since it is seen as a threat to social cohesion and stability. Surprisingly, relatively little is known about the spatial dimensions of rising socioeconomic inequality. This paper builds on a study of socioeconomic segregation in 12 European cities:...