This study seeks to understand the interrelationship between daily mobility and the spatial structure of an emerging metropolitan urban system. It is concerned with the daily mobility of a specific group of inhabitants, higher education students, living in a contemporary metropolis and experiencing urban living. The study’s main aim is to better understand aspects of this complex urban spatial structure through the students’ lives and through their daily mobility to explore specific urban spatial dynamics and trends. This study therefore considers the effects of an accelerated urbanisation process and the development of an increasingly fragmented and segregated socioeconomic environment. In doing so, it highlights the ways in which rapid urban expansion in developing countries has tended to reproduce or maintain a range of inequalities In this study, how the student population lives, works, studies, and spends its leisure time within the Valparaiso Metropolitan Area (VMA) proves to be dependent on a complex of structural factors. Such day-to-day activities are further shaped by more dynamic and perhaps more subtle influences such as the changing functions of the urban space, increasing socioeconomic fragmentation and segmentation and the inequitable provision of public transport across what is a topographically complex area. This research within this study however demonstrates that a better understanding of an individuals’ daily mobility can make visible urban trends that have previously been left undisturbed by the existing traditional origin and destination surveys. The research therefore serves to highlight the social and economic flows that continue to shape the metropolitan spatial structure.

More and more citizens are entering the public domain and taking over tasks that traditionally belong to the government. For example, citizens increasingly run a community centre themselves, maintain the greenery in their neighbourhood and manage the local playground. To some extent, governments also encourage this behaviour and are disposing of social real estate. Against this background, this study examines the rise of citizens' initiatives in the Netherlands and how this takes shape in the context of urban regeneration. The study pays attention to a specific type of citizens’ initiative, namely community enterprises. It applies qualitative research methods, such as semi-structured interviews with representatives of community enterprises and discourse analysis of policy documents. It examines the expectations governments have of active citizens and how this relates to the motivations and capacities of active citizens themselves. The study broadens our understanding of active citizens who utilizes their entrepreneurial skills and mindset to drive positive change, contribute to the well-being of their community, and address pressing societal challenges.

This study investigates local activism in politically challenging contexts, focusing on Cairo. In such contexts, active resident groups strive for urban improvement, while governance arrangements often disregard citizen involvement in urban and public affairs. Cairo presents an exemplary case of local activism in a politically challenging and under-researched context. The study explores the characteristics, roles, and interrelations of active resident groups with local governance arrangements and their deviations from existing literature. It employs a qualitative methodology with observations and semi-structured interviews with local officials and active residents from nine different districts. The study uses Facebook to select, observe, and analyze the activities of multiple active resident groups and contributes to theoretical frameworks for analyzing local activism in complex contexts. It reveals the dominant and absent roles and the governance dimensions (un)attainable by active residents. It also traces the sources of limited local activism in the existing governance arrangements in Cairo, highlighting the importance and difficulty of changing governance arrangements in Egypt. The study broadens our understanding of local activism in the Global South beyond dominant forms of activism.

This PhD thesis aims to move beyond the standard treatments of neighbourhoods in research on spatially transmitted inequality. The research questions explored in the four empirical chapters of the thesis delve into under-researched elements of sociospatial inequality transmission in neighbourhoods. The thesis uses statistical models to analyse register and survey data, and relies on different operationalisations of neighbourhoods: administrative and bespoke. Chapter 2 finds that controlling for selection reduces neighbourhood effects compared to when only individual characteristics are controlled for, and provides insight into the differing patterns of neighbourhood selection and effects in Dutch regional housing markets. Chapter 3 shows that the strength of the observed relationship between neighbourhood poverty and educational attainment is dependent on how exposure is measured and conceptualized, and highlights the importance of choosing the temporal aspects of individual neighbourhood histories based on the theoretical scope of a study. Chapter 4 finds that in the Netherlands, the positive effect of neighbourhood affluence on educational attainment is stronger than the negative effect of neighbourhood
poverty. Chapter 5 addresses the discrepancy between the registered data-based measurements of neighbourhood characteristics, specifically the share of neighbours with foreign background and low income, and the individual perceptions of those characteristics by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The findings of the thesis confirm the validity of treating the neighbourhood as a social setting that interacts with the micro and macro contexts, rather than simply as an aggregated characteristic which can be controlled for.

Improved liveability in the neighbourhoods Spangen, Tussendijken and Bospolder is desirable. A more socio-economically diverse population partly contributes to this. Gentrification makes wealthier residents move into the neighbourhoods in a short period of time. Yet, it causes a decrease in affordable housing and a chance of the disappearing of physical and social neighbourhood identity. Which means that current, less wealthy residents no longer feel attached to the place and that wealthier population groups want to settle in increasing numbers. This demonstrates unsustainable urban development by creating a re-segregated neighbourhood.

This thesis examines if and how urban design can contribute to a socially sustainable way of urban development for the improvement of liveability and the creation of a stable socio-economically diverse population with a preserved and reinforced neighbourhood identity. By research and design three important phases of the course of gentrification related to urban design are established. The urban approach to these phases forms the starting points for redesign: Stabilise the amount of social housing for socio-economically diverse inhabitants, create vibrant, liveable and stayable public spaces designed for slow traffic and preserve or reinforce the typical economic program of small-scale enterprises with affordable products. These are placed in current, upgraded axes with potential for liveliness and in developable public spaces with a reduced liveability. Fitted into current broken program routes and future urban development in the vicinity creating resilient urban design. The design is a hypothesis for improving social sustainability based on urban design. Because of this focus, much of the problem of (extreme) gentrification is left aside. Policy-making on urban renewal and responding to trends in housing requirements play a major role in these unsustainable urban developments.

Vechtzoom-Zuid in post war neighbourhood Overvecht experiences multiple problems, the modernistic layout does not fit our society, the social cohesion is low and the inhabitants have a lot of social-economical problems. Shopping centre 'De Klop' is located in the centre of this neighbourhood, and experiencing a lot of problems as vacancy, nuisance and neglect. Due to its important location within the neighbourhood, spatially and socially, all the problems of the neighbourhood come together in the centre and, vice versa, the centre has a major impact on these problems. Therefore this research answers the following research question: 'How can modernistic shopping centre de Klop in post-war expansion neighbourhood Overvecht be transformed into an attractive centre that increases the social cohesion of Vechtzoom Zuid, while coping with transitions affecting shopping centres over the next 30 years?'

The research consists of multiple parts. The first part shows how the design of a centre can increase social cohesion in a neighbourhood. This can be done in three ways: Firstly, by making the centre overall more attractive and thereby increasing the use of public facilities. Secondly, by introducing new green spaces, where people can recreate and meet each other. And thirdly, by adding new housing in order to make housing career within the neighbourhood.

The second part shows the original ideas behind the neighbourhood, what changed in current society and what is the core problem within the design. The neighbourhood was built based on the ideas of CIAM, and the ‘Wijkgedachte’, but the changing composition of the population and social idea of top down collective social community caused problems. The collective spaces aren’t used as they are supposed to be, making the area unlively. The barriers caused by the car, and the repetition of buildings make the shopping centre unrecognisable resulting in even less liveliness. Therefore with the transformation of the centre the aim should be to make new, recognisable and accessible collective spaces, that are not yet to be found in the neighbourhood.

Lastly it is researched how a shopping centre should be designed in order to be adaptable to societal changes in the future. The centre should be densified, new slow routing has to be implemented and the transformation should consist out of different vast materialised spaces, functioning as a condition for multiple ways of shopping and commerce where the extremes are fun shopping and run shopping.

The answers of these three parts lead to the objectives and a design goal for the transformation of de Klop: Create new flexible and accessible collective spaces as a condition for a safe and recognisable heart of the neighbourhood where current and future residents can find a motive to visit and meet each other. Resulting in a transformation proposal that creates new flexible central spaces along a slow traffic line, breaking through the zoning of the Modernistic layout.

Cities never function in isolation but as nodes in overarching systems characterised by flows of goods, people, and information. To fully understand the evolution of cities, a relational approach is needed, which investigates cities in relation to other cities and urban regions. While a significant part of urban system research has focused on aspects such as the concentration of populations and economic activities, the understanding of the actual networks connecting cities and their impact is still limited. However, the required data is notoriously difficult to obtain. This dissertation contributes to knowledge on the relationship between cities in the Netherlands by exploiting – in novel ways – three data sources: web pages mentioning cities, local historical newspapers, and administrative registers. After providing an overview of the systems of cities literature, the toponym co-occurrences method is explored. This method aims at identifying patterns of relations between cities in a systematic way by looking at the co-mentions of cities in text documents (here in web pages). Using text as data appeared as a great direction for studying urban systems, and elements from this first exploration are used in the next section of the thesis where the past dynamics of the Dutch urban system is reconstructed using information flows retrieved from digitised historical newspapers. Finally in a last empirical part, the potential of information from individual-level registers about professional and residential trajectories for measuring relations between places at multiple spatial scales is investigated. This measure is then used to reveal the nested hierarchy of functional regions in the Netherlands.

This thesis has developed alternative methods of operationalising neighbourhoods at multiple spatial scales and used them to advance our understanding of spatial inequalities and neighbourhood effects. The underlying problem that motivated this thesis is that many empirical studies use predefined administrative units, and often this does not align with the underlying theory or geography. Despite the extensive literature on neighbourhood effects and, more generally, on sociospatial inequalities, spatial scale remains an under-analysed concept. As a response to this research gap, this thesis takes a multiscale approach to both theory and the empirical analysis of neighbourhood effects, highlighting the multitude of spatial processes that may affect individual outcomes of people. To operationalise this, we created bespoke areas (centred around each residential location) at a range of one hundred scales representing people’s residential contexts, primarily in the Netherlands but also in multiple European capitals. Using microgeographic data and a large number of scales combined with small distance increments revealed subtle changes in sociodemographic characteristics across space. In doing so, we provided new insights into ethnic segregation, potential exposures to poverty, and neighbourhood effects on income, all in light of the fundamental issue of spatial scale: The analyses of sociospatial inequalities are substantially affected by the scale used to operationalise spatial context, and this varies within and between cities and urban regions. The aim of this thesis was therefore not to find a single, ‘true’ scale of neighbourhood, but to acknowledge, operationalise, and better understand the multiplicity of spatial scales.

Neighborhoods represent a scale at which inequalities are reflected in the unequal spatial distribution of ethnic and income groups across urban space. However, neighborhoods are not static entities and spatial patterns of socioeconomic and ethnic inequality shift over time as a result of processes of neighborhood change. This dissertation has adopted a longitudinal approach to analyze patterns of neighborhood change on a relatively low spatial scale. This dissertation illustrates that neighborhoods remain relatively stable over time in their socioeconomic and ethnic status and that change takes several decades to take effect. This dissertation finds that neighborhoods exhibit a strong degree of path-dependency and demonstrates how the housing stock influences neighborhood trajectories. In addition, it shows how large-scale changes to the housing stock in the context of urban restructuring affect residential mobility and neighborhood upgrading. This dissertation also reveals the ways in which different population dynamics interact to inhibit or generate neighborhood change to reproduce socio-spatial inequalities. Moreover, the innovative methods that are explored in this dissertation contribute to broadening the scope of statistical methods for the longitudinal analysis of neighborhood change.

Since the 1990s Lithuania’s geopolitical and economic position has radically shifted from being a relatively affluent and prosperous region in the Soviet Union to a relatively poor country on the periphery of the European Union. The transition period was accompanied by a sharp population decline, which makes Lithuania one of the fastest shrinking countries in the world today. Furthermore, in the socialist period, planning policy focused on decentralisation and sought to limit the growth of the major Lithuanian cities. Now most of the economic growth and demographic potential is concentrated in a few metropolitan regions, particularly in Vilnius. Extreme population decline and uneven spatial development can be seen as a threat to the economic and social stability of Lithuania.
The aim of this thesis is to gain more insight into the recent socio-spatial transformation processes and their consequences in Lithuania. This thesis investigates the main features and drivers of socio-spatial change. It shows why we should be concerned, despite the growing economy and improvements in the standard of living, as Lithuania is facing major challenges related to extreme population decline and increasing socio-spatial inequality. The results of this study provide a better understanding of the development processes and reveal how the Soviet-designed socio-spatial structures adapted to a market economy environment.