Research project The Neighbourhood Revisited: Spatial polarization and social cohesion in contemporary Sweden
The six-year research programme “The Neighbourhood Revisited: Spatial polarization and social cohesion in contemporary Sweden” explored the extent to which spatial polarization produces a society that is increasingly polarized in attitudes, valuations, life styles and behaviour and, thus, less socially cohesive.
Stockholm University obtained a large six-year grant from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, for the research programme “The Neighbourhood Revisited: Spatial polarization and social cohesion in contemporary Sweden”. The programme was coordinated by Bo Malmberg, Department of Human Geography.
The Neighbourhood Revisited - Summary of research programme
This programme explored the extent to which spatial polarization produces a society that is increasingly polarized in attitudes, valuations, life styles and behaviour and, thus, less socially cohesive.
Our focus was on neighbourhoods as locales for social interaction, socialization, identity formation, and for building social capital. If neighbourhoods, through a process of spatial sorting, come to consist of communities with very different social composition, there is a risk that society-wide common values and solidarity between groups cannot be established. Spatial polarization can produce neighbourhoods with concentrations of socially marginalized individuals that provide poor contexts for social integration. The research program used a novel approach to social classification based on life-course patterns in education, income, employment, and family formation.
Three broad questions were addressed:
1. To what extent do individuals that follow similar life course trajectories tend to cluster into similar neighbourhoods?
2. To what extent are individuals’ attitudes formed in and influenced by their neighbourhood residential context?
3. To what extent are the adult life courses of children and adolescents influenced by their exposure to different types of neighbourhoods during childhood?
Further, the program considered how neighbourhoods change their composition over time and how such dynamics influence people’s attitudes and well-being.
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