This article investigates the relevance of spatial assimilation theory in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm. An important backdrop is the “Nordic model of welfare”: We assume that welfare generosity decreases the speed of spatial integration. The study uses non-Western immigrants as a target group and natives as a reference group. We register location in 2000 and 2008, and analyze integration in terms of neighborhood status and residential segregation. The results show, in all cities, a lack of aggregate upward mobility in the spatial hierarchy. We also find a negligible effect of upward earnings mobility on upward spatial mobility. Upward spatial mobility increases integration in ethnic terms, but other factors work in the opposite direction and contribute to prevailing segregation. The results as a whole strengthen the purported association between welfare state characteristics and spatial integration. Deviant outcomes, particularly in Helsinki, are explained by immigration history and housing market structure.

Economic crises are often associated with increasing levels of income segregation and income polarization. Poor neighborhoods generally hit more severely, with unemployment levels increasing and income levels dropping more than in better-off neighborhoods. In this article, we study the correlation between economic recession and income segregation in Malmö, Sweden, with focus on development in the regions' poorest neighborhoods. We compare and contrast these areas' development during a period of economic crisis (1990–1995) with development during a period characterized by relative economic stability. Our findings  suggest that (1) income segregation and income polarization indeed increased during the period of economic crisis; (2) neighborhoods that were already poor before the crisis fared worse than the region in general; and (3) this development was due to both in situ changes and to residential sorting, where the differences in income and employment status between people moving into a neighborhood, those moving out, and those who remained in place were greater during the period of recession compared to the more stable period.

We investigate the relationship between neighborhood income composition and income trajectories of adults, employing annual panel data from Stockholm over the 1991–2008 period and multiple measures of neighborhood income mix. We advance the human geography literature in three ways by quantifying neighborhood effects that: (1) are unusually precise due to our large sample size; (2) are arguably causal and unbiased due to the econometric techniques employed; (3) are potentially heterogeneous, varying according to gender, income group, and ethnicity. Our innovative, fixed-effect change modeling indicates that neighborhood income mix affects subsequent one- and five-year income trajectories of residents in highly heterogeneous ways according to gender, income and ethnicity, and for some groups this effect is substantial. The evidence supports on Pareto improvement grounds a social mix policy that attempts to reduce the incidence of lower-income dominant neighborhood environments and replace them with more mixed or middle-income dominant ones.

This paper examines how ethnic segregation is connected to an ethnic division of the housing market and a spatial separation of different housing tenures in four Nordic cities. Explanations for the differences across the cities are found by comparing housing markets and housing policies. The housing markets are in all four cities ethnically segmented with high concentrations of immigrants in some forms of tenures (especially social/public housing) and low concentrations in others. We further discuss the reasons for the observed pattern. The paper shows that the spatial distribution of immigrants is strongly connected with the tenure composition of neighbourhoods. Ethnic divisions of housing tenures thus contributes to segregation, but the effect is much dependent on how tenures are distributed spatially. It is shown that ethnic segregation in three of the cities is connected to social housing, while cooperative housing is crucial in the fourth. It is also shown that a policy of neighbourhood tenure mix in one of the cities has resulted in a relatively low degree of segregation in spite of high concentrations of immigrants in social/public housing.

We investigate the degree to which neighborhood income composition affects the subsequent income of individual male residents, and test the degree to which these effects are characterized by nonlinear, threshold-like relationships. We specify a fixed-effects model to reduce potential bias arising from unmeasured individual characteristics affecting neighborhood selection and income. We employ annual data on 124000 working-age males residing in Stockholm over the 1991-2006 period to estimate parameters for innovative variables measuring the sequence, duration, and intensity of neighborhood exposures. We find that two thresholds-one above 20 per cent and the other above 40 per cent-best describe the strong inverse relationship between consistent exposure to higher percentages of low-income male neighbors and subsequent earnings of individual male residents. We draw implications for potential causal mechanisms behind this relationship and formulating public policy towards places of concentrated disadvantage.