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Introduction

“whenever there is widespread agreement or consensus that a certain policy, or set of related policies, should be pursued or enacted, it becomes necessary to step back and ask, why?” DeFilippis and Fraser (2010, p.135)

This book is about the ways in which governments try to intervene in neighbourhoods when they perceive things to have gone wrong: so-called area-based or neighbourhood-based policies. It is about the global and the local. It is about individual people and about the places in which they live and the ways in which they interact. It is about large scale structural socio-economic problems which, as the world becomes ever more globalised, are increasingly played out at the ‘hyperlocal’ level: our neighbourhoods. This book examines what policies are used to ameliorate problems perceived to originate at the neighbourhood level, and what outcomes are expected and for whom.

In this volume we make explicit links between the neighbourhood based polices and neighbourhood effects.Footnote 1 Whilst the diversity of neighbourhoods is not contested and inequalities are obvious for all to see, the importance of neighbourhood effects especially with regard to whether or not they have a casual impact on individual outcomes have never been more fervently debated than at present. This is despite the fact that, at the time of writing, the western world is experiencing some of the severest cuts in government spending in living memory and many of the neighbourhood interventions of the past decades have either come to a conclusion and not been renewed or have been cancelled mid flow. Against this back drop, western governments are increasingly looking to the private market as the stimulus for neighbourhood regeneration and change.

The debate that exists in the neighbourhood effects literature was reflected in the previous two books. The first volume was concerned with the theoretical foundations of the neighbourhood effects debate, and the examination of the state of the art in terms of empirical evidence relating to the identification of and search for such effects (van Ham et al. 2012a). Chapters were drawn from a range of national contexts, including the United Kingdom, the United States of America, The Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Norway to provide evidence relating to neighbourhood effects on educational achievement, employment outcomes and teenage pregnancies as well as exploring the links between theory and practice in neighbourhood effects research, the problems with using evidence from the quasi-experimental settings in the United States and a discussion about how to look inside the “black-box” of mechanisms and processes that the phrase “neighbourhood effects” is usually used to cover.

Drawing on the findings of the first volume, the second investigated the processes of neighbourhood change and selective mobility into and out of neighbourhoods (van Ham et al. 2013). The primary focus was on one of the most significant challenges to the identification of real causal neighbourhood effects: selection bias resulting from non-random selection of people into neighbourhoods. Both of the previous volumes have been critical of the neighbourhood effects shibboleth (see also Manley et al. 2011) and have engaged in more cautionary discussions than is present in much of the literature. It is clear that neighbourhood effects research is at a crossroads and in order to move the debate forward there are many challenges that researchers must address head on (see van Ham and Manley 2012 for an overview of the challenges). Whilst looking to the future of neighbourhood effects research, it is important to also look at the policy prescriptions that have been made to attempt to improve neighbourhoods and the lives of individuals who live within them. That is the focus of this third and final edited collection.

The neighbourhood has long been a site of government intervention. This is because the neighbourhood represents a scale at which many government services and provisions are made (schooling, libraries and so on) and because political representatives are elected at this scale it represents a means to promote and enhance governance. The neighbourhood is a scale at which people can be persuaded to get involved and feel a sense of belonging (Pill 2012). In the long history of neighbourhood-based policies, there have been many incarnations of interventions. The most obvious developments have involved the construction (and reconstruction) of neighbourhoods and communities as a means to overcome the perceived social, economic or cultural problems experienced by individuals living in poor conditions, frequently in old industrial towns. In many Western countries there have been long traditions of constructing neighbourhoods as a means to developing better communities. In the UK, the Garden City movement of the early 1900s, and the overspill estates of the interwar period followed by the multiple waves of New Town developments in the post World War 2 period all placed the neighbourhood at the centre as a clearly defined space for individuals and households to live within. Since the 1980s, policies that specifically target neighbourhoods have commonly focused on the composition of the residents. These policies, frequently discussed under the rubric of social mix but which have more commonly been introduced using tenure mixing (co-locating social renters and owner occupiers in the same neighbourhood), have gone hand-in-hand with wider scale neighbourhood regeneration whereby dense social housing developments were knocked down and lower density low-rise properties were built in their place.

However, neighbourhood-based policies have not solely been focused on the development of physical housing infrastructure. Other aspects of neighbourhood and community life have also been targeted in the interventions specifically focusing on the main individual outcomes that concern researchers in the neighbourhood effects literature, and these form the topics in the first half of this volume (see below). These initiatives have targeted policy areas such as education, employment, crime, health and well-being. They have, in the UK, included Community Police Officers, to promote safety and crime reduction in specifically targeted neighbourhoods; investments in school buildings and other infrastructure including the rebuilding of poorly maintained and damaged buildings to provide newer, modern facilities; development of local employment projects through smaller scale local industrial units; and the investment in sport and leisure services.

In the previous two volumes research was presented which suggested that, even when casual mechanisms relating to neighbourhood disadvantage and individual outcomes were not present, because of selective migration or spatial exclusion, there is still be a case to be made for investments in neighbourhoods as a means to redistribute advantage and provide social facilities for communities. Thus, it appears logical that, in order to tackle neighbourhood inequalities, place- and person-based policies should go hand-in-hand. There are many multi-directional interactions between people, their neighbours and their neighbourhoods. One of the main problems in the neighbourhood effects literature stems from the difficulty of separating out all these different effects. Accepting that such links are present, it would also appear logical, at least to us, that policies designed to tackle the perceived problems that accrue because of concentrated poverty, spatial disadvantage and inequality should themselves include many multi-directional linkages. However, as many of the chapters in this book show, these links are rarely explored and frequently ignored.

Indeed, drawing on a recent comprehensive review of place- and people-based policies in the UK, a stark conclusion is drawn: “for the most part, person- and place-based policies have been developed separately and sometimes in isolation from each other. This reflects the responsibilities of government departments influenced by their different approaches and traditions” (Griggs et al. 2008, p.1). A further complication can arise with regard to the relative magnitude of place- and person-based effects. Time and again, the neighbourhood effects literature has shown that place-based effects are substantially smaller than person-based effects (especially for factors such as education, health, employment and household circumstances, see for instance van Ham and Manley 2010). Musterd and Andersson (2005) posed the question whether neighbourhood-based policies can ever be successful if neighbourhood effects are only ever found to be small in nature. If the neighbourhood only makes a small contribution to an individual’s health, education or employment outcomes, then it would follow that interventions at that level can only make small changes. Maclennan (Chap. 13) counters this with a different view and suggests that the divide between place and person based intervention is, necessarily, a false one. The justification for place-based policy interventions arises not only from the potential effects of place but also through the advantage of having individuals gathered in a single neighbourhood or set of neighbourhoods and the resulting efficacy of being able to target specific resources at specific places (see Pill 2012). Nevertheless, in their admittedly partial review of policies between 1997 and 2008, Griggs and colleagues find very few policies initiatives that genuinely embrace the logical links between people and the places in which they live.

From Effects to Policies

A persistent question that regularly surfaces in discussions about neighbourhood effects and neighbourhood-based policies is whether or not place-based policies remain relevant if neighbourhood effects do not exist? If irrefutable evidence was available that no causal links were presented between individuals and the contexts in which they live then would there still be merit in government pursuing place based initiatives? This is an important issue to address because, although it is true that there are large differences between neighbourhoods (variety in for example, wealth, health, and employment opportunities), it is less clear that living in poor neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents. If the inequalities exist but do not cause significant differences for individuals living in the neighbourhood, or require a specific set of circumstances to cause a change, then the policy interventions are different compared to the policy interventions that occur if causal pathways between neighbourhood context and individual outcomes are persistent and repeated. The logic of this position is as follows: if the neighbourhood context can make a difference to an individual’s life course (above and beyond that individual’s personal characteristics), then an intervention at that same neighbourhood level should be able to either ameliorate the initial problem (for instance a concentration of unemployment leading to higher levels of unemployment amongst neighbours through negative socialisation) or remove it with a net gain in welfare for society as a whole. However, if the causal pathway is not present at the neighbourhood level, then a neighbourhood intervention is merely redistributing resources or opportunities to residents there at the expense of groups outside the neighbourhood – a zero sum game.

Discussing the outcome of neighbourhood regeneration in Scotland, Matthews (2012) notes that one of the reasons why large scale neighbourhood regeneration projects have had minimal success is because they are “inward-looking and failed to tackle the wider social forces that created and reinforced the neighbourhood’s deprivation” (p.9, see also Hall 1997). Using the outcome of Australia social mixing policies, Arthurson (Chap. 12) notes that one of the reasons why Australian place-based policies have not had the impact that the policy makers expected was because problems in Australia were thought to be of the same magnitude and type identified in the American literature. However, as scholars elsewhere in the social sciences have highlighted, the adoption of “situated knowledges” is crucial to developing a better understanding of the local processes the produce local outcomes. Writing about economic geographies in general, Larner (2011, p.89) points out that “[w]e need to be clear with ourselves [....] that it is not good enough to simply study ‘here’ using the analytical tools of ‘there’”. For neighbourhood based interventions, it is logical that if the problems are comparatively smaller, then any gains from implementing area based policies are likely to be similarly smaller in magnitude.

It would be naïve to assume that neighbourhood effects are the only motivator behind the use of neighbourhood-based policies, although for many they provide the justification and rationale behind many area-based initiatives (Tunstall and Lupton 2010). In fact, there are many reasons why governments may wish to intervene at the neighbourhood level. Not least of these is the very fact that concentrations of poverty (and other so called social problems) bring together specific groups in specific places and the area level can be very useful for allowing the efficient targeting of resources. This can include provision of new services in neighbourhoods that previously had poor service provision (including health care, schooling or shopping facilities) or the provision of employment and skills training in neighbourhoods where large employers have closed, or it can include interventions such as policing where communities perceive issues with crime and safety.

Reading the neighbourhood effects literature, it would appear that in the minds of many academics the presence (or otherwise) of effects is a crucial element of the drive behind the development of placed-based policies (see for example: Platt 2011; Musterd and Andersson 2005; Lupton 2003; Tunstall and Lupton 2010). However, this view point is not reflected in the policy machinery and, as we will see below, in a number of place-based policy initiatives, the presence or otherwise of neighbourhood effects is irrelevant! However, for other policy initiatives it is crucial. One of the most commonly referenced neighbourhood-level interventions (although by no means the most prevalent or most substantial) has been poverty deconcentration through the creation of socially mixed neighbourhoods (See Chap. 7 by Keith Kintrea). Social mix has been created both indirectly, through policies in the UK and wider afield such as the Right-to-Buy (where former public housing tenants can become home owners by purchasing their property) and explicitly through the infilling or redevelopment of former social housing sites to include a proportion of private properties (either privately rented or owned through shared ownership, affordable housing schemes or mortgage and outright purchases). In theory, the links between social mix and neighbourhood effects should be very clear. For instance, the neighbourhood effects thesis suggests that individuals living in areas of economic disadvantage can become isolated, lacking links to groups outside their neighbourhood who can provide access to job markets and opportunities whilst the links that they do have within the neighbourhood increases exposure to ‘negative’ peer groups. Socially mixed neighbourhoods are thought to overcome this by enabling exposure to ‘positive’ peer groups who can provide access to previously closed social and informational networks. However, empirically, very few of these theoretical pathways for promoting advantage have been shown to operate; the empirical evidence remains much more sketchy than the theoretical literature would suggest (see for instance, Sarkissian 1976; Arthurson 2002; Galster 2007; Graham et al. 2009). Furthermore, it is immediately clear that this framework assumes that the flow of information and advantages gained are distinctly one sided. Individuals in concentrations of disadvantage require specific interventions to enable them to alter their life course (See Chap. 2 by Carlo Raffo for a discussion around why the pathologisation of individuals and groups based on a presumed collective experience may not be an appropriate model, using an educational example).

Conversely, new entrants from higher social groups (frequently owner occupiers) appear to have little to gain from the process, and certainly from the social renters. Other authors provide evidence that the presence or otherwise of neighbourhood effects was largely coincidental for the development of such policies. Using case studies from the United States, Joseph and colleagues (2007) concluded that in many cases the development of social mix was as much about local and national government’s accessing the ‘rent’ that had accrued on desirable urban land where social housing was located as it was about the redevelopment of physical stock and the expected improvement to individual life outcomes.

Of course, it is important to remain critical of policy developments that intervene in neighbourhoods and individual life courses, to ensure that they do offer new opportunities and that they are genuinely targeted at real problems. The need to intervene in concentrations of poverty and the depiction of residents living in these areas have become unchallenged principles, that do not deserve such status (for discussion see Manley et al. 2011). Recognising this, Chap. 6 by Tom Slater provides an important and timely call to rethink the neighbourhood effects arena.

Neighbourhoods Have Open Borders!

The whole of the second volume (van Ham et al. 2013) was devoted to the issue of selective mobility into and out of neighbourhoods. The rationale for this also lies behind one of the major challenges that neighbourhood policy makers face: neighbourhoods are not closed systems. Instead, they are open systems where individuals and households are (largely) free to flow in and out. Whilst this is a relatively simple statement to make, the processes underlying residential mobility and individual neighbourhood histories are incredibly complex (van Ham et al. 2012b). The neighbourhood mobility literature is diverse and reports on the econometric modelling of mobility at one end (through neighbourhood entry as a means of consumer modelling: see for instance Schelling 1969) through to understanding the cultural representations of space at the other (Clark 2009).

Because of the mobility processes, there is a widespread concern that even the most targeted area based policies may lose effectiveness because of ‘leakage’ with the argument running as follows: successful policies aimed at targeting inequalities may (for example) help individuals obtain better employment, raising their income, enabling them to move out of the neighbourhood, taking the (policy) resources that they have consumed with them. This leaves the neighbourhood with a vacancy and, as the residential sorting literature has shown, incomers into neighbourhoods tend to have very similar characteristics to those individuals who reside their already (see Bailey and Livingston 2008; Hedman et al. 2011) so that the neighbourhood remains the same. The empirical evidence for this simple model is relatively thin, however, and that which does exist suggests the picture may be a good deal more complicated; in particular, the leakage through selective migration may be much less than is generally assumed (Bailey and Livingston 2008; Bailey 2012).

Nevertheless, the concern with possible ‘leakage’ through residential mobility poses an important consideration for policy makers: whether they wish to help people or places. If the answer is people, then households moving out of neighbourhoods and taking their gains with them is not a problem. The vacancy they create in the neighbourhood is a positive outcome, representing a space into which another individual can move and potentially benefit from the policy interventions. However, if policy is designed to improve the neighbourhood, then any selective outflow would be of concern because it represents a loss to the area. In policy documents, this issue is rarely explicitly articulated.

The second aspect of population change in a neighbourhood that occurs as a result of the physical regeneration is displacement. Major regeneration projects frequently require the demolition and removal of the original dwellings so that new dwellings can be constructed. Over the 1990s and 2000s, and especially in combination with the promotion of socially mixed neighbourhoods, new dwellings were constructed at a lower density and with less public housing than was present in the neighbourhoods originally. During this process those households that were resident in the neighbourhoods were forced to move out to surrounding neighbourhoods either temporarily or, more commonly, permanently. In the second volume, Posthumus and colleagues (2012) investigated this process using data from The Netherlands and demonstrated that individuals were frequently moved to neighbourhoods that had at least as much and sometimes more deprivation. There are a number of important issues that arise from this idea which both the academic and policy literature must take account of: firstly, it must be recognised that that demolition of communities in this way and the displacement of households does not serve to improve the individual outcomes of the people in the areas targeted. More commonly, the perceived problems are pushed to other neighbourhoods – the so called waterbed phenomenon. Secondly, there is an issue of social and spatial justice, whereby former residents are excluded from the areas in which they use to live (Harvey 1973; Mitchell 2003; Soja 2010). Of course, place-based policies (of which there are many different types) and physical regeneration need not automatically lead to displacement and the loss of households from the community. In The Netherlands, regeneration policy during the 1980s and 1990s adopted an approach of regeneration for the people of the neighbourhood (an initiative explored in more detail Chap. 10 by Gideon Bolt and Ronald van Kempen; see also Bailey and Robertson 1997 for details of a comparable UK example).

Looking Forward

One realisation that has become apparent through engaging with the papers presented at the three seminars, reading and editing the chapters that follow is that, the neighbourhood effects literature has been characterised by a lack of definition regarding what it is that actually concerns us. As Slater (2013, p.3) suggests, “[w]hilst it would be naïve to paint an impression that daily life in public housing is somehow a positive experience across the board, the tendency for outsiders to focus only on extreme and serious episodes occurring in public housing […] has played a significant part in the sorry trajectory of affordable housing provision in America and beyond”. In short, the idea that urban areas have neighbourhoods with different characteristics, different levels of wealth, and differing degrees of infrastructure is not necessarily problematic. Indeed, neighbourhoods in urban areas need to be differentiated and heterogeneous partly to provide residential environments desirable and suitable for the diverse range of people that wish to live within the city and partly to provide accommodation for the individuals and households with different financial means. Cities need low cost neighbourhoods that provide entry points into the city as well as spaces for individuals and households who have become more established. When neighbourhood inequalities become starker, however, a range of negative consequences may ensue. For example, private finance may withdraw from the neighbourhood (See Chap. 6), denying the residents important services such as access to supermarkets or health and welfare services, and transport links can be broken. When this happens, vulnerable populations can become excluded from neighbourhoods in the wider urban environment making policy interventions necessary. It should go without saying that we all deserve to live in safe, healthy neighbourhoods and dwellings and that a major task of government should be to provide this, or at the very least facilitate the provision of these environments through regulation and policy. Unlike the tone of the debates at that are being played out at the time of writing in the UK, where Think Tanks such as the Policy Exchange are proposing that social housing in areas with high house prices should be sold off to facilitate the construction of new dwellings in cheaper areas (a sort of social 2 for 1 offer), government interventions in neighbourhoods should facilitate the opening up of neighbourhoods to populations disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, not the restrict their urban space.

To conclude, we would like to lay down a challenge to policy makers and governments involved in neighbourhood based policies: who are your policies designed to help and who will your policies disadvantage either intentionally or unintentionally? To address this question, we suggest policy makers should open themselves up and allow social researchers access to the policy structures. Crucially, they need to engage in a dialogue that allows the asking, not just the questions that conform to current government ideology, but also the more uncomfortable questions including those that challenge current beliefs and standpoints. Government policy makers and social scientists need to become open to the idea of experimental design and randomised trials with built in policy evaluation (Haynes et al. 2012). In a financial era where data collection is perceived as an additional an unnecessary governmental expense, built in and critical policy evaluation with full social science research backing is crucial. It is often said that experimenting on people’s lives is unethical and immoral. Experiments carry risks and these need to be balanced against any possible benefits and acknowledgement concerning the inequitable distribution of who is exposed to the risks and benefits raises the spectre of more complex and difficult ethical issues. However, untested and ungrounded neighbourhood based policies borne out of beliefs, and which impact on individual lives, are equally as immoral and irresponsible.

Book Structure and Contents

The remainder of the book is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first half of this book each tackle problems that are perceived to be the result of negative neighbourhood effects accrued from living in poverty concentrations. In turn the problems of poor educational attainment, worklessness, crime, and poor health outcomes are investigated and the potential links between neighbourhoods and policy interventions are explored. In the second part of the book attention is given more generally to the policy solutions that have been developed with regard to these problems in five national contexts: the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Australia, The Netherlands and as a contrast the largely aspatial policy context of Canada. These nation states were chosen because of their very different policy focuses with regard to addressing these issues through urban regeneration, social mixing, employment growth schemes and other Area Based Initiatives. Between Part I and Part II is a chapter that focuses on a critical view, that this introduction has also given prominence to and the case is made that who you are affects where you live rather than the oft cited where you live affects who you are of the neighbourhood effects literature. This counter point is very important in the wider neighbourhood effects debate and frequently one to which, frequently, insufficient space is devoted.

In Chap. 2, Carlo Raffo investigates the role that neighbourhood context plays in educational outcomes. There is a vast literature that links poor educational outcomes to disadvantage in the neighbourhood environment. In general, there has been a consistent policy drive to ensure that educational standards have risen across all areas in the UK. In places where this consistent upwards drive of standards has been less successful, Raffo shows that Area Based Initiatives (ABIs) have been used to provide extra resources and address more persistent inequalities. The chapter moves on to demonstrate that the vast majority of interventions have only been partially successful in raising attainment for some people. In the context of 40 years of ABI and a vast amount of money invested in improving outcomes such inconclusive results need to be interrogated. Raffo uses the framework of social justice to explain the lack of positive results and highlights that redistribution is about more than just financial resources. The vast majority of education ABIs did little to alter the causes of the inequalities including cultural injustices rooted in patterns of representation, interpretation and communication need to be addressed so that injustices where individuals from disadvantaged communities are rendered as deviant or dysfunctional and inappropriate to successful education are amended. Thus, many of the educational injustices that are linked to concentrations of poverty are actually based on the lack of politics of recognition. For example, the curriculum sets out and identifies standard cultural codes and assessment modes that dominate many mainstream class rooms. However, this standard set of codes can ‘other’ the experiences and cultures of pupils from a wide range of background and exclude them from the schooling process. To illustrate the point, a case study from Peterborough (UK) is presented. Here the curriculum is co-developed with external community partners so that a learning experience that values the pupil’s backgrounds provides bridges between their external experiences and the learning environments.

In conclusion, Raffo reiterates that the perceived problems of educational achievement in disadvantaged areas are not solely about a lack of economic resources, but also about a lack of cultural recognition for the individuals living there. Thus, ABIs charged solely with tackling the economic injustice of educational inequality will never fully address the problems, and inclusion Raffo highlights the upcoming problems for educational inequality in the light of the post 2008 financial crisis and public spending reviews.

In Chap. 3, Stephen Syrett and David North document the links between concentrated poverty and what has become known as worklessness in the policy literature. They explore the policy initiatives that were instigated by the New Labour Government in the United Kingdom between the late 1990s and early 2010. Syrett and North make the link between the wider processes of labour market restructuring, and the negative cycles in the neighbourhood and persistent worklessness. The chapter considers the role that neighbourhood effects play in relation to the causes of worklessness and how the neighbourhood can mediate disadvantage. The major themes that are drawn out as mechanisms operating in neighbourhoods that could lead concentrations of worklessness forming including social capital and networks, the problems associated with neighbourhood stigmatisation and discrimination and the problem of physical isolation and poor public transport links preventing individuals from accessing opportunities for work when they do exist. Drawing on the work of Lupton and colleagues (2011) five different types of neighbourhoods where worklessness tended to be concentrated were identified.

The New Labour Government attempted to tackle the problems of worklessness using a wide range of Area Based Initiatives including the Action Team for Jobs Initiative, the Working Neighbourhoods Pilot Initiative and the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. Evaluation of these policies at the Local Authority Level (typically areas containing 250,000 people) demonstrated that employment levels had broadly increased when these initiatives had been in place. The problem for this analysis is that areas of this size cannot be regarded as a neighbourhood, and analysis at a more local level demonstrated a less positive picture. Neighbourhood level interventions are poorly positioned to address changes in labour market supply and demand which are likely to be the main causes of worklessness. But, they can provide a mechanism for the delivery of services. Finally, Syrett and North conclude that these ABIs existed in a disconnected policy arena and with many disparate agencies all competing to perform the same role in different places the lack of significant co-ordination between the policies and the wider economic environment meant that the effectiveness of the policies was muted.

In Chap. 4 Ian Brunton-Smith, Alex Sutherland and Jonathan Jackson tackle the issue of crime and perceptions of crime. They make direct links between the academic work on the causes of crime and many international policy initiatives including community policing and zero tolerance strategies. The historical development of neighbourhood context and crime is discussed with reference to neighbourhood deprivation in early work based in Chicago. However, they highlight that, in general, the experience of individuals in neighbourhoods is largely absent in the ways in which academic work has informed crime policy: early work relied on inappropriate analytical strategies and only in more recent work has the use of multilevel modelling techniques begun to overcome some of the more technical problems.

The authors give in-depth accounts of the mechanisms that are thought to be behind crime and the perceptions of crime starting with the idea of Social Disorganisation. Based on work from Chicago, it was hypothesised that higher levels of residential mobility and neighbourhood heterogeneity disrupt the formation of neighbourhood networks and prevent the development of community controls based on information. There are clear links between social disorder and the second mechanism listed, Neighbourhood Control. This emphasises the three domains of control private, parochial and public. All three levels need to function effectively for neighbourhoods to exercise the necessary controls on individuals and to influence public decision making sufficiently to ensure that neighbourhoods do not become disenfranchised. This also requires the neighbourhood to be able to mobilise the necessary resources from external agencies – such as the police – to establish the control of law and order. The third mechanism, Collective Efficacy, is based on positive control mechanisms. These include the process through which interpersonal trust can enable collective controls on individuals and also how efficacy can act as a mediator between the structural determinants of disorder and the fear of criminal behaviour. Low-level Disorder is identified as the fourth mechanism and this relates to relatively minor issues such as graffiti or vandalism which can act as signifiers that disorder is tolerated in a community and in turn lead to the fear of greater problems as well as the incidence of social disorder. The fifth mechanism is Subcultural Diversity which proposes a direct link between ethnic heterogeneity and variations in crime and concerns about crime. This theory focuses on conflict theory and suggests how inter-group tensions can lead to mistrust and external group fear. The sixth and final mechanism is Defensible Space and draws on ideas of territoriality and the physical design of the urban space. Critical to this mechanism is the way in which space is delineated and the boundaries through which a sense of ownership and therefore responsibility can be communicated.

The second part of the chapter deals with neighbourhood level policies for policing. In the UK context these have included neighbourhood policing programs, community support officers as part of larger regeneration initiatives, and the development of crime and disorder reduction partnerships. Using the police framework as a way to link into questions of neighbourhood effects and crime, the authors present a multilevel analysis looking at the components of the mechanisms listed above and data from the British Crime Survey. The model shows the importance of spatial autocorrelation in relation to the fear of crime and shows that neighbourhood characteristics represent an important driver in the development of an individual’s fear of crime. In conclusion, the authors suggest that neighbourhood studies need to better reflect the ways in which individuals live in space and act out their daily lives in order to better understand the influences that they experience in developing their perceptions of crime.

One area where research into neighbourhood effects has been particularly prevalent is health research. Indeed as Jamie Pearce points out in Chap. 5 there is over 200 years worth of documentation on the subject. In this chapter, the evidence linking health and place is reviewed and three major problems with the previous work are identified: firstly few studies have developed a coherent picture of the processes operating in neighbourhoods, the historical development of these processes and the implications that they have for individual health and well-being outcomes. Secondly, little work has shed light on the ways in which the neighbourhood can mediate the associations between place and individual health outcomes. Thirdly, much of the previous work on health and well-being outcomes has adopted a ‘deficit model’ approach, whereby the problems of poor health and well-being are explained through the assumptions that those experiencing the problems are to blame and if only these people were given more knowledge they would adapt their behaviour to solve their problems.

One of the explicit problems that is explored in this chapter is the idea that many of the circumstances that lead to health and well-being problems are at the macro level and result from the decisions taken by multinational corporations (for instance in the form of not opening stores in less economically well off areas and reducing the supply of fresh food to the local residents) or in the form of macro level government policies in the provision of health care (whereby individuals living in less economically well off areas have to travel further to access doctor surgeries). As such, the neighbourhood is a wholly unsuitable level at which to analyse the problems that result from these interventions. Pearce contends that neighbourhood effects are an unsatisfactory conceptualisation of geographic health inequalities proposing instead an alternative framework known as “environmental justice” that extends the notion of social justice into the environmental arena. This framing enables three crucial aspects to be considered together: the social, health and environmental inequalities. This is in direct contrast to the current literature which isolates these interactions as single entities, or at best combines the social and health in one outcome to the determinant of the environment. The environmental perspective encourages a macro level evaluation of the processes that lead to ill health – not just the local ones traditionally associated with the neighbourhood effects literature but also the issues such as unequal investment in infrastructure, migration and mobility patterns which result in the concentration of lower income groups in areas that are less advantageous with regard to health and well-being outcomes.

Using this framework, Pearce provides details of the Multiple Environmental Deprivation Index (MEDIx), a small area measure of environmental characteristics thought to be related to health and well-being outcomes. Such an index is useful because it allows the environmental circumstances in which people live with to be related with their socio-economic circumstances, and it becomes apparent very quickly that places with social and economic disadvantage also experience environmental disadvantage highlighting the concentrations of disadvantage experienced by vulnerable individuals who frequently already have poorer health. In conclusion, Pearce calls for the neighbourhood effects literature to move beyond the deficit model, and to recognise the multiple influences that place can have on individual outcomes rather than isolating the social and economic from the environmental in order that we can move to a better understanding of how an individual’s health can be influenced.

There is substantial debate in the neighbourhood effects literature about whether or not causal mechanisms can be identified through which individual life courses can be altered. Much of this debate is technical in nature and relies on increasingly complex econometric modelling. It is, however, rare that the foundations of the neighbourhood effects thesis are critically examined and the appropriateness of the framework as a mode of analysis called into question. In Chap. 6, at the pivot point in the book between Part 1 and Part 2, Tom Slater does just that and turns around the argument that where you live can affect your outcomes and presents the reverse case: your outcomes affect where you live. Highlighting what he calls the seductive simplicity of the neighbourhood effects thesis, he draws on the Marxian tradition of research to give precedence to the ‘why’ people live where they do aspect of neighbourhood effects research. Using Engels original work in Manchester, Slater demonstrates that the inequalities that were writ large in Manchester were the direct result of the system of private property rights. Engels provides a means to understand inner-city decline and the process of ghetto formation, neighbourhood decline and turnover as the consequence of successive reductions in capitalist investment in the infrastructure (property, parks, work places and services). This reduces the cost of entry into a neighbourhood which makes it available as a place to live for working class households.

In many ways, this chapter is uncovering one of the processes behind what the quantitative analysts have termed “selection effects”, the idea that the distribution of individuals into their residential locations is a far from random process and that this structure matters. However, adding the Marxian perspective to this debate allows us to move beyond merely suggesting that the econometric models are incorrectly specified and, instead, allows us to reflect on whether the way in which we are approaching the investigation of neighbourhood effects is actually reinforcing the perceived problems of poverty that we wish to tackle. Thus, Slater shows that the very notion of a neighbourhood effect is an instrument of accusation, and that the neighbourhood effects literature has failed to engage with the wider socio-economic processes that occur outside the neighbourhood. Using educational dropout rates for teenagers in low socio-economic status neighbourhoods as an example the argument is made that, rather than blame the concentrations of low status individuals as the driving force behind the high incidence drop outs, the wider economic picture must be considered. Factors including the necessity of working to provide financial support to the wider household or to provide assistance to relatives in poor health (to cite two possibilities) should be integrated into the debate. By ignoring important structural aspects blame is laid at the door of the individual living in poverty preventing a fuller picture emerging, and the policy interventions that are prescribed are those that require individuals to be moved away from apparently negative neighbourhood environments as the solution to their problem, dealing with a symptom rather than a cause. Ultimately, Slater calls for the demolition of the neighbourhood effects thesis as a supportive prop for ‘decision-based evidence-making’ and the assumption that concentrations of poorer individuals automatically lead to reduced levels of place attachment, worse social networks and social capital and worse outcomes across a wide range of well-being and related outcomes

Part 2 of the book turns attention towards the specific policies that have been pursued to tackle the perceived problems highlighted in the first section and brings together a set of chapters that deal with different national contexts. Whilst the problems between countries may be strikingly similar the policy arrangements made to alter the perceived negative effects of concentrated poverty have been very different. However, one solution that has been pursued in multiple national contexts is that of mixed communities.

In Chap. 7 Keith Kintrea deals with the idea of mixed communities through the rubric of social mix. In essence social mix is a policy that seeks to incentivise the colocation of better off households in neighbourhoods previously dominated by poorer households. More often than not, social mix policies have been pursued as part of wider housing and regeneration programs. Whilst specific national contexts are explored further in the chapters that follow, this chapter provides a general overview of the policy. The chapter makes a direct link between social mix and neighbourhood effects as justifications for these policies include the idea individuals can become socially isolated when they live in deprived neighbourhoods and develop the ‘wrong’ sort of social capital. Mixing is a policy device through which outward looking social networks are thought to be enabled through the presence of wealthier residents. However, sceptics of the policy have pointed out that spatial proximity may not lead to physical mixing between the different social groups and is insufficient to create new links. Similarly, socially mixed communities have been described as communities without community with many frequently conflicting identities competing with each other. Lastly, social mix has been described as gentrification by stealth and the state-led destruction of communities in order to attract private investors into areas previously demarcated as state owned. It is rarely the communities of wealthier residents that are redeveloped for social mixing!

In his concluding comments, Kintrea asks what social mixing policies have achieved. He suggests that social mixing has (partially) been guided by ideological positioning and that the outcomes have been based more on hope than real expectations of change. In fact, there has been relatively little systematic evaluation of the majority of schemes and their impacts. To end, Kintrea notes that the social mix policies do little address the causes of inequality instead focusing on the symptoms. Nevertheless, improving the physical environment for households can provide benefits for the residents of the neighbourhoods.

In Chap. 8, by Neil Bradford, we begin the focus on national experiences of neighbourhood policy in Canada. Unlike the other countries in this volume, Canada does not have a history of national neighbourhood or even housing policy. This lack of spatial framework is compounded by the tensions between federal and provincial government policy claims which mean that there is intense competition over limited financial resources and there is little incentive to integrate or co-operate over these resources, or develop co-responsibilities or control. In his introduction, Bradford proposes that national-level policies that are enacted by national governments can be the source of neighbourhood effects. For instance, access to services and resources provided by the government are set by national policy, but the inequalities and challenges that individuals face as a result of these policies are played out in the local arena.

Within this context, three aspects of place-based policy have been developed: Incrementalism developing policies on a step-by-step basis; Interscalar links policy alone is not a panacea for urban poverty, and; Learning from the local the use of fine grained local knowledge. Using this framework, two cases studies are presented that show how urban revitalisation policies have been implemented over the last decade. The first, the Vancouver Agreement (VA), between the federal and provincial governments in Vancouver, was conceived as a city-wide policy for the targeting of resources in the Downtown Eastside of the city. It brought together multiple agencies to target social, economic and health priorities. The second case study is drawn from the Action for Neighbourhood Change (ANC) which operated in five cities across the country and was set out as a ground level engagement with communities to work with the people to tackle the problems that they face. This 2 year project was designed to test a resident lead regeneration project. The project brought together residents in the poorest neighbourhoods of Halifax, Toronto, Thunder Bay, Regina and Vancouver. The motivation for the ANC policy was a desire by policy makers to learn how they could further their mandates via collaborative place based work. Primarily, the focus was on how community led organisations could be used to address gaps in service provision or barriers to accessing national policy initiatives.

In conclusion, although Canada was a latecomer to place-based policies, it has embraced them with enthusiasm recently. As such, there is a desire in Canada to implement policies with the right mix of interventions. Moreover, Canadian policy makers are increasingly realising that local engagement is vital for the successful development of initiatives that intervene where the market failure has been observed. Bradford also notes that an important policy conclusion from the Canadian experience is that initiatives need to proceed on a case by case basis rather than assuming what works in one local will automatically work in another.

In Chap. 9 Rebecca Tunstall turns the policy focus towards the UK context. In this chapter Tunstall argues that evidence-based policy is attractive to policy makers as well as to researchers especially within the framework of impact-based research assessments. However, as yet, neighbourhood based policy interventions have not been linked explicitly to the neighbourhood effects literature. Tunstall argues that this disconnection is largely a function of the lack of UK specific studies on neighbourhood effects. Tunstall uses the UK government’s “Treasury Green Book” – guidelines for policy appraisal and evaluation – as an illustration of how neighbourhood effects literature may influence government policy in the future.

The substantive part of this chapter consists of three examples of empirical work that the author has been involved with: an analysis that links individual personal and neighbourhood circumstances to a range of outcomes using the longitudinal British Cohort Studies and the Millennium Cohort Study. These studies enable the longer term outcomes of neighbourhood effects to be traced by looking at both childhood and early adult situations. In both cases evidence of (weak) neighbourhood effects were identified. The third example sought to understand neighbourhood reputation and stigmatisation as a barrier to employment using matched job applications for apparently identical (fictional) candidates where address was the only difference. Again, evidence of a neighbourhood effect was identified, whereby those individuals with addresses in stigmatised neighbourhoods were less likely to get offered job interviews compared with identical candidates from non-stigmatised neighbourhoods.

At the end of the chapter, Tunstall uses data from the participants of the ESRC seminar at which the original version of this chapter was presented as a means of conducting a participatory experiment to uncover what researchers think about the policy implications of neighbourhood effects research. Surprisingly, all participants believed that there was sufficient evidence that neighbourhood effects did exist, at least to a limited extent, and that the disagreement in the literature was not sufficient to render neighbourhood level policies ineffective.

Chapter 10 by Gideon Bolt and Ronald van Kempen focuses on the Dutch case drawing on policies aimed at deconcentrating poverty through desegregation. The Netherlands has a long tradition of neighbourhood level interventions and until the 1990s, the purpose of many neighbourhood level interventions was to improve the physical infrastructure for the residents. The 1980s brought with it a realisation that these policies did little to assist individuals and policy makers became convinced that concentrations of low income groups in specific places were the cause of societal ills. Consequently, the Dutch government refocused on the economic mix of residents in neighbourhoods. However, these policies changed focus post 2001 when ethnic mix became increasingly important and the discourse shifted towards ideas of assimilation and the explicit avoidance of ethnic minority segregation.

Government policy was directed at ‘problematic neighbourhoods’ and across the Netherlands, 40 neighbourhoods were target as areas that had an over-representation of low income, ethnic minority residents with excessive outflows of middle-class families and with few chances for labour market participation. More recently, the change in governmental priorities has resulted in a reduction in the urban and neighbourhood aspect of the integration and desegregation polices. A key policy introduced, initially in the city of Rotterdam, was the Special Measure for Urban Issues (and nicknamed locally the Rotterdam Law) which allowed municipalities to exclude residents from specific neighbourhoods when they could not meet strict criteria including the ability to financially support themselves independently or had not previously lived in the municipality for at least 6 years. Despite the vigorous adoption of the desegregation law, subsequent analysis has identified that the absolute difference in ethnic composition when comparing pre and post neighbourhood composition was nine households.

Bolt and van Kempen assess these policies against the empirical basis that exists in the academic literature. Citing literature using Dutch data the authors start by examining the applicability of Wilson’s social isolation theory (Wilson 1987). The overall conclusion of the literature is that there is no evidence of social isolation of ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands and the living in concentrations of ethnic minorities does not hamper ties to the labour market. However, as Bolt and van Kempen note, research that only measures the number of ties cannot provide information about the quality of the social networks. Indeed, it is suggested that many of the ties the developed between households occur for reasons other than the fact that they live in relatively close proximity. In a modern society, social relations occur in a wide range of spaces and at a diverse set of scales, not necessarily just at the neighbourhood level.

In conclusion, Bolt and van Kempen suggest that the desegregation policies in the Netherlands that have sought to reduce the concentration of perceived social ills in neighbourhoods have not been very effective. Indeed, they suggest that the sectoral nature of the policies means that with highly restrictive access policies to the social sector combined with tight regulation and planning laws for new building the opposite effect may have occurred. That is, segregation may in fact be increasing. In sum, the authors point to the contradiction between policies that seek to desegregate communities being highly ineffective, while others enacted by the same government have exactly the opposite outcome.

There is a long history of neighbourhood level policy intervention in the United States, with the most (in)famous being the Gautreaux poverty deconcentration programs. However, although they have received the majority of attention, explicit poverty deconcentration policies only form a small part of a much wider raft of US policy initiatives, as examined in Chap. 11 by George Galster. Four major housing programs are discussed: (1) scattered-site public housing; (2) tenant-based Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV); (3) private developments subsidized through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC); and (4) mixed-income redevelopment of distressed public housing estates (HOPE VI). Of these the third, LIHTC, is the largest and is outside the control of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Galster observes 4 facts about these programs: residents of public housing in the United States live in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods compared with other people; that in site based programs (LIHTC) residents live in less disadvantaged areas than residents using HCVs; that HCV holders fare better than non-HCV holders even if in the same neighbourhoods; that HCV holders do not improve their neighbourhood circumstances with subsequent moves once they have left their initial neighbourhood. Galster notes that the first fact is obvious, and a consequence of planning policies, whilst the last three are because of: individual behaviours and constraints (including search strategies for housing); structural constraints including property availability and landlord participation, particularly for the HCV holders, and; program rules determining who could participate and where the administration system was governed. However, untangling which of these explanations underlies the outcomes observed as a result of the programs is very difficult and frequently the research into the outcomes has failed to provide answers.

Galster attempts to unpick how the various neighbourhood level programs have fared by reviewing the research outcomes. For instance, social capital of residents has been shown to be an invaluable source of support for residents in deprived neighbourhoods but also acts as a strong pull reducing the geographical extent of many residential searches. Properties advertised to HCV holders are often located in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, with landlords using HCVs to boost lower demand in harder to let areas. In combination with aggressive marketing tactics, knowledge about available properties as well as property availability serves to constrain the geographic extent of HCV holder moves. Finally, program administration details include the willingness of landlords to accept program members in areas that are easy to let compared with areas that are harder to let coupled with the fact that the HCV only cover a limited amount of rent and additional rental payments have to be met by the householders means that participants are frequently excluded from more desirable neighbourhoods. With regard to the LIHTC participants, properties were only available in areas that were deemed “Qualified Census Tracts” which were defined as areas that were part of comprehensive redevelopment initiatives. In turn this excluded many non-disadvantaged areas simply because neighbourhoods had to have a low income status before they became recognised as areas that were suitable for LIHTC.

In conclusion, Galster provides a alternatives to the current US neighbourhood policies. The ideas include incentives to landlords in more desirable areas to accept HCVs, providing counselling to households in disadvantaged areas to assist them with the moving process and increasing the range of information (particularly about schooling) available to residents. However, as a caution, Galster notes that the American context is specific, and many of the issues faced in the US do not translate well to other contexts. As a result, detailed policy recommendations should not be based directly on the American experience. This is because US poverty is largely driven by the markets, where as in Western Europe, poverty is largely state driven. The fragmented federal structure of the US means that there is a lack of national co-ordination of programs in the US, and the politics of poverty and racism are local to the US. Finally, Galster challenges policy makers to consider on what basis should neighbourhood composition be judged? How much concentration is too much? Over what scale should the measures be judged and how quickly do the policies need to be progressed?

One of the national contexts in which US policies have been applied is that of Australia, which is the national context investigated in Chap. 12 by Kathy Arthurson. Set against the policy backdrop of post war social housing developments that are viewed as being increasingly problematic in terms of concentrations of unemployment, poverty and behavioural issues the Australian government has pursued policies of neighbourhood demolition and redevelopment. Starting in the 1980s, these first redevelopments renewed the physical infrastructure, frequently increasing the density of building. Recognising that the physical changes did little to address many of the perceived problems in the estates the programs were altered and increasing amounts of attention was paid to providing a social mix through selective redevelopment with policy makers arguing that, through social mix employment opportunities, educational achievements and service provision will all increase.

Arthurson draws on research conducted in Australia during the 2000s, investigating the level of social cohesion in 3 regenerated communities in Adelaide. Three dimensions are considered: the spatial scale at which the mix is implemented, the length of time that individuals are resident within the neighbourhood, and the stigma held by owner occupier residents towards their social renting counter parts. Social mix was identified as being less relevant to modern life, as individuals spent a lot of their time away from the neighbourhood. For some residents the age of neighbours was considered more important than their social status, and the broadening range of ages was a major barrier to the forming of friendships. However, the biggest tensions were reserved for the perceived differences in neighbours’ standards and values surrounding behaviour. An important realisation here is the heterogeneous nature of the social renting group who are perceived as relatively homogenous groups in policy terms. One area in which individuals in different tenures did agree was around schooling, and the importance of having ‘all walks of life’ in the community school. However, this positivity needs to be tempered as home owners made specific judgements about the local community school and decided to send their children to schools elsewhere as a result. Consequently, those owners reporting positive feelings about the integration of children from different social backgrounds are a group who have specifically chosen that schooling route.

In conclusion, Arthurson suggests that the chapter highlights the processes, complexities and challenges that policy makers face. Importantly, the chapter shows that homogenous social housing communities do not have the exclusive rights to neighbourhood based problems. Neighbourhoods in which there is a large degree of social mix can face substantial challenges and problems. Whilst some residents recognise the diversity and plurality of residents’ backgrounds in social groups, others stigmatise and point to the problems. Overall, Arthurson asks whether or not social mixing has become an outmoded concept: Wider networks beyond the residential neighbourhood have made the local environment less relevant for many residents. In conjunction with the clear contradictions between policies of social mix and providing housing for individuals with limited means has the consequence that social housing increasingly becomes a tenure for those in the greatest need alone, effectively increasing the isolation of low income groups and reducing mix in the very same tenure that the policy makers are attempting to reintroduce it to.

In the final chapter of this volume, Chap. 13, Duncan Maclennan contemplates how the policy environment has engaged the idea of neighbourhood effects. A difficulty for those interested in developing policy from research is that the vast majority of the academic contributions to the neighbourhood effects debates have come from work conducted in the United States of America, evolving from the Chicago school, where-as policy development requires more locally sourced examples as well.

In exploring why neighbourhood effects research has failed to have the expected impact on urban policy the first section of the chapter suggests a set of issues that need to be addressed in order for research to link directly with policy outcomes. Firstly, much of the neighbourhood effects research has essentially left the mechanisms of transfer as a black box. The broad area of work that is defined as neighbourhood effects consists of multiple disciplines researching from their own, often competing experiences and perspectives. This disagreement often makes it easy for policy makers to ignore research simply because the messages are inconsistent or inconclusive and lack guidance for developing policies. Secondly, researchers need to have a convincing story to tell policy makers. Despite the recent advances in neighbourhood effects theory and empirical research it is suggested that the ideas underneath the research are still sufficiently loose or fuzzy and that they do not relate back to the theoretical frameworks which they purport to investigate. Thirdly, the research needs to integrate the multiple aspects of individual life courses and the range of residential contexts through which people move. In this chapter, Maclennan suggests that, to date, the research undertaken in the name of understanding the urban residential environment has tended to be patchy and lacking in depth sufficient for policy makers to untangle the overall message that can be translated into direct policy interventions and initiatives.

Duncan then explores the suggestion that the lack evidence is sufficient to make neighbourhood based policies ineffective. Maclennan suggests that this assertion is incorrect in at least three ways: firstly, neighbourhood effects are not and never have been sole reason for area based interventions. Secondly, such a consideration places a false dichotomy between people and places. This means that successful policy interventions require a range of scales over which different aspects should be targeted. These scales include the local neighbourhood, but also include the sectoral and macro levels as well. In this conception the need, or otherwise, for strong neighbourhood effects to exist is not generally relevant. Third and finally, the link between academic evidence and policy is not as straightforward as a one-to-one relationship between evidence and policy development.

Ultimately, Duncan calls for a better understanding of the processes behind the phenomenon that are observed in the neighbourhood effects literature. This includes understanding better what can constitute a neighbourhood and neighbourhood space and whether they need to be spatially and temporally contiguous. Similarly, we need to know much more about how individuals choose their living environments, how they search for housing, what trade-offs they make and what cost structures they use when making their decisions. There are symmetries in the need to understand the effects of partial and missing information on these processes. Finally, we need to better understand the processes that are missing in the black-boxes that are used mediate neighbourhood effects. What mechanisms are important, for whom, when are they important and where. Only when we can thread all of these competing facets together will the academic discipline be in a better shape to deliver a more coherent story to policy makers and move beyond the policy mistakes of the past.