Miki Malul (p)

Relieving poverty is one of the important and complicated tasks in every society. Is the public aware of poverty-related data? Do people know who is considered as poor? Public awareness to the issue of poverty is crucial for pushing policy-makers to act. Using a survey-based experiment with a representative sample of 751 Israelis, we found significant gaps between perceptions and reality regarding several measures of poverty. In fact, in most of the poverty indicators, 80% of the public estimations were inaccurate. We found, however, that 60% of the people understand that as the issue of poverty negatively affects the entire society. We showed that perceptions of the poverty and perceptions regarding the reasons for poverty affect people’s views about the need for poverty-reducing policy measures.

Lasse Sigbjørn Stambøl (p)

Abstract: This paper describes analysis of workplace segregation among employed with immigrant background versus natives in Norway. With political ambitions to achieve an improved integration of immigrants in the society through lower segregation relatively to natives, we investigate how the segregation at workplaces has evolved in a period from 2005 to 2015.

Immigrants’ participation in work is considered an important factor to be as integrated as possible in the society. However, participation in working life may reflects a necessary, but not necessarily a sufficient, condition for immigrants to be better integrated into a society. High or increasing accumulation of immigrants in firms in some industries and regions does not necessarily reflect increased integration but may have segregating effects despite a working relationship.

We thus rise questions about the degree of homo- and heterogeneity in the composition of the workforce in the firms, how this composition has evolved and whether we can observe an increasing or decreasing workplace segregation among employed with immigrant background? Initially, all firms in Norway are examined, but then specified to firms with both foreign and native employment, by their size, industry and regional localization. Employed immigrants are further specified by selected characteristics as gender, age, level of education, country background as well as their duration of residence in the host country.

As a methodological basis we use individual matched employer-employee data covering the entire employment to investigate how workplace segregation has evolved between selected years. We use different methods for analyzing the detailed data, but with most focuses on the D index, the dissimilarity index, and in particularly cases also the Gini coefficient.

Preliminary results indicate a decline of workplace segregation when employed in all firms are included. Despite an increase of firms with only immigrant workers, an even stronger decrease in the number of firms with only native employed may reflect this finding. However, when the analysis is specified to firms that have both foreign and native employed, the workplace segregation increases. Furthermore, male immigrants show higher workplace segregation than female immigrants, segregation falls with increasing educational level and with increasing duration of residence. Industries such as construction and business services contribute to increase workplace segregation, and immigrants from EU countries in East Europe contribute to keep up segregation. Workplace segregation increases with declining regional centralization generally, but when assuming firms with mixed foreign and native employment the regional differences are more evenly distributed.

Aleksandra Zarek (p), Panu Lehtovuori

Tenure integration in housing is claimed to encourage improved life chances, social mobility and mixed economy activities for the poorer residents. Such socioeconomic benefits can positively influence wider notions of urban resilience, understood as a city’s capacity to build stability in changing socioeconomic circumstances, and social sustainability, defined as communities’ efforts towards fairer and more spatially equal societies.

However, lack of clarity around roles in urban design management of mixed tenures is often cited to cause social tensions within them carrying a detrimental influence on the notions of urban resilience and social sustainability through intensifying physical and thus perceptual social segregation. There has been little research on successful strategies in integrative negotiation management in design, planning, construction and post-occupancy operation of mixed tenures to ensure their social consolidation. This paper will focus on possible approaches to identify critical factors in urban design management for successful mixed tenure schemes from the perspectives of social sustainability and urban resilience understood as alleviation of social and spatial inequalities through tenure integration.

In the proposed approach a number of mixed tenure case studies are investigated in terms of socially sustainable urban design management understood as integrative negotiations and orchestration of activities of various stakeholders involved in the planning and management of such developments with the objective of providing affordable yet high quality mixed housing schemes. The selected cases originate in contrasting settings chosen for their specific approaches to mixed tenure housing: the United Kingdom, where the history of mixed developments has been well established; Finland and Poland, where the interest in such models has been growing recently. The selected cases are at different stages of development ranging from design conception through planning and construction to post-occupancy management, reflecting various roles, challenges and opportunities encountered across the full development cycle.