Prof. Marcin Stonawski (p), Prof. Vegard Skirbekk

This article examines the relationship between migration, automation, and spatial segregation in Denmark by analyzing patterns of residential clustering relate to migrants’ risk of technology-induced job loss. Automation reduces demand for routine, automatable tasks while increasing demand for both high-skill and low-skill service occupations. Migrant workers are disproportionately affected, as they are overrepresented in sectors highly exposed to automation risk, such as manufacturing and agriculture, while also concentrated in expanding care and domestic work sectors. Using longitudinal, geo-coded Danish register data (2007–2023), we investigate whether migrants are spatially clustered not only by socioeconomic status but also by their risk of technology-induced job loss. To measure occupational exposure to automation, we employ the Routine Task Intensity (RTI) index developed by Autor et al. (2003) and updated for ISCO-2 digit occupations by Lewandowski et al. (2022). Spatial analysis is conducted using a Geographic Information System (GIS) approach that constructs individualized, scalable neighborhoods, thereby avoiding the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). This enables the identification of areas where migrants with high RTI scores are concentrated and where communities may be most vulnerable to automation-driven labor shifts. Focusing on Denmark’s four largest cities—Copenhagen, Aarhus, Aalborg, and Odense—we explore long-term changes in spatial clustering across skill levels and household compositions. We hypothesize that migrants, particularly low-skilled individuals and households, will exhibit stronger clustering patterns by automation risk than by traditional socioeconomic indicators, revealing new dimensions of inequality in the era of technological change.

Dr. Ran Ben Malka (p)

The Relationship Between Innovation, Regional Inequality, and Migration: A Case Study of Israel
Background and Objective While innovation is a primary driver of national economic prosperity, its benefits are often spatially concentrated, potentially exacerbating socio-spatial inequalities. This study examines the Israeli context, where regional disparities rank among the highest in the OECD, with over 60% of high-tech employment concentrated in the national core. We investigate how the centralized concentration of innovation correlates with regional polarization across three dimensions: labor mobility, internal migration, and living standards.
Methodology The research utilizes a longitudinal multivariate analytical framework with data from 2000 to 2020 provided by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. We employ multivariate OLS regressions to analyze trends in commuting patterns, net internal migration, and a multidimensional Socio-Economic Index (SL). The SL index serves as a proxy for socio-spatial quality of life, incorporating 14 variables across education, employment, and asset accumulation.
Findings The empirical results reveal a significant structural shift in peripheral labor markets. We find a growing trend of peripheral residents commuting to central innovation hubs, particularly for medium-distance regional mobility. Commuting has emerged as a "default" employment strategy, showing resilience to short-term market fluctuations. However, this mobility has not translated into permanent population de-concentration; net internal migration remains stagnant, largely due to prohibitive housing costs in the core acting as a barrier to relocation.
Crucially, the study identifies a systematic widening of the socio-economic gap. The decline in living standards in the periphery is notably steeper than in the core, driven by a "household sorting" mechanism where high-skill human capital and assets remain concentrated in central regions. Segmented analysis further reveals a "distance-decay" effect, with regions lacking rapid transit infrastructure experiencing the most pronounced relative decline.
Conclusions and Policy Implications The findings suggest that current innovation-led growth models facilitate a "backwash effect" rather than regional wealth convergence. Commuter-based integration provides employment access but fails to improve local quality of life or foster regional independence. To mitigate this polarization, we propose differentiated place-based policies: strengthening internal regional connectivity for the far periphery and incentivizing remote work to stabilize peripheral populations.

Mr Laurent Gomez (p), Prof. Michel Dimou, Prof. Alexandra Schaffar

The integration of immigrants is multidimensional, yet their daily mobility remains an underexplored aspect. In France, as in other countries, immigrants exhibit transportation behaviors that differ from native-born. Understanding the reasons for these differences is essential to reducing risks of social exclusion and designing more equitable mobility policies.

Drawing on a national transportation survey conducted in metropolitan France in 2019, we compare the commutes of immigrants and native-born workers by analyzing distance, travel time, and travel speed. Descriptive statistics indicate that immigrants spend more time commuting and travel more slowly, despite similar distances. We examine the contribution to these raw differences using an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, distinguishing four dimensions: personal attributes, household characteristics, location specificities, and travel conditions.

Our results show that differences stem from unequal endowments between the two groups, particularly in terms of location. If there were no territorial disparities among natives and immigrants, the commute time for immigrants could be reduced by 17.1%, out of a raw gap of 30.9%. Individual or family attributes, on the other hand, play a more limited role, while travel conditions, particularly the choice of transport mode, also contribute to the differences, reflecting travel behaviors acquired before migration. However, when we remove the mode of transport from the estimates, we observe what we label a “concealed effect” of location: approximately 3% of the real impact of spatial characteristics is captured by this variable.

We also highlight the existence of an ethnic “commuting penalty” due to residential segregation, i.e., due to the immigrants’ preference for living in ethnic enclaves, rather than a penalty due to discrimination in the labor or housing market, as theorized by some authors.

Subgroup analysis confirms the robustness of our findings for different population categories. However, variations appear depending on the urban area of residency, suggesting specific local dynamics. Finally, in addition to discrepancies in endowments, immigrants are sometimes more sensitive to certain determinants of mobility, which also leads to differences in mobility. For example, a deterioration in health is likely to increase immigrants' travel time by 32.8%, but not that of natives.

Dr. Kimsa Maradan (p)

Regional science has documented that development trajectories unfold unevenly across space, concentrating opportunities, infrastructures, and labor market dynamics in some territories while leaving others structured by endogenous economies and differentiated access to resources. Yet the gendered dimensions of these spatial inequalities, and more specifically the ways in which contrasting sub-national development trajectories reorganize women's work, care, mobility, and temporal regimes, remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing the concept of gendered territorial regimes of work, understood as the set of economic, domestic, and institutional arrangements that, within a given space, organize access to activities, the distribution of paid work and care time, modes of remuneration and recognition, and the possibilities of mobility available to women and men.
The analysis draws on a comparative ethnography conducted in Kiên Giang province, southern Vietnam, spanning nearly ten months across two contrasting sites: Hà Tiên, a small coastal town organized around fishing, local commerce, and diffuse tourism; and Phú Quốc, an island that within a decade became a major tourism hub marked by rapid urbanization and large-scale external investment. This controlled territorial variation treats development trajectories not as context but as a central differentiating mechanism in gendered relations of work. The corpus comprises 126 semi-structured interviews conducted in Vietnamese, complemented by extended fieldwork observations across both sites.
The findings identify two distinct gendered territorial regimes of work. In Hà Tiên, women's trajectories remain deeply embedded in domestic economies, affording relative control over daily rhythms but at the cost of limited monetary remuneration and weak institutional recognition. In Phú Quốc, tourism-led integration diversifies opportunities but institutionalizes demanding expectations of temporal availability and emotional performance, while maintaining gendered occupational hierarchies. Across both sites, the analysis reveals a pattern of temporal extraction through which territorial development sustains local economic dynamism by drawing on women's time, availability, and coordination work, contributions that remain largely invisible in conventional regional indicators.
This dynamic has direct implications for how regional responses to global challenges are evaluated. When care infrastructures are absent and labor market protections remain inadequate, transition costs are silently displaced onto households and, within them, onto women. By foregrounding gendered territorial regimes of work, this paper argues that evaluating the social inclusiveness of territorial transitions requires attending to the temporal, reproductive, and relational conditions under which participation in development is made possible, and to who bears its invisible cost.