Introduction

Debate and research on large housing estates are integrated and embedded in wider discourses on the role of neighbourhoods, communities, urban change, poverty, and segregation. The problems associated with the large estates are similar to those being discussed in relation to ‘deprived neighbourhoods’ in more general terms: why they exist; how they are produced and reproduced; and what effects they might have on people growing up and living there.

The issue of selective migration figures prominently in these debates, especially in North Western Europe, and is often seen as a contributing factor in the processes of decline and deprivation. The situation in Eastern Europe is somewhat different, partly because in Eastern European cities a higher proportion of the urban population lives on the large housing estates, a fact that might reduce the risk of residualisation and stigmatisation. Whether this situation will persist is discussed in other chapters in this book; one might hypothesise that rising economic standards in these countries will increase the demand for single-family housing and housing environments other than those presently found on the large estates. If neighbourhoods become less popular for various reasons, selective migration can indeed be expected to occur.

Murie, Knorr-Siedow and van Kempen state with reference to this phenomenon that the “spiral of decline may be increased because more stable and affluent households move away …, or may be increased because there are no opportunities for deprived households to move away” (2003, p 29). They continue by arguing that the “danger with these kinds of accounts is that they imply an inevitability to processes of decline and give too little attention to human agency, individual and collective action designed to improve estates or to address particular problems”. We would like to argue, first, that we believe that individual and collective action are indeed important and can make a difference for neighbourhoods and residents; second, that knowledge about the demographic and structural position and change of different types of neighbourhood normally improves the capacity to act and to decide on what measures to take regarding particular problems.

Relatively little is known about the character of the out-migration from large housing estates. Who stays and who moves? And where do the out-migrants move to? The phrase ‘middle-class leakage’ has sometimes been used to describe the out-migration flow (Friedrichs, 1991).