Where to live and whom to live with? Examining neighborhood preferences for living with immigrants and urban form in Copenhagen, Denmark

ABSTRACT

While preferences for different neighborhoods have long been studied, one under-studied area concerns fear of crime, namely that being more fearful of crime can shape where we decide to live. In our analysis, we analyze how fear of crime is linked to a dyad of contrasting neighborhood preferences that are also interconnected: the immigrant composition of the neighborhood and its urban form of mixed-use or single-family home-oriented neighborhoods. In doing so, we build on previous work by assessing if, and how, the pathways to these two preferences differ. The key implication is that fear of crime may operate as a racialization process across space. Using cross-sectional data from the 2015 Copenhagen Area Survey, results show that studying these contrasts is important as fear of crime is an essential predictor of neighborhood immigrant preference for Copenhageners but not for neighborhood urban form preference. This provides evidence of this racialization process given that fear of crime is linked to the immigration composition of the neighborhood but does not link to other urbanism preferences. Additional findings show that left-leaning residents and city dwellers prefer neighborhoods with more immigrants and that are more mixed-use. We conclude by focusing on implications relating to race and space for urbanism.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighborhood preferences
• immigrant
• urban form
• criminality
• ethnic segregation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We undertook three supplemental analyses that served as robustness checks of the results presented thus far with three additional variables, namely (i) aggregated political party preference (categorized into left, right, and other) (ii) specific political party preference (9-party Danish system), and (iii) immigrants and their children (binary categorical variable). For all the additional variables incorporated into our regression model, we observed that the results for political leaning/party variables are similar to those in Model 2 of Tables 2 and 3 indicating that right-leaning individuals are less likely to favor neighborhoods with immigrants as compared to others but the results for neighborhood urban form preference were not found to be statistically significant for either of the political party variables. Finally, we added immigrants and their children to the sample (see Methods), and a statistically significant association was found between “immigrant or child of an immigrant” with neighborhood immigrant preference. However, the association remained insignificant for neighborhood urban form preference, indicating that immigrants are more likely to favor areas with mixed neighborhoods as compared to non-immigrants.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.