Counteracting Segregation: Swedish Policies and Experiences

Abstract

The issue of residential segregation has been on the Swedish political agenda since the early 1970s. This paper analyses the background for this interest, presents some basic features of socio-economic and ethnic residential segregation, and discusses some fundamental contextual properties regarding the Swedish welfare state, its institutional set-up and changes in housing and other policies that have affected the conditions for segregation processes. Three more specific anti-segregation policies are also identified and analysed: housing and social mix policy (first initiated in the 1970s); the refugee dispersal policy (initiated in the 1980s); and the area-based urban policy (initiated in the 1990s). Of these three, the last two have a clear ethnic focus while mix policies primarily aim for socio-economic and demographic mix. The analysis shows that none of the policies have managed to affect levels of segregation more than marginally, the reasons being ineffective implementation (the mix policy), failures in the design (the refugee dispersal policy) or conflicting aims inherent in the policy (area-based interventions).

Keywords:

• Planning
• welfare state
• neighbourhoods
• desegregation policies
• Sweden
• housing mix

Notes

¹ Developed by an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, in the 1910s, Gini Coefficient is commonly used to indicate income inequality in society. The coefficient is a number which has a value between 0 and 1 where 1 means that one household has all the income and 0 means that all households have an equal share of the income. So, a higher value of the coefficient means a higher degree of income inequality in a society.

² The index of dissimilarity (ID) is a common measure of residential segregation. It measures the differences in spatial distribution between two populations, usually a minority group and the majority population. The index ranges from 0 to 100 and can be interpreted as the percentage of the minority group's population that has to move in order to achieve the same spatial distribution as the majority population, i.e. the higher the index the higher the level of segregation.

³ Data refer to neighbourhoods defined as statistical areas called SAMS (Small Area Market Statistics). The SAMS classification has been developed by Statistics Sweden and covers the entire country. On average, a SAMS area has approximately 1000 inhabitants, but areas are somewhat smaller in Gothenburg (average 850 people).

⁴ This section is based on Holmqvist (2009).

⁵ Source: Board of Migration/Statistics Sweden. http://www.migrationsverket.se/pdffiler/statistik/tabs1.pdf

⁶ This section closely follows the analysis presented in Andersson (2006). For a detailed account of the policy, unfortunately only available in Swedish, see Palander (2006). The MDA was also studied in the Swedish part of the EU-funded research project RESTATE, see Öresjö et al. (2004).