Neighborhood social mix : theory, evidence, and implications for policy and planning

Progressive thinkers about the residential composition of neighborhoods have long held that population socioeconomic diversity was desirable (Gans 1961; Sarkissian 1976). Similar sentiments still undergird a rich palette of official pronouncements and planning initiatives in Europe, Australia, and the United States. Programmatic examples include: urban regeneration measures that replace concentrations of social housing with more diverse housing stocks; social housing management and tenant allocation reform; tenantbased housing allowances; and land-use planning rules requiring mixed developments (see Berube 2005; Briggs 2005; Musterd and Andersson 2005; Norris 2006). Despite its longstanding, exalted place in the pantheon of planning nostrums, the goal of "socially mixed neighborhoods" has been challenged on conceptual and empirical grounds by a wide range of scholars, including Atkinson and Kintrea (2000, 2001), Ostendorf, Musterd and de Vos (2001), Kearns (2002), Musterd (2002, 2003), Musterd, Ostendorf and de Vos (2003), Meen et al. (2005), Galster (2005), Delorenzi (2006), Joseph (2006), Joseph, Chaskin, and Webber (2006), Cheshire (2007), Van Kempen and Bolt (2009), and Darcy (2010). It behooves planners to take the challenges seriously, not to pursue social mix as a matter of faith. This chapter aims to assist planners in this quest. It synthesizes and extends the challenges to social mix and assesses comprehensively the empirical evidence from many disciplines and nations as it interfaces with the topic considering both the goal of social mix and the means to achieve it. It tries to clarify what questions we need to ask and the degree to which answers seem certain regarding concepts, policy rationales, and causal mechanisms, and then draws appropriate, pragmatic implications for planners.