Population Space and Place最新文献

Housing is a fundamental determinant of individual and household well-being. In fertility research, its role has traditionally been examined through homeownership, yet the impact of housing expenditure—including mortgage payments, rent, bills, and maintenance expenses—remains underexplored. This study extends the literature by analyzing the relationship between housing expenditure and childbearing in Italy. Using data from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth (1998–2016), we uncover two key findings. First, higher housing expenditure is positively associated with childbearing, but only among homeowners, not tenants. This suggests that property ownership and improved housing conditions are perceived as essential prerequisites for parenthood in Italy. Second, this relationship holds exclusively for wealthier households—those who can sustain both higher housing costs and the financial demands of raising children. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the increasing prerequisites for parenthood, underscoring the relevance of housing prerequisites. Homeownership—even if it leads to a financial burden—represents a crucial milestone in the childbearing process, at least in Italy.

Research on highly skilled migration has challenged methodological individualism by emphasising the need to centre familial relationships in the understanding of migration. However, the resulting focus on the micro-scale of the family unit negates an understanding of broader political-economic discourses shaping everyday migrant lives. This paper demonstrates why research on highly skilled family migration needs to be placed in conversation with neoliberalism. Using a case study of Australian and British highly skilled migrant families moving through Singapore, the paper makes two contributions to research on migration. First, the paper develops the scope beyond that of the micro or macro-scale into the missing meso-scale analysis of highly skilled family migration. Second, the paper advances migration infrastructures as a conceptual approach to understand the meso-level, contesting the previous methodological individualism by extending analyses of infrastructures to the family. Using examples of infrastructures of visas and international schools, the paper demonstrates that meso-level infrastructures broker temporariness, transience and time insecurity as a condition of neoliberalism within the lives and mobilities of highly skilled family migrants.

The aim of this paper is to study the subjective well-being (SWB) of the resident population in Italy, by analyzing the association between self-reported life satisfaction and institutional trust, controlling for socio-demographic, human capital, other measures of SWB and government change, whilst distinguishing between Italian and foreign citizens. Indeed, examining disparities in SWB between Italian and foreign citizens is crucial for understanding if their well-being levels are similar and which factors might either foster or hinder parity. Italy is a peculiar case study, as it is characterized by a general lack of trust in institutions; moreover, the relationship between SWB and institutional trust has so far not been approached from a native/immigrant comparative perspective. We use pooled data from seven rounds (2015–2021) of the Multipurpose survey on households ‘Aspects of Daily Life’ carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). Our dependent variable is self-reported life satisfaction. Institutional trust is built as an index of respondent's trust in the Italian parliament, the government, political parties, the judicial system and law enforcement. We run OLS linear regression models with wave fixed effects to account for changes in the distribution between the different years. Life satisfaction is slightly higher for Italians compared to foreign citizens. Institutional trust appears positive and a significant predictor of life satisfaction for both Italian and foreign citizens. However, results suggest that institutional trust has a mediating role for the life satisfaction of foreign citizens, meaning that trust in institutions is more important for non-Italian citizens. Finally, government change is positively associated with life satisfaction.

Within the intertwined processes of migration and population ageing, the emotional experiences of growing old in a new environment and their impact on mental well-being remain underexplored. Drawing on a sample of 413 elderly migrants from two representative migrant-concentrated districts in Shenzhen, China, this study employed structural equation modelling to investigate the pathways linking residential normalcy, place attachment, and mental well-being. The key findings reveal that place attachment serves as a significant mediator in the relationship between residential normalcy and mental well-being, with place identity emerging as the most prominent subcomponent. This relationship is further moderated by both the duration of residence and the quality of the residential environment. Specifically, residential normalcy exerts a direct positive effect on mental well-being only among elderly migrants residing in high-quality neighbourhoods, indicating that residential mastery directly enhances their mental well-being. Furthermore, for late-life arrivals and elderly migrants living in lower-quality neighbourhoods, the development of place attachment through residential mastery proves challenging. In these groups, the mediating influence of place identity assumes greater importance relative to their counterparts. The study demonstrates that fostering place attachment can serve as a critical affective coping strategy for mitigating mental well-being challenges associated with ageing out of place. Therefore, there is a critical need for the development and implementation of policies and interventions aimed at fostering residential normalcy and enhancing place attachment, especially among late-life arrivals and elderly migrants residing in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Such measures are essential to support the transition from ‘ageing out of place’ to healthy ‘ageing in place’ for elderly migrants in urban China.

This article introduces the notion of ‘hopping (im)mobilities’, referring to relatively short-term relocations—socially and geographically—within neoliberal academia. The data is drawn from two research projects focused on mobile researchers making Latvia and Japan their more permanent place. Our fieldwork reveals that researchers’ affective ties play a central role in place-making. Whilst career progression and achievements matter for welfare and subjective wellbeing, we argue that recentring intimacy—connections to people and places—serves as a valuable analytical device that sheds light on the constitutive role of relationships in producing spaces, including academic knowledge spaces, and invites to pose much broader questions about the entrenched epistemologies of Western knowledge hubs, perceived undesirable peripheries and place from the standpoints of researchers themselves.

Who are “the rich” and how should their residential patterns be studied? In society, the rich are defined not only by their high income but also—and perhaps more importantly—by their high wealth. However, while income is closely monitored and taxed, wealth often remains less scrutinised, particularly in the context of residential segregation research. This study explores how the spatial patterns of affluence and poverty differ when considering wealth versus income and discusses their implications. By analyzing geo-coded microdata from the Netherlands, we reveal that wealth segregation is much higher than income segregation, and that roughly the top tenth richest households in terms of wealth are far more spatially isolated from the rest of the population than what the income-based literature would suggest. Our findings also demonstrate three other key insights: (1) Whereas financial wealth is more unequally distributed than real estate wealth across society, it is more equally distributed across space. (2) Wealth segregation is notably more sensitive to the spatial scale of measurement compared to income segregation. (3) The temporal trends of income and wealth segregation diverge: while the former is decreasing in most urban areas, wealth segregation is rising almost everywhere in the Netherlands. This stresses the necessity of incorporating wealth into studies of segregation not as an alternative operationalization, but as a different perspective on the spatial concentration of capital which captures the role of social class, age and migration in a way that income-based approaches cannot render.

This study analyses spatial variation in fertility and its determinants, including their direct and spillover impact, in China. We apply spatial regression models to the 2000 population census. The results show, first, that there is significant spatial variation in fertility at the county level in China and that counties with similar fertility levels tend to cluster together. Second, the total fertility rate (TFR) is higher in counties with a smaller proportion of highly educated females, a larger proportion of agricultural workers, a larger share of the married population, and a larger proportion of ethnic minorities. Higher GDP per capita is associated with lower TFR. This study highlights that both population composition and context can explain spatial variation in fertility in China, indicating that individuals' characteristics as well as the context in which they live influence their fertility behaviour. It additionally emphasises the spillover impact of population composition and context from neighbouring counties on the fertility level in a given county.