Maarten van Ham

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Urbanism

As a growing number of Dutch higher education institutions become increasingly interested and active in university–community engagement, questions have arisen about their motivations, goals, and activities in this area. This paper aims to provide insight into the factors driving universities’ community engagement and how this is manifested in the N...

Over many decades, academics, policymakers, and governments have been concerned with both the presence of inequalities and the impacts these can have on people when concentrated spatially in urban areas. This concern is especially related to the influence of spatial inequalities on individual outcomes in terms of health, education, work and income,...

Harnessing large urban housing estates in former socialist countries as a resource for the future housing supply requires innovative and practicable strategies and concepts. What are the challenges to be overcome? How can the often mono-structural estates be altered, and how can spatial and cultural identities be reinforced? Which role does the com...

Emerging longitudinal research on the relationship between commuting mode and psychological wellbeing draws exclusively from cities in developed countries and the findings are not consistent. Our study contributes to the evidence base from urban China, where rapid urban growth has raised great concerns for urbanites' commuting problems and psycholo...

Working from home (WFH) was prevalent among previous daily commuters during the COVID-19 pandemic and is expected to continue in post-COVID-19 society. By using WFH enforced by the UK government during the pandemic as a real-world experiment, our study investigates the relationship between switching from commuting to WFH, and subjective wellbeing (...

Social frontiers arise when there are sharp differences in the demographic composition of adjacent communities. This paper provides the first quantitative study of their impact on household mobility. We hypothesise that conflicting forces of white flight and territorial allegiance lead to asymmetrical effects, impacting residents on one side of the...

Residential self-selection studies argue that pre-existing travel-related attitude overshadows the role of changes in residential built environment in (re)shaping travel behaviours. Our study contributes to this self-selection argument by including family-and job-related life events as another self-selection source, and accounting for the reverse c...

An extensive body of research has documented the deleterious effects of community violence on adolescent development and behavior. Much of this research focuses on how exposure to violence structures social interaction , and, ultimately, how it motivates youth to engage in troublesome behavior. This study builds upon this body of research to demons...

Neighbourhood effects studies typically investigate the negative effects on individual outcomes of living in areas with concentrated poverty. The literature rarely pays attention to the potential beneficial effects of living in areas with concentrated affluence. This poverty paradigm might hinder our understanding of spatial context effects. Our pa...

Research on the experienced utility of commuting time is dominated by an individualistic view of choice concerning the trade-offs between long commutes and job-or housing-related benefits. The widely discussed phenomenon of the commuting paradox shows that individuals systematically report worse subjective wellbeing as commuting time increases over...

Governments are focusing on building new cities to control rapid urbanization and accommodate overpopulation in Africa. Meanwhile, existing agglomerations suffer from urban deterioration, much to the dissatisfaction of their residents. Cairo is an exemplary case of active residents’ response toward urban deterioration in their neighborhoods, result...

The relationship between commuting behaviours and subjective wellbeing has been fascinating scholars of different disciplines. Especially in the last decade, longitudinal research designs have made great progress in identifying causality in the commuting-wellbeing relationship by focusing on within-individual variations over time. However, the resu...

Studies of neighbourhood effects typically measure the neighbourhood context at one specific spatial scale. It is increasingly acknowledged, however, that the mechanisms through which the residential context affects individual outcomes may operate at different spatial scales, ranging from the very immediate environment to the metropolitan region. W...

Studies of neighbourhood effects increasingly research the neighbourhood histories of individuals. It is difficult to compare the outcomes of these studies as they all use different datasets, conceptualisations and operationalisations of neighbourhood characteristics and outcome variables. This paper contributes to the literature by studying educat...

You can download full text via https://research.tudelft.nl/files/123401740/1_s2.0_S0264275122002372_main.pdf Informal urbanism has been generally studied within social, economic and political frameworks, yet little is known of how it performs in terms of urban vitality. The aim of this article is to better understand the urban vitality of informal...

The non-random selection of people into neighbourhoods complicates the estimation of causal neighbourhood effects on individual outcomes. Measured neighbourhood effects could be the result of characteristics of the neighbourhood context, but they could also result from people selecting into neighbourhoods based on their preferences, income, and the...

Contextual poverty refers to high proportions of people with a low income in a certain (residential) space, and it can affect individual socioeconomic outcomes as well as decisions to move into or out of the neighbourhood. Contextual poverty is a multiscale phenomenon: Poverty levels at the regional scale reflect regional economic development, whil...

In this commentary, we provide an overview of the contribution that both types of studies make for our better understanding of the impacts and processes behind the (re)production of inequalities in modern cities. We also address some of the main challenges in modelling contextual effects and, crucially, provide evidence that no single study can def...

Full text can be downloaded via the following link https://research.tudelft.nl/files/111471410/1_s2.0_S0264837722000370_main_1.pdf Identifying the economic potential of informal urban areas is a topic of increasing interest for policymakers and practitioners in less developed countries, yet little is known of how informal street design influences...

Basedonextensiveresearchwithdistinguished scholars within the book project ‘Socioeconomic Segregation in European Capital Cities’, this chapter summarizes the key trends in income inequalityand socioeconomic segregationin Europe. We draw our data from the two last census rounds, and we focus on the most common indicators of incomeinequality(Gini In...

We studied the relation between cumulative exposure to neighbourhood deprivation and adolescents' Big Five personality traits, and the moderating role of personality in the relation between neighbourhood deprivation and the development of problem behaviour and educational attainment. We studied 5365 British adolescents from ages 10 to 16, with neig...

There is no theoretical reason to assume that neighborhood effects operate at a constant single spatial scale across multiple urban settings or over different periods of time. Despite this, many studies use large, single-scale, predefined spatial units as proxies for neighborhoods. Recently, the use of bespoke neighborhoods has challenged the predo...

The literature on intergenerational contextual mobility has shown that neighbourhood status is partly ‘inherited’ from parents by children. Children who spend their childhood in deprived neighbourhoods are more likely to live in such neighbourhoods as adults. It has been suggested that such transmission of neighbourhood status is also relevant from...

A paradigm shift is taking place in spatial segregation research. At the heart of this shift is the understanding of the connectedness of spatial segregation in different life domains and the availability of new datasets that allow for more detailed studies on these connections. In this thematic issue on spatial underpinnings of social inequalities...

Because the demographic composition of neighborhoods and schools overlaps, their effects on educational attainment are not independent of each other. Throughout the early teenage years, the timing and duration of exposure to neighborhood and school contexts can vary, advocating for a longitudinal approach when studying schooling outcomes. This stud...

University-community engagement has been implemented by an increasing number of universities across the world, in a period characterized by growing international competition. The growth of interest in university-community engagement has led to multiple definitions of this term and a high level of complexity in defining what it entails. Using a lite...

The book “Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality: a Global Perspective” investigates the link between income inequality and residential segregation between socio-economic groups in 24 large cities and their urban regions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. Author teams with in-depth local knowledge...

Households with children have been suggested to play a key role in ethnic residential segregation. One possible mechanism is that school district boundaries affect their segregation patterns, but direct evidence on this is scarce. This study investigates the role of school catchment areas for ethnic residential segregation among different types of...

This open access book investigates the link between income inequality and socio-economic residential segregation in 24 large urban regions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. It offers a unique global overview of segregation trends based on case studies by local author teams. The book shows important global trends...

An extensive body of research has documented the deleterious effects of community violence on adolescent development and behavior. Much of this research focuses on how exposure violence structures social interaction, and, ultimately, how it motivates youth to engage in troublesome behavior. This study builds upon this body of research to demonstrat...

News travels fast and far, and the general idea is that the spatial extent of news coverage has increased over time. Information flows are always involved in systems of interdependent cities. This is the reason why George Zipf and Allan Pred, both pioneers of the urban systems literature, were eager to obtain data on these relations to understand u...

Based on data from the 1980s, Sassen’s influential book ‘The Global City’ interrogated how changes in the occupational structure affect socio-economic residential segregation in global cities. Here, using data for New York City, London and Tokyo, we reframe and answer this question for recent decades. Our analysis shows an increase in the share of...

Neighbourhood socioeconomic change is often related to structural processes that transform urban income compositions. In the Netherlands, restructuring of the welfare state and the housing market are examples. The paper examines the role of structural processes in neighbourhood income change in four Dutch cities (1999-2014) by decomposing total cha...

Understanding how inequalities are transmitted through generations and restrict upward spatial mobility has long been a concern of geographic research. Previous research has identified that the neighborhood in which someone grows up is highly predictive of the type of neighborhood he or she will live in as an independent adult. What remains largely...

Active citizenship related to neighborhood governance is dependent on the political and governance structures of its context, and is therefore different in the Global North and the Global South. Local active citizenship is often presented from a Northwestern perspective, with its own active culture of engagement. In contrast, it is often shaped by...

Local governments make use of 'enterprise language' to encourage citizens to adopt entrepreneurial behaviour in managing their daily lives and solving problems that emerge in their neighbourhood. In this paper, we examine the use of enterprise language and the promotion of enterprise in Dutch urban policy focusing specifically on how Dutch cities u...

Previous studies have highlighted the importance of having long term data for the study of cities, but such sources are relatively scarce. This is especially the case for data about relations between cities, which is a crucial aspect of urban dynamics. Over the last two decades, many efforts have been made to digitalize texts, including books and n...

Borrowed size refers to the idea that small cities near larger metropolitan centres can reap the advantages of large agglomerations, but without the costs of agglomeration. The study explores whether broadband internet helps such smaller cities to enjoy the labour market benefits of a larger city. Using Swedish micro-data from 2007 to 2015, togethe...

Teleworking may increase the willingness to accept a longer commute. This paper presents new evidence of the effect of teleworking on the length of commutes. We use novel panel data from the Netherlands, for the years 2008-2018, and find stronger effects compared to studies that use older data. Between 2008 and 2018 however, the effect was remarkab...

Theory behind neighbourhood effects suggests that people’s spatial context potentially affects individual outcomes across multiple scales and geographies. We argue that neighbourhood effects research needs to break away from the ‘tyranny’ of neighbourhood and consider alternative ways to measure the wider sociospatial context of people, placing ind...

In urban geography research there is a small supply of articles which reflect upon the aims and motives of entrepreneurs when they enter neighbourhoods that are undergoing a process of gentrification. The aim of this paper is to better understand the explanatory factors behind the timing of entrepreneurial changes that take place during the commerc...

Multiscale measures of population - Supplemental video

Neighbourhood socioeconomic change is a complex phenomenon which is driven by multiple processes. Most research has focused on the role of urban-level processes, which lead to an exchange of relative positions among neighbourhoods of a single metropolitan area. Consequently, the effects of structural processes on neighbourhood socioeconomic change,...

Previous research has reported evidence of intergenerational transmissions of neighbourhood status and social and economic outcomes later in life. Research also shows neighbourhood effects on adult incomes of both childhood and adult neighbourhood experiences. However, these estimates of neighbourhood effects may be biased because confounding facto...

In the Netherlands, active citizenship in the context of urban regeneration of deprived neighbourhoods seems to have evolved into ‘entrepreneurial citizenship’. The concept of entrepreneurial citizenship combines top-down and bottom-up elements. National and/or local governments promote an ideal citizen with entrepreneurship skills and competencies...

Existing empirical research on the link between ethnic minority concentration in residential environments and voting for the radical right is inconclusive, mainly due to major differences between studies in the spatial scale at which minority concentration is measured. We examined whether the presence of non-western ethnic minorities in the residen...

The spatial concentration of immigrants in disadvantaged neighbourhoods may hinder their opportunities for social and economic integration. It is therefore important that immigrants can translate their available economic resources into mobility to less disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This study adds to existing research on the relationship between so...

The housing career describes the succession of housing states, events, and transitions that individuals experience over time. The structure of housing careers is influenced by the trajectory of people's lives, their links to other individuals, and the contextual opportunities and constraints they encounter. The life‐course perspective provides a ri...

The neighbourhood in which people live reflects their social class and preferences, so studying socio-spatial mobility between neighbourhood types gives insight into the openness of spatial class structures of societies and into the ability of people to leave disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In this paper we study the extent to which people move betwe...

Deliverable 5.3 for the EU funded (H2020) RELOCAL project: https://relocal.eu/deliverables/

This paper provides new insights into the relationships between income inequality and residential segregation between socioeconomic groups by undertaking a comparative study of European urban regions. In Europe, income inequalities are the lowest in North Europe and the highest in South Europe. In many East European countries, a switch from low ine...

Growing up in a disadvantaged parental neighbourhood is related to long-term exposure to similar neighbourhoods as adults. However, there are multiple socio-spatial contexts besides the residential neighbourhood to which individuals are exposed over the life course, such as households, schools, and places of work and leisure, which also influence t...

The global financial and economic crisis that hit the world since 2008 has affected the lives of many people all over the world and resulted in declining incomes, rising unemployment, foreclosures, forced residential moves, and cut-backs in government expenditure. The extent to which the crisis has affected urban neighborhoods and has led to rising...

Despite the many uncertainties of life in cities, promises of economic prosperity, social mobility and happiness have fuelled the imagination of generations of urban migrants in search of a better life. Access to jobs, housing and amenities, and fewer restrictions of personal choices are some of the perceived advantages of cities, characterised her...

Although many studies claim that the residential context is an important factor in shaping the ethnic identity of minorities, there are few studies which actually measure this relationship. This study contributes to filling this gap by investigating the relationship between the ethnic composition of neighbourhoods and changes in the self-reported e...

This article focuses on the influence of state-led urban redevelopment on the place attachment of deprived and old homeowners living in danwei communities that are facing demolition in Shenyang, China. It investigates lived experiences through in-depth interviews with homeowners in the context of the pre-demolition phase, i.e. an inevitable prospec...

Despite the massive forced relocation of residents during urban restructuring in China, there is no systematic overview regarding how residents experience the process and its outcomes. Most studies concerning urban restructuring in China directly equate forced relocation with displacement, which has a negative connotation. This predominantly negati...

The socio-economic mosaic of urban neighbourhoods changes under the influence of three distinctive distributional processes: reordering of the socio-economic position of urban neighbourhoods; changing levels of inequality between neighbourhoods; and an overall growth or decline in income levels which affects all neighbourhoods of an urban area. Wit...

Ageing of the population in European cities creates fundamental challenges with regard to employment, pensions, health care and other age-related services. Many older people want to live independent lives as long as possible. This aspiration is currently strongly supported by many local governments. A precondition for ‘ageing in place’ is that olde...

It is well-known that the spatial scale at which neighborhoods are operationalized can affect the outcomes we observe. This article describes a typology of children׳s neighborhood income trajectories generated by sequence analysis using 100 × 100 m grids to define neighborhoods. The article further describes ethnic differences in the prevalence of...

This open access book explores the formation and socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in Europe. Are these estates clustered or scattered? Which social groups originally had access to residential space in housing estates? What is the size, scale and geography of housing estates, their architectural and built environment composition,...

This paper aims to better understand the effects of homeownership and regional unemployment levels on inter-provincial migration during the recent economic crisis in Spain. We use rich individual level microdata from the last two Spanish censuses (2001-2011) to study migration. Our findings suggest that regional unemployment levels do not have a st...

In many large cities, socioeconomic segregation is increasing; rich and poor are increasingly living separated in different neighbourhoods. The rich live more concentrated than the poor because they can afford to buy houses in the best neighbourhoods. This chapter develops a multi-level conceptual model of segregation, by using three conceptual lev...

It is generally found that workers are more inclined to accept a job that is located farther away from home if they have the ability to work from home one day a week or more (telecommuting). Such findings inform us about the effectiveness of telecommuting policies that try to alleviate congestion and transport-related emissions, but they also stres...

The study of relations between cities has long been a major focus in urban research. For decades, this field has grown integrating contributions from many disciplines. But today, the field appears rather fragmented. This study analyses the body of literature that has developed over the last 23 years to identify schools of thought on interurban rela...

Socio-spatial polarization is increasing in large cities throughout Europe (Tammaru et al., 2016). Socio-spatial polarization refers to the process where the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing, which is translated into spatial segregation along ethnic or socioeconomic lines. In the European context, this has resulted in distinctive spa...

The share of ethnic minority residents has been increasing in many major European cities during the past two decades and these cities are experiencing increasing ethnic diversity (Vertovec, 2007). For example: In 1999, non-western ethnic minorities, such as Turks, Moroccans, Antilleans, and Surinamese, comprised 8.5% of the Dutch population. By 201...

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which started in 2008, has had a major impact on many Western European and North American countries. In the years preceding the crisis, many countries in the Global North experienced rising house prices, accompanied by an expansion of mortgage financing (Wachter, 2015). As the financial market has become increasin...

Mid-twentieth-century large housing estates, which can be found all over Europe, were once seen as modernist urban and social utopias that would solve a variety of urban problems. Since their construction, many large housing estates have become poverty concentrating neighbourhoods, often with large shares of immigrants. In Northern and Western Euro...