Professor Maarten van Ham at the SPS seminar
Professor van Ham talked about “New directions for residential mobility research: Linking lives through time and space”, a work he has developed in partnership with Rory Coulter and Allan Findlay.
Van Ham argues that there is increasing attention to international migration, but less interest in short distance migration and immobility. According to van Ham, “Most moves are over very short (less than 5km) distances”. * (the following are excerpts from van Ham’s presentation)
“Short-distance moves are crucial for the structuration of everyday life, the operation of housing and labour markets and the (re)production of social inequalities”.
In order to understand short-distance migration and immobility, van Ham and associates use life course theories, where biographies and life stories are central. According to van Ham, there are 3 key aspects of life course theories relevant to his study: life course theories allow us to conceptualise the DIVERSITY (occurrence, timing and sequencing of life events) of life trajectories beyond deterministic notions of a shared life cycle (Feijten, 2005). Life courses are bound together by RELATIONAL TIES (Bailey, 2009; Elder, 1994). Moving decisions and mobility behaviours are fundamentally relational. An emphasis on BIOGRAPHIES and the multidimensional nature of time guides us to conceptualise moving as a process rooted in the context of past experience, as well as hopes and aspirations for the future (Gutting, 1996; Kley and Mulder, 2010)”
In order to understand the diverse relational and biographical dimensions of residential mobility, van Ham argues that it is crucial to use longitudinal data gathered from individuals and their moves through time. According to him, geo-referenced longitudinal data is fortunately becoming increasingly available. Results suggest low dependency on neighbourhood effects for social mobility and immobility among different social groups. It also suggests high correlation between ethnicity and social mobility and immobility in the cases analysed. A broad trend seems to be the dwindling of general upward social mobility in the last few decades in Western Europe, expressed in the decline of upward housing careers.
Maarten van Ham is Professor of Urban Renewal and head of the Neighbourhood Change and Housing research group at OTB. More information can be found at http://www.maartenvanham.nl
