URBLOG

East Midlands region fastest growing in England

NEWS FROM ONS

The fastest growing English region, over the 10 year period from 2006 to 2016, is expected to be the East Midlands; the South East is projected to remain the most populous region.

Moral, But No Compass

Government, Church and the Future of Welfare
This new major study  draws on hundreds of interviews and survey questionnaires, describes the modern setting in which the government's welfare and related voluntary sector policies often are experienced as “discriminatory”, inadequately rooted in evidence and at risk of failing the faith communities.

produced by the von Hugel Centre for the Study of Faith in Society

Francis Davis in The Tablet

Migration and economic segregation reports from ippr

Floodgates or turnstiles? Post-EU enlargement migration flows to (and from) the UK

Fresh evidence on the scale and nature of migration from the eight new Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 and, to a lesser extent, from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 2007.

A Tale of Two Cities: Neighbourhood segregation by income in two urban case studies

Policy and economic drivers interact with the processes of income segregation at different spatial scales. This research, from ippr, focuses on the processes at the local level. In particular, it explores the relationship between a neighbourhood’s income profile, and the housing market.

One London?

Change and cohesion in three London boroughs

IPPR / Government Office for London report explores the nature of the contemporary challenges to community cohesion in London and sets out how local actors have responded to them.

"...the capital faces its own very particular challenges to community cohesion, including lower levels of neighbourliness and inter-personal trust, families in the same street living on very different incomes and lacking shared experiences, and a very rapidly changing demographic make-up in a context of growing pressures on basic resources, especially housing."

Riven by class and no social mobility - Britain in 2007

Guardian report on 'classless society'

• No change in 10 years of Labour rule
  · 89% say they are judged by class
  · Poll shows deep North-South gap

2007 Citizenship Survey

Civic partiticpation, community cohesion, belonging and discrimination are covered by The Citizenship Survey, a face to face household survey carried out by Communities and Local Government covering a representative core sample of almost 10,000 adults in England and Wales each year.

Headline findings from a comprehensive survey into citizenship and communities  shows that the overwhelming majority of people living in England and Wales have a strong sense of Britishness.

 

Leicester 'to become plural city'

A new study claims Leicester will become the first city in Britain to have no ethnic majority group in 12 years' time.

Researchers at the University of Manchester - who carried out the study - also expect Birmingham to become a plural city in 2024.

New atlas of identity in Britain reveals stark social contrasts

Identity in Britain: A cradle-to-grave atlas

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have created an innovative atlas which provides clear proof that most of Britain is not the diverse country many believe it to be, showing a startling lack of social integration and social mobility.

"Most people think they are average when asked. In most things most are not. Most say they are normal, but our atlas shows that what is normal changes rapidly as you travel across the social topography of human identity in Britain, from the fertile crescent of advantage, where to succeed is to do nothing out of the ordinary, to the peaks of despair, where to just get by is extraordinary." 

Sample maps and staistics

Guardian report

New poverty and wealth maps of Britain reveal inequality to be at 40-year high

Poverty, Wealth and Place

A new way of comparing poverty and wealth trends across Britain shows inequality has reached levels not seen for over 40 years. This is according to research released today (17 July) by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. A second report, published simultaneously, has found that the public believes the gap between rich and poor people is too large.

Urban Britain is heading for Victorian levels of inequality

Tristram Hunt in The Guardian

Today's super-rich are endowing a new generation of cities as divisive and ostentatious as themselves. In New York, Shanghai and London, the cosmopolitan plutocracy outdo each other in displays of ritual vulgarity from the car showroom to the restaurant table. But beneath the helipads, there lurks a growing cityscape of poverty and exploitation.'

Geographer Danny Dorling comments:

'That future has already arrived in London, where rich and poor jostle together most closely. And if the long-term trends we have identified continue, then socially much of the rest of the country will start to look that way. So why let things carry on polarising when we can see that we are heading in the wrong direction?'

TWO TRACK CITIES

Some UK cities still waiting for an urban renaissance

England’s cities are growing but at two different rates, according to a new report published  by the Centre for Cities at ippr. The report includes a new index of performance indicators which combine different measures of employment, population and skills, presenting evidence that unemployment and disadvantage in England is primarily an urban phenomenon but showing that it is distributed unevenly.

"Cities matter. They are the national economy. But the urban renaissance is unfinished business. There's a lot more work to do over next decade, to ensure that all our cities succeed."