Ghetto Lists, Good Fortune Paradoxes and Neighbourhood Effects: Can Segregation Be Built out of Existence?
Professor Matz Dahlberg’s Conferment Ceremony Lecture
“Have you thanked your neighbors in your dissertation?” That was the question posed by Matz Dahlberg, Professor of Economics, when he gave his Conferment Ceremony Lecture in the Uppsala university hall for new PhDs, titled Ghetto Lists, Good Fortune Paradoxes, and Neighborhood Effects – Can Segregation Be Built Out of Existence?
Matz Dahlberg
The lecture was structured around three central questions:
- Is it a new phenomenon to label residential areas as marginalized?
- Does it matter what kind of neighborhood one grows up in?
- Can segregation be built away?
The public designation of "vulnerable areas" is not a new phenomenon, Dahlberg noted. Since the 1990s, Swedish authorities have implemented several large area-based initiatives with similar aims, such as the Metropolitan Initiative (Storstadssatsningen) and the Local Development Agreements. The police’s list of vulnerable areas is thus only the latest expression of a long-standing ambition to improve conditions in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
But there is a troubling continuity: the same areas often appear on these lists year after year. One explanation, according to Dahlberg, is the so-called good fortune paradox – when individuals "succeed" through work or education, they tend to move away from the area, which undermines collective improvement.
The lecture also addressed the question of how much neighborhoods actually affect people’s future prospects. Here, Dahlberg emphasized the difficulty of isolating so-called neighborhood effects, since people are not randomly placed in residential areas – we choose (or are forced into) housing based on our resources and circumstances.
However, there are research programs that allow for causal conclusions. One of the most well-known is the American Moving to Opportunity experiment, where households from poor neighborhoods were randomly assigned the chance to move to more affluent areas. The results show that children who grow up in less poor neighborhoods attain higher education, better health, and improved labor market outcomes later in life. Similar studies in Sweden – including from Urban Lab, a research initiative at Uppsala University led by Dahlberg – confirm this pattern: neighborhoods do influence people’s life chances.
The lecture concluded with Dahlberg’s key takeaway, based on a recent study from Urban Lab: A large part of segregation can, in fact, be built away.
And yes – neighbors do matter. Maybe it’s time to start thanking them in the acknowledgements of our dissertations.