"Segregation is a central societal issue that affects everyone"

Roger Andersson, professor emeritus of human geography

Where and how people live – and why – is a central and ever-present societal issue. IBF's former professor of human geography Roger Andersson has spent 30 years investigating residential segregation and the geographical separation between different groups in society.

– I have long believed that segregation is a central societal issue that affects everyone. Interest in both politics and media coverage has grown in scope, which reflects the increased importance of the issue. Not just what causes what, but also how it affects upbringing conditions, the education system, the labor market and security issues.

That is what Roger Andersson, professor emeritus of human geography at IBF, says, who has long studied residential segregation in Sweden. He defines residential segregation as a geographical separation between different groups in society. The difference can be based on several different factors, but some of the most common factors that researchers study are income, age and ethnicity. Segregation can occur in all human societies. But how segregation is created and recreated is not an easy nut to crack. What do immigration and emigration patterns look like, and what are the consequences of that? What counts as a residential area? Who lives separately from whom? Here, aspects such as planning and housing costs, the residents' socio-economic status, origin and age interact in different ways.

– In our research, we have looked at many aspects: causes, patterns, consequences and the politics of segregation. The question has great explosive power because it concerns people's living conditions and what significance, for example, poverty has when it is concentrated geographically, says Roger Andersson.

How do you measure segregation? The starting point is a categorization of both population and geography, the latter based either on coordinates or a district division. The categorization of geography is used together with IBF's nationwide population and housing database with annual information on everyone living in Sweden, and information on, for example, family type, education and income.

– With the help of the database, we can see how many people are left in an area after a few years and where those who have moved have gone. This gives us a better understanding of the ongoing geographical sorting of households across a city's residential areas and how society is changing and can study the effects over time. All data is of course de-identified, says Roger Andersson.

Thanks to its detailed basis, Swedish research into residential segregation has attracted great interest even outside Sweden's borders. That is why IBF has had several collaborations with researchers in, among others, the other Nordic countries, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA.

Are there similarities between segregation in Sweden and other countries?

– The underlying driving forces behind it are quite similar. For example, we know that financial resources are crucial for who lives where and that the opportunity to choose a residential area is limited by various types of discrimination. We also know that in Sweden it has been more common to have multinational residential areas, while in many other countries it has been more common to have ethnically homogeneous areas.

Roger Andersson has retired, but has continued to conduct active research. He has been responsible for the Swedish part of an EU project on the housing, work and education of young people, which included 16 cities in Europe. The Swedish study, which focused on Borlänge, has been completed.

– In several European countries, the 2008 financial crisis knocked an entire generation out of action. Today, there is a big difference in living conditions between younger and older people, so we are looking at how the financial crisis affected inequality patterns. The Covid-19 crisis has further increased the need to focus on the living conditions of younger people, says Roger Andersson.

In the future, he hopes for studies that are ongoing over longer periods of time and that can provide answers to the importance of the residential area for how people are doing in life. He also hopes that society will start to look at segregation with more realistic eyes.

– Segregation is often perceived as something that exists in a specific place, for example disadvantaged suburbs. That is why politicians focus on those areas, which can both stigmatize the residents and hide the root causes of segregated housing. Vulnerable areas are only one side of segregation, on the other are the affluent areas and all other residential areas.

Text: Anna Hedlund