The Housing Market as a Source of Urban Demographic and Social Change: The Impact of Flat Break-Ups in London and Condominium Conversion in the Netherlands

Abstract

A great deal of research has been done on urban social patterns over the past sixty years and it is now accepted that the structure and composition of the resident population in different areas are influenced to an important extent by the structure and geography of housing opportunities. The reason is simple. Robson (1975) has pointed out that ‘social areas are made up of people living in houses, distributed in space’. Given the well-known relationships between house type, tenure, price and the like and the character of the resident population and the fact that different types of housing are not ditributed randomly over space, it follows that the social composition of different residential areas is likely to reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, the distribution of the housing stock by type, tenure, price and accesss (Robson 1969, Bourne 1981, Bassett and Short 1981).