The equalising mirage? Socioeconomic segregation and environmental justice in post-socialist Bucharest
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The equalising mirage? Socioeconomic segregation and environmental justice in post‑socialist Bucharest Samuel Rufat1,5 · Szymon Marcińczak2,3,4 Received: 11 December 2018 / Accepted: 6 December 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Unlike the vast majority of European capitals, and despite growing income inequality, descriptive measures of socioeconomic segregation seem to show a desegregation trend in Bucharest over the last two decades. Socioeconomic segregation and environmental justice studies provide completing insights of the intricated uneven geographies of social, economic and environmental disparities of post-socialist cities. And Bucharest is paradoxically the most populated and yet less studied of the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper explores changes in the patterns of socioeconomic segregation in post-socialist Bucharest, sheds more light on the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and the patterns of segregation, and includes ’attractor’ and ’repellent’ environmental factors, contributing to combine environmental justice and socioeconomic segregation approaches. Despite the apparently continuous desegregation trend, and even when controlling for the presence and proximity of other predictors, environmental factors play an increasing role in shaping local socioeconomic segregation patterns. This would suggest the need for consideration of the environmental factors in public policies aimed at mitigating the social cost of the transition and residential segregation. This should also lead to use descriptive measures of segregation more cautiously and to explore the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics, environmental conditions and the local patterns of segregation instead. Keywords Socioeconomic segregation · Environmental justice · Post-socialist · Bucharest
* Samuel Rufat samuel.rufat@u‑cergy.fr Szymon Marcińczak [email protected] 1
Université de Cergy-Pontoise, 33 bvd du Port, 95011 Cergy‑Pontoise, Paris, France
2
Institute of Urban Geography and Tourism Studies, University of Łódz, Łódz, Poland
3
Department of Geography, Centre for Migration and Urban Studies, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
4
Department of Geography, Environmental, Management and Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
5
Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), 1 rue Descartes, Paris, France
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
S. Rufat, S. Marcińczak
1 Introduction Socioeconomic, income or class-based segregation has been on the rise in Europe and North America for the past two decades (Florida 2017; Marcińczak et al. 2016). On both sides of the Atlantic, the deepening of socio-spatial divisions has its roots in growing income inequality. Whereas the results from the U.S. (Reardon and Bischoff 2011) and Western Europe (Musterd et al. 2016) illustrate that rising socioeconomic segregation closely follows growing income disparities, the effect of economic inequality on spatial divisions seems to differ in former socialist count
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