Centre for Migration and Urban Studies

The aim of the IMO is to build a data infrastructure for mobility studies that integrates emerging (mobile phones, sensors); traditional (individual level censuses, registers) and contextual (environment, traffic sensors, urban sensors etc) data sources.

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

https://imo.ut.ee/

During the project social and spatial trajectories of large housing estates built during socialist decades will be analysed. The studies are carried out in 3 countries - in St.Petersburg, Russia; Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia; Berlin and Halle, Germany. In these spatial contexts the institutional framework for urban policies and planning measures is different. During the project comparative research will be carried out and published and major research gaps will be identified to enable establishing systematic research in the field in the future.

Principal investigator: Kadri Leetmaa 

https://www.estatestransition.org/

National URBACT Point (NUP) in Estonia distributes information about the activities and funding opportunities of the European Territorial Cooperation programme URBACT in Estonia and encourages discussions about sustainable integrated urban development within the country.

Principal investigator: Kadri Leetmaa

https://urbact.eu/urbact-eesti

The research project Urbanization, Mobilities and Immigration (URMI) analyzes future of urbanization and its drivers, state-of-art and promotion of urban sustainability and resource efficiency, impact of urbanization to regions, and the impact of immigration on urbanization, especially in the largest urban regions in Finland. The focus is on immigrant integration across multiple life domains in the three largest city regions in Finland - the capital, Tampere and Turku regions. The dynamics of ethnic residential segregation and its relationship with intermarriages and workplace integration are studied. The mobility between Estonia and Finland is thoroughly studied. A longitudinal research design is applied utilizing primarily register-based data.

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

The objective of DEPRIVEDHOODS is to come to a better understanding of the relationship between socio-economic inequality, poverty and neighbourhoods. The spatial concentration of poverty within cities is of great concern to national governments, partly based on a belief in neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in deprived neighbourhoods has an additional negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their own characteristics. This belief has contributed to the development of area-based policies designed to introduce a more ‘favourable’ socio-economic mix in deprived neighbourhoods. Despite the persistent belief in neighbourhood effects, there is surprisingly little evidence that living in deprived neighbourhoods really affects individual lives. There is little consensus on the importance of neighbourhood effects, the underlying causal mechanisms, the conditions under which they are important and the most effective policy responses. It is likely that most studies claiming to have found that poor neighbourhoods make people poor(er) only show that poor people live in poor neighbourhoods because they cannot afford to live elsewhere. DEPRIVEDHOODS will break new ground by simultaneously studying neighbourhood sorting over the life course, neighbourhood change, and neighbourhood effects, within one theoretical and analytical framework. This project will be methodologically challenging and will be the first integrated, multi-country research project on neighbourhood effects to use unique geo-referenced longitudinal data from Sweden, United Kingdom, Estonia, and The Netherlands. Special attention will be paid to the operationalization of neighbourhoods and how it affects modelling outcomes. Through its integrated and international approach, DEPRIVEDHOODS will fundamentally advance understandings of the ways in which individual outcomes interact with the neighbourhood, which will ultimately lead to more targeted and effective policy measures.

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

This research programme examines the links between various forms of spatial population mobility (external and internal migration, temporary mobility) and residential segregation for addressing the challenges facing sprawling urban regions, with a particular focus on Estonia and East Europe. Research is mainly based on large scale quantitative microdata, such as population censuses, population registers, and mobile phone data. The results of the research programme contribute to the a) better understanding of geographic processes and their consequences in urban regions; b) development of international knowledge centre for spatial mobility, urban and regional research; c) enforces MSc and PhD studies in the same field at the University of Tartu; and d) smart, sustainable and inclusive spatial planning practices and urban development in Estonia.

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

The central hypothesis of this project is that socio-economic, socio-demographic, ethnic and cultural diversity can positively affect social cohesion, economic performance and social mobility of individuals and groups. A better social cohesion, higher economic performance and increased chances for social mobility will make European cities more liveable and more competitive. In this period of long-term economic downturn (or sometimes even crisis) and increasing competition from countries elsewhere in the world (e.g. China, India), it is important to find out how and under which circumstances European's urban diversity can be turned into social and economic advantages.
Many current urban policies lack a positive view on urban diversity, because they generally focus on the negative aspects of diversity, such as intolerance, racism, discrimination and insecurity. New policies, instruments and governance arrangements are needed, and sometimes they already exist. We have to find out how they have become successful and how they can be implemented elsewhere.
When we acknowledge the hyper-diversity of our urban societies, we also have to acknowledge that these societies cannot flourish from standard or general approaches aiming at, for example, economic growth or better housing or more liveable neighbourhoods. Increasingly, more diverse, more tailored arrangements are needed, arrangements that have an eye for hyper-diverse cities and communities.
As a result of the project, new and innovative policy instruments and governance arrangements will be suggested that (a) recognise urban diversity as a positive aspect; (b) increase interaction and communication between the diversity of groups in urban society; and (c) increase participation to satisfy the needs of the communities.
The project thus aims at finding out how urban diversity influences three core issues: social cohesion, economic performance and social mobility and how governance arrangements help to strengthen this.

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

In most EU countries, a large part of Third Country Nationals (TCNs) experience a situation of sufferance linked to both specific risks in the employment domain and conditions of social exclusion. This is related to two primary features we find in the European model of integration: first, an over-emphasis on the economic and working dimension, conceived as the key one justifying TCN workers’ presence in the host countries; secondly, a tendency to collectively represent TCNs’ work and economic role in terms of an asymmetric complementarity with autochthonous labor, a perception which is fuelled by – and simultaneously favors – immigrant concentrations in specific, mainly low qualified, job sectors (where job vacancies are mostly concentrated). At the same time, however, the consolidation of the migratory phenomenon has led EU countries, according to their distinctive tradition of respect for individual dignity, to extend rights and protection for TCNs and their family members, fostering the spreading of the condition of “denizen”. As a result, at the heart of the European model of integration there is an implicit tension between the economicism implied by EU members states’ systems of entry regulation and the principles of solidarity and equal opportunities. In order to sustain both economic competitiveness and social cohesion in Europe, the project aims to tackle three major challenges as related to TCNs. The first change entails the progressive evolution of a system based on the depiction of immigrants as “contingently instrumental resources”, in order to render TCNs’ abilities and potential a structural resource for the qualitative development of EU economies and societies, according to a real “human capital model”. The second change entails a more diffuse and more conscious adoption, among different kinds of organization (private, public and non-profit), of diversity management (DM); i.e., an approach to human capital capable not only of favoring the expression of those traits (attitudes, skills, needs, etc.) that are specific to certain groups of people, but also of transforming such factors into an added value for the organizational performance. The third essential change deals with the necessity of rebalancing an integration model that so far has largely stressed the economic (and working) dimension at the expense of the social and political ones.

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

One of the most studied topics in urban social geography has been residential segregation by ethnicity. Recently discussions have been extended from residential segregation to other spheres of people’s daily lives. It is asked whether other spheres besides the neighborhood where inter-ethnic contacts are created are important in reproducing segregation patterns (work, schools, leisure time activities, services, personal networks, etc.). The proposed research uses an integrated research framework about majority and minority contacts in different spheres of daily life. We are interested in interrelations between four spheres where inter-ethnic contacts are created – places of residence, places of work, family networks and leisure time contacts.
Since in the residential segregation literature two broad discussions could be differentiated – minority segregation and the segregation-behavior of the host population – we also integrate the minority and majority perspectives to better understand to what extent both groups contribute to segregation. In empirical studies, we focus more on the workplace and leisure time domains. We use the characteristics describing the contacts in the workplace and leisure time domain as dependent or main explanatory variables, and we ask: How is the workplace and leisure time segregation created? And, how do workplace and leisure time contacts influence inter-ethnic contacts in other domains (family network, residential choice, workplace / leisure time)?
We use data on two types of immigrant societies – Nordic countries with growing and heterogeneous immigrant communities (Sweden and Denmark), and post-Soviet countries with homogeneous minority communities (Estonia), where the high-level of immigration stopped two decades ago. More specifically, we use unique longitudinal individual-level databases based on Swedish and Danish population and employment data registers, the cross-sectional Census 2000 database, and we include the block with relevant questions to a regular municipal sample survey carried out in Tartu, Estonia, in 2013.

Principal investigator: Kadri Leetmaa

Migration from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to Western Europe increased significantly after the eastward expansion of the European Union (EU) in 2004, bringing along growing fears in origin countries of losing a significant part of their highly educated population. However, our knowledge on who are the people who leave CEE countries for Western Europe is far from perfect, and there is considerable demand for further studies based on high quality quantitative data.
First, previous studies show that the level of education of migrants is high on the one hand (reflecting the “brain-drain” from CEE), and the education and labour market outcomes of migrants do not match with each other (the “brain-waste”) on the other. However, increasing migration flows from CEE to Western Europe relate to student mobility and short term work, and there is thus a considerable circulation in East-West migration. There is very little research on this possible “brain-gain” for CEE countries as a result of this circular nature of migration within Europe.
Second, previous studies suggest that there are several reasons to expect ethnic differences in emigration. These reasons include the ongoing discrimination of ethnic minorities in some CEE countries, the fact that ethnic minorities are often emotionally less bounded to the origin country, and there are higher levels of unemployment among ethnic minorities. However, there is little research on ethnic differences in East-West migration.
The aim of the project is to clarify changes in East-West migration (emigration and return migration) since EU enlargement in 2004 with a special focus on educational and ethnic differences in migration. Our study draws on the case study of Estonia, a country with a very heterogeneous population, including a large ethnic minority population. Thus, Estonian case study allows us to focus on the core debates on East-West migration, and thus to expand the general understanding of contemporary migration in Europe. The project will address the following research questions. First, what is the population composition of East-West migration and how it has changed after EU enlargement in 2004? Second, how does the probability to stay abroad or to return to homeland vary among migrant groups?

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

Unequal distribution of population groups in the housing market is influenced by the structural constraints and opportunities, as well as by the subjective choices of individuals. Radical political, economic and social transformations that took place in the Estonian society in the post-1991 period have influenced individuals’ housing careers and changes in the residential distribution pattern of different population groups. Suburbanisation has become the main process changing the pattern of residential distribution in the Tallinn urban region. Another, less-studied major process is the revitalisation of the inner city in downtown areas.
The aim of the research project is to analyse changes that have taken place in the socio-spatial residential distribution pattern (in relation to the socio-economic, ethnic and demographic characteristics of the population) in Tallinn and the surrounding metropolitan region during the post-1991 period, and to understand the mutual relationship between individual and structural factors influencing these changes. In the Estonian context, the Tallinn urban region has witnessed the most rapid development during the transition period.
The population and housing census forms the basis for studying the socio-spatial residential pattern of population groups in 2000, whereas the post-2000 changes in the pattern of residential differentiation, individual housing careers and factors influencing them are analysed by using data from different surveys. The proposed qualitative case studies enable to study more thoroughly the factors influencing individual housing careers. It is assumed that the 2000s have brought significant changes in socio-spatial disparities and housing conditions, stemming from the socio-economic status of households. The housing behaviour of the younger generation is presumably different from other population categories, and differences are also expected between the housing careers of Estonians and non-Estonians.
The main outcome of the proposed research project will be improved knowledge of the socio-spatial processes in the Tallinn urban area as an example of a post-socialist CEE metropolitan region. This scientific knowledge will also have direct practical applications. A crucial outcome of the project will be a contribution to international cooperation and to the future academic career of the participating researchers and postgraduate students.

Principal investigator: Anneli Kährik

The aim of the research project "Urbanisation, suburbanisation and counterurbanisation of population subgroups in Estonia" is to analyse trends and determinants of migration in Estonia in a comparative perspective with other countries (in transition). We study urbanisation, suburbanisation and counterurbanisation by the main personal and contextual characteristics and we analyse the interdependencies between migration and commuting. We use "Census 2000" and "Social Survey 2004" data and logistic regression for data analyses in our study.

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru

Principal investigator: Tiit Tammaru