Introduction

This chapter deals with the social dimension of integration processes of immigrants. The organisation of work units within IMISCOE defined the social dimension as distinct from the political, the economic and the cultural/religious dimension which are treated in the two preceding and the following chapter respectively. This field is a vast one covering a significant amount of research in the past decades. In surveying the literature on social integration we will focus specifically on its local and spatial expressions for reasons that we will unfold in the next pages.

In the first section, we discuss some of the conceptual issues related to the term ‘integration’ and its use in the academic and policy fields. We discuss the notion of integration as a general sociological concept and propose to use the social environment, in which individuals and groups form interdependencies, as the special unit of study. Focusing on spaces as the locus of developing interdependencies, we emphasise the spatial dimension of immigrants’ social integration processes.

Section two focuses specifically on the spatial dimensions of integration. It reviews the relationships between the characteristics of the housing market and their implications in terms of socio-ethnic segregation, emphasising the spatial dimension of social integration. Immigrants’ and ethnic minorities’ geographical placement and the extent of their mobility condition their access to urban resources (e.g. housing, education, health, jobs and different kinds of goods and services). We discuss the basic concepts of ethnic segregation as well as its advantages and disadvantages by drawing on contemporary literature. The main determinants of residential segregation and the manner in which they are explained and conveyed in the literature are surveyed. Finally, we discuss the issue of accessibility to urban resources, as a spatial expression of social integration and its measurement.

In the third and final section, we seek to synthesise the key ideas and conclusions of the previous sections and present a number of proposals for future lines of research.

From assimilation to integration and back again

If the current use of the concept of integration in social sciences and policy when dealing with immigrant settlement is relatively recent, the associated notions of assimilation, acculturation and accommodation have a longer history.