ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of some of the work examining residential patterns within cities. Broad patterns of residential segregation within cities can appear relatively fixed and enduring. The chapter considers the processes underpinning these patterns, focusing on ideas of choice and constraint through a consideration of residential mobility and decision making and the operation of housing markets. It also considers the key issues of access to, and affordability of, housing, highlighting a range of contemporary urban issues, such as homelessness and squatting. Gentrification has certainly been a hot topic in urban geography for some time and the volume of work that has been produced could fill a textbook on its own. The mutation of gentrification into this new form of super-gentrification has also questioned the early stage models of gentrification that assumed an endpoint of mature gentrification in neighbourhoods.
