‘The housing settlement of immigrants and its effects on integration processes’

Iker Barbero González, María Caballero Bellido, Saioa Bilbao Urkidi.

This research project addresses the need to know and understand the social processes behind the housing segregation found in our societies, and their consequences for integration and social cohesion.

In view of its exploratory nature, we have chosen to undertake the study in a small, manageable context: the city of Bilbao.

The idea is to broach this complex reality through a preliminary exercise in which we try out different approaches, concepts, methods and analyses in order to check their validity and efficacy for the generation of new knowledge.

The general objectives pursued are of a varied nature:

• empirical, describing the housing settlement of foreign immigrants in Bilbao including characteristics, causes and consequences
• theoretical, testing newly minted concepts and models for the study of immigrant housing patterns in receiver societies and validating existing approaches (ecological and ethnic) for the case that concerns us here
• methodological, checking the validity and efficacy of an analytical scheme that combines quantitative and qualitative methods and techniques, both ethnographical and sociological, for the purpose of their future application to other realities
• and, finally, practical, providing guidelines for future social intervention policies.