Spatial Inequality in Socioeconomic and Built Environment structure in Britain: Trajectories, Interactions and Indicators

Inequality remains a considerable challenge for socioeconomic development despite significant progress over the last 200 years. Persistent socioeconomic inequality has produced environments of social discontent across the world in declining and lagging-behind areas. Similar to socioeconomic inequalities, there are areas that lack access to more sustainable developments such as mixed land use, walkable neighbourhoods and access to open spaces. These different forms of spatial inequalities highlight the complexity of the underlying factors that relate not only to population but also to built environment characteristics. Current research on spatial inequalities has made significant contributions establishing persistent patterns of inequality within countries and regions. A key focus has been on understanding places that have been left behind in terms of their economic and social opportunities. International organisations have emerged to collect data and evidence to combat existing regional inequalities across a range of socioeconomic, housing, environmental, healthcare and infrastructure domains. However, and despite the substantive research agenda on spatial inequalities, there are still key deficiencies in understanding spatial inequalities and their evolution over time at small geographical scales especially in the UK. The deficiencies in spatial inequalities research in the UK can be summarised in four points. First, due to lack of consistent data at the same spatial scale, there is often difficulty to study neighbourhood changes across longer time-periods at highly granular level. Second, spatial inequalities are often established at coarse geographical scales, primarily countries or regions. In addition, traditional neighbourhood change theories assume that neighbourhoods follow a linear process of change. Third, measuring sustainable development in urban areas and its equity over space is an aspect of spatial inequalities that has attracted less attention. Fourth, while spatial inequalities related to population attributes have been better established in literature, there is still a research gap in the understanding of spatial cooccurrence of inequalities across population and built environment domains. By addressing these research gaps, this thesis aims to progress our understanding of spatial inequality across population and built environment domains and their interactions in Great Britain. To this end, the broad methodological strategy adopted consisted of four stages. The first stage develops a framework to study the evolution of spatial processes over time on a temporally consistent geography. The second stage sought to capture structural changes and establish how intra-regional and inter-urban inequalities have evolved over time. The third stage sought to develop a set of indicators to measure sustainable urban development and identify patterns of spatial inequalities in the built environment and how they changed over time. The final stage sought to understand the interrelationships between population related and ambient environment (i.e. built and natural environment) inequalities. The findings of this thesis contributes to data and methods, theory, substantive knowledge, and public policy. Regarding data and methods, a number of research data and software products were delivered. In relation to theory, this thesis contributes towards expanding theories of spatial inequality and neighbourhood change, but also established that more disadvantaged areas tend to be spatially unequal in a set of neighbourhood-level attributes in population and built environment domains. In terms of substantive knowledge, this thesis provides robust evidence on the various forms of urban inequality in Great Britain and their evolution over time. Moreover, it conceptualises the importance of using a dynamic approach for understanding spatial inequality and determine the extent of long-term inter-regional and inter-urban inequality in Britain. Another substantive contribution of this thesis is to develop an analytical framework to measure sustainable urban development indicators. Finally, the significance of this thesis is also reflected by contributions to public policy. Taken together, the findings from this thesis provide evidence that can inform public policy to matters relating to multidimensional urban inequality in Great Britain