David McCollum

The housing crisis in England and Wales is commonly explained as a national shortage of housing supply, leading to a policy focus on aggregate production targets. This paper challenges that narrative, arguing that this framing has obscured a parallel dimension: a growing spatial mismatch between where homes are and where they are needed, compounded by deepening inequalities in how the existing stock is occupied. Using Local Authority District (LA) data from four decennial censuses (1991 to 2021), this study examines local changes in housing supply availability, the alignment of new stock with demographic pressure and patterns of occupancy inequality across England and Wales. The study contributes a spatially granular, methodologically replicable framework for measuring housing maldistribution. Three key findings question the undersupply narrative. First, a ‘dip and recovery’ pattern characterises availability; for most local areas, pressure was highest in the early 2000s and has recovered since. Second, at the same time, the housing market's response shows a structural breakdown; although new housing supply once tracked demographic need, this relationship weakened after 2001, exacerbating spatial mismatch. Third, deepening spatial polarisation in housing consumption is identified. By clustering LAs based on occupancy rating changes, diverging trajectories are revealed that together form a pattern of concentric mismatch: a financialised ‘hollowing out’ of high‐value urban cores and intensifying overcrowding in displaced inner suburbs co‐exist with densification in the wider unaffordable commuter belt and rising underutilisation in ageing rural areas. Together, these findings frame the housing crisis as a failure of distribution in two senses: of homes to places and of space to people. As supply‐centric housing policies dominate much of the Global North, this perspective provides a transferable analytical lens for examining housing inequalities internationally.

Rather than being an indiscriminate ‘greater leveller’, it is widely recognised that the burden of the covid‐19 pandemic and its aftermath has largely mirrored longstanding cleavages of social and spatial disadvantage. This paper considers how the nature and effects of the mass covid‐induced shift to remote and hybrid working can inform theorisations of contemporary regional inequalities. Through a loosening of the relationship between the geography of home and employment, in theory, these novel working practices and associated changing residential preferences hold potential for easing spatial disparities. Drawing predominantly on interviews and workshops across 15 UK case study areas, this analysis however contends that stark social and spatial divides in the prevalence of remote/hybrid working mean that the propagation of working from home (WFH) may well in fact entrench rather than alleviate geographical inequalities, as working practices have improved for the mainly higher socio‐economic employees who can WFH (overrepresented in prosperous areas) but remain largely unchanged for the majority of the workforce elsewhere who cannot WFH. In this sense, the resilience of core–periphery economic geographies is just as compelling as the significant shift in working practices and residential preferences that the pandemic created. Consequently, caution is needed to avoid a fetishisation of ostensibly transformed post‐pandemic geographies of work–home relations and their potential as a panacea for spatial inequalities.

Reflecting critically on 50 years of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) (RGS‐IBG) Population Geography Research Group (PopGRG), and drawing on interviews with leading population geographers of the British Isles, this paper identifies defining features of Population Geography that attest to its longevity: personal connections and material production; fluidity and adaptability over time and through interdisciplinary contexts; and utility, vitality and relevance of the subdiscipline. We argue that continuation of care, material production and nimbleness can sustain the subdiscipline in the context of ongoing neoliberalisation across Higher Education. To remain vital, Population Geography must also decolonise and promote ‘population thinking’ to more boldly and critically attend to contemporary global challenges.

Population sustainability is a prevalent yet nebulous concept within academic and policy debates surrounding the nature and consequences of demographic and economic change. This research seeks to add nuance to understandings of population sustainability in ageing societies. The fiscal challenges posed by population ageing mean that more and more states are implementing specific policies in response to it, with limited degrees of success thus far. This investigation examines place-based understandings of population sustainability on the part of local stakeholders in a region of Scotland, a country facing significant demographic challenges and which is enacting policy measures specifically aimed at promoting population sustainability. The findings suggest that the on-the-ground realities of population sustainability are nuanced and complex. As such, there is scope for greater attention to the diversity and complexities of population and economic change at the sub-national scale in broader academic conceptualisations of and policy responses to the increasingly pressing issue of population sustainability.

This paper seeks to broaden existing understandings of migrant worker flexibility drawing on the data from the two ethnographic studies of low‐wage employers and Eastern European migrants in Scotland. It focuses on the temporal aspects of flexibility production in employment discourse and temporal expectations about flexible migrant workers. Our findings reveal double movement of interruption and remaking of temporal flexibility, which challenges directional expectations about time and unsettles the assumed connectivity between flexibility's temporal elements. Uncertainty and instability of migration and employment frameworks undermine the attempts of employers and migrants to manage time, to develop continuous portfolio careers and coherent temporal horizons. Furthermore, contested temporal expectations about flexible migrant workers create fragmented and fractured “flexiworkers” that do not fit within the existing temporal frameworks of signs, routines, and rhythms. The paper suggests re‐orientation of flexibility debates beyond temporal measurement, outside familiar temporal structures, and towards redefinition of flexible worker identities.

The significant inflow of migrants to the United Kingdom following the Eastern EU Enlargement of 2004 is noteworthy due to its scale, intensity and geographic diversity. Recent statistical data suggest that these migrants exhibit spatial mobilities that reflect their disadvantage not just from the White British but also from other minority groups. Drawing on 83 interviews with Polish migrants living in Scotland, this paper illustrates the often‐persistent residential relocations experienced by this group postinternational migration and considers the drivers behind them. A key driver of this is the cycle of low paid and insecure employment that many migrants become entangled in, most frequently on arrival but often also longer term. These insights speak to wider debates about the scholarly dichotomy between international and internal migration and social inequalities in relation to labour market change and associated exposure to labour market and residential precarities.

This article offers some reflections on the lessons readers might take from the papers in this special issue. These are framed through consideration of three key themes: Scottishness, nationhood and national identity; the search for belonging, not least in relation to migrants’ emotional responses to Brexit; and the practical questions that Brexit poses for citizenship(s) and ‘settled’ status. In considering these themes, attention is drawn towards three areas which are ripe for further study. Several of the articles bring into focus the notion of Scottish exceptionalism, provoking questions about what impacts this exceptionalism, or perhaps more importantly perceptions of it, may have at policy and attitudinal levels. Questions too, are posed about the heterogeneity of perception, experience and response to Brexit amongst ECE migrants in Scotland. Finally, it can be seen that Brexit has been a protracted process and a source of anxiety and anguish, not least for those who have made Scotland their home. Looking forward, there will be more Brexit related tension to come, a prospect hugely complicated by the impacts of Covid-19.

This chapter outlines a framework whereby residential mobility and other forms of migration can be better understood within the core context of the lifecourse. It explores how, across the lifecourse, the linked lives of mobile people are increasingly being understood as situated within the changing economic, social and cultural structures of contemporary society. These perspectives, which draw on recent retheorisations of mobility, can potentially offer fresh insights into the changing nature and meanings of migration across the lifecourse. As such, it places the lifecourse at the centre of efforts to advance the conceptual understanding of the emerging (im)mobilities evident in contemporary Western society. Such a focus is especially timely given the plethora of data and analytical techniques now available to researchers in this field.