How sociospatial contexts change over space and time in the Netherlands: Multiscale patterns of exposure to socioeconomic, demographic and housing characteristics

Understanding the sociospatial context to which individuals are exposed to is at the heart of research on inequalities in cities. Exposure to sociospatial contexts, including various spatial scales, can affect people’s life courses. In segregated urban spaces, the attributes that constitute this sociospatial context are not evenly distributed over space and across scales. Against this background, previous research characterised sociospatial contexts based on multiscale measures of population composition. In particular, studies have concentrated on the extent to which residents are exposed to specific population groups within their sociospatial context. However, less attention has been given to characterising sociospatial contexts based on exposure patterns to multiple contextual attributes and understanding how these patterns change over time. This study presents a novel approach to analyse how sociospatial contexts change across spatial scales using multiple social, economic and demographic characteristics. We propose a scalable method to compare the patterns of exposure to different contextual attributes between residential locations, both within and between urban areas over time. Using georeferenced administrative data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), covering the entire Dutch population from 1999 to 2022, we classify the spatial contexts using attributes measured at various spatial scales. We apply a cluster classification to characterise the representative types of sociospatial contexts present across all major cities in the country and examine the specific sequences of transitions between different cluster types that residential locations exhibit across scales. The spatio-temporal analysis of these patterns of exposure will improve our understanding of the specific geographical scale at which different socioeconomic and demographic groups are clustered in space and how this has changed over time.