PhD defence: Aske Egsgaard-Pedersen

Aske Egsgaard-Pedersen defends his thesis,

Moving in the city: Residential mobility and housing choice within a metropolitan area

Via Zoom

Supervisors:
Professor Lars Winther
Associate Professor Høgni Kalsø Hansen

Assessment Committee:
Associate Professor Erika Sandow, Umeå University - Sweden
Professor Pieter Hooimeijer, University of Utrecht – The Netherlands
Professor Lasse Møller-Jensen (chair), IGN

Summary:
Urban areas have become an increasingly important factor in regional development, attracting many new businesses and residents, and creating the need for greater emphasis to be placed on the match between people and residences. This can potentially lead to an unequal development of urban areas, with some groups of people losing access to increasingly larger parts of the city. In this light, changes in both demographic composition and the emergence of new types of technology may play an important part in how the future match between people and residences is shaped.
In four papers this thesis examines how changing demographic trends and emerging technological innovations that allow for a more flexible utilization of residences influence the match between people and residences in Denmark, primarily within urban areas. The changes in residential mobility and housing choice are analysed by combining the frameworks of the life course and housing consumption. The four papers each incorporate their own analytical approaches depending on their respective research questions regarding: i) what characterizes the changing demographic composition of Copenhagen; ii) how sharing economies affect the residential mobility of city dwellers; iii) Airbnb’s influence on housing choice and residential prices; and iv) how family dissolution through the death of a partner affects the survivor’s residential mobility and housing needs.
The thesis shows that the relationship in the match between people and residences is not a steady-state phenomenon but is always in flux. However, the findings of the respective papers also show that changing patterns in the city’s demographic composition and new technological possibilities are both disrupting current patterns of residential mobility and housing choice, thereby altering the future relationship of the match between people and residences both within and outside urban areas.

A digital version of the PhD thesis can be obtained from the PhD secretary Mikala Heckscher at mikala@ign.ku.dk