During the last three decades, the countries of the developed world have been engulfed by the 'second demographic transition', which involves new family relations, less and later marriage, declining fertility rates, population ageing, postponement of child-bearing and smaller households, among other trends. It is being increasingly argued that such population dynamics are having a powerful transformative effect on the inner city, by diversifying and redensifying its social landscapes, and creating a 'splintered' urban form. Based on the findings of a recent EU Framework 5 research project, this paper investigates the demographic contingencies of this process-also known as reurbanisation-in four European cities: Leipzig (Germany), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Bologna (Italy) and Leon (Spain). Analyses of census and municipal registry data, as well as on-site questionnaire surveys and interviews, have revealed that the reviewed cities are being populated with, and fragmented by, multiple migration trends and new household structures connected to the second demographic transition.

During the last three decades, the household has become the focus of a wide range of sociodemographic processes, including the destabilization of traditional patterns of marriage, cohabitation and divorce; the growing fluidity of ties of kin and friendship; and increasingly complex transitions through the life course. However, these dynamics - which are often summarized under the common heading of the `second demographic transition' - have been marginalized in the mainstream geographical literature. In this paper, we draw attention to the extensive, albeit fragmented, body of sociological, economic, feminist and geographical insights into the changing social geometry of the household. Recent developments in these domains have affirmed the pivotal role of the household in shaping the geographies of gender, home and everyday life. We underline the importance of households as agents of urban transformation, arguing in favour of the further incorporation of household demography into the interpretation of contemporary urban problems and trends.

IntroductionThis paper investigates the changing population geography of the city of Bologna, within the context of broader social and demographic shifts in the urban cores of developed-world cities. Its main aim is to examine whether the concept of gentrification, in its commonly understood meaning (see, for example, Glass, 1964;Hamnett, 1991;Smith, 1996), can adequately capture the distribution of different population structures in the inner city. We argue that these transformations are better described as`reurbanisation,' which, despite being a contested term (see Davidson and Lees, 2005), can be conceptualised as a comprehensive dynamic of improving the residential attractiveness of the inner city for a wide variety of population groups (see Buzar et al, 2005a;Haase et al, 2005a;.Reurbanisation' was first used in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a broad theoretical concept for an alternative future for cities, as opposed to what was then foreseen as accelerated`deurbanisation ' and deconcentration (van den Berg, 1982), or unbridled diurbanisation' (Klaassen et al, 1981, page 37). It was viewed as a possible fourth phase in the urban growth cycle, when growth returns to cities after the sequence of urbanisation (centralisation of population), suburbanisation (relative decentralisation), and deurbanisation (absolute decentralisation) (Haase et al, 2005a; Klaassen et al, 1981;Law, 1988;van den Berg, 1982). Our use of`reurbanisation' here is rather more specific with normative as well as analytic aspects.Many of the social groups that drive reurbanisation stem from the demographic changes encapsulated by the`second demographic transition': population ageing, low

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In this paper I aim to develop a relational geographical interpretation of energy poverty in the postsocialist states of Eastern and Central Europe, through a field-based study of inadequately heated homes in the Macedonian cities of Skopje and Štip. According to the reviewed evidence, domestic energy deprivation simultaneously shapes, and is shaped by, the institutional relationships between policy actors at different levels of governance, and the day-to-day interactions between vulnerable households and the built environment. It is contingent on three sets of processes: the socioeconomic implications of energy reforms in postsocialism, the inadequate energy efficiency of the homes of energy-poor households, and the mismatch between housing needs and heating systems at the household level. As a result of such interdependencies, households may become ‘imprisoned’ in particular types of sociospatial arrangements that contribute to the emergence of poverty.