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Abstract We explore new connections between the dynamics of conservative partially hyperbolic systems and the geometric measure-theoretic properties of their invariant foliations. Our methods are applied to two main classes of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms: fibered partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms and center-fixing partially hyperbolic systems. When the center is one-dimensional, assuming the diffeomorphism is accessible, we prove that the disintegration of the volume measure along the center foliation is either atomic or Lebesgue. Moreover, the latter case is rigid in dimension three (this does not require accessibility): the center foliation is actually smooth and the diffeomorphism is smoothly conjugate to an explicit rigid model. A partial extension to fibered partially hyperbolic systems with compact fibers of any dimension is also obtained. A common feature of these classes of diffeomorphisms is that the center leaves either are compact or can be made compact by taking an appropriate dynamically defined quotient. For volume-preserving partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms whose center foliation is absolutely continuous, if the generic center leaf is a circle, then every center leaf is compact.