Segregation. Eric Fong

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1

Introduction

      When you walk the streets of major cities of the world, such as Cairo, London, Mexico City, New York, São Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto, you will quickly notice different groups of people living in different parts of the city. In some neighborhoods, most residents are of the same racial or ethnic group. They tend to know each other well as many of them have grown up in the same neighborhood. In middle-class neighborhoods, you may see rows of well-maintained houses with manicured lawns. In other parts of the city, you may also see areas with high concentration of poor families, dotted with dilapidated houses, unkempt yards, and graffiti on walls. Some other neighborhoods are home to clusters of immigrants where you may see shops and restaurants with foreign words on storefront signs. The distinctiveness and spatial arrangement of these neighborhoods contribute to the pattern of residential segregation in a city, which is the subject this book will explore.

Residential segregation creates and maintains the separation of population groups into distinct neighborhoods and shapes the living environment at the neighborhood level (Kawachi and Berkman 2003). This separation may be voluntary or involuntary. Residential segregation has most commonly been applied to the study of racial segregation, but it can be used to study the sorting of a variety of different groups into neighborhoods and other social environments (e.g. on the basis of race/ethnicity, income, age, household type, sexual orientation, religion, etc.). Most of this book will focus on residential segregation by racial/ethnic status because it has received by far the greatest amount of attention due to its role in social stratification, inequality, and conflict within society. Because racial/ethnic status is correlated with income and wealth, any investigation of segregation involves examining patterns that represent the effects of both racial/ethnic identity and economic status of people and their residential communities.

      How does residential segregation relate to patterns of segregation more generally? Table 1.1 provides a simple conceptual guide that relates segregation to the social and physical distance of groups. The most common way of studying residential segregation is to examine situations where there is both physical and social distance between distinct groups. The word “residential” in residential segregation usually implies groups living in completely different neighborhoods, which are most often approximated by census tracts in empirical research. The physical distance of being in another neighborhood implies that there is also social distance, so residential segregation most commonly means both physical and social distance. In the table, we label this “complete” segregation. Research examining this kind of segregation represents the bulk of research on residential segregation and will take up most of our attention in this book. For example, in many large cities in the United States, a situation of high segregation, sometimes called “hypersegregation”¹ (the concept will be elaborated in Chapter 4), persists between blacks and whites, whereby the sharing of neighborhoods and social environments is uncommon (Massey and Denton 1989).

Table 1.1 How residential segregation relates to physical and social distance