Race, Class and Urban Space

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Race, Class and Urban Space
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Key question for urban geography

• People or place-based solutions to urban poverty?

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Residential segregation

• Both personal choice and economic factors
• Family status/lifestyle
• Socio-economic status
• Ethnicity
• Path dependent trends

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Family status and lifestyle

• Family-ism
• Careerism
• Consumerism
• Culture

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Social Status

• Housing markets important
• Federal housing policy also contributes
• Poor neighborhoods
• Service-dependent ghettos
• Low-income elderly
• Physically disabled
• Chronically unemployed
• High status areas
• Economic exclusion
• Gated communities

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Source Data from U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Current Population Reports, Series P-60.
Reported in Fainstein, N. (1995) Black
Ghettoization and Social Mobility in Smith,
Michael Peter and Feagin, Joe, eds. The Bubbling
Cauldron Race, Ethnicity and the Urban Crisis
(Berkeley UC Press)., p. 127.
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Ethnic segregation

• Dynamics of separation
• Defensive
• Avoidance
• Protection
• Social action
• Characterizations of separation
• Colony
• Enclave
• Ghetto

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U.S. Ethnic Communities

• 1st wave of immigration, up to 1860
• Western Europe
• IrishNY and Boston
• GermansMilwaukee
• SwedesChicago
• Africa
• Southern plantations
• 2nd wave, 1869-1924
• Southern and Eastern Europe
• Italian, Polish, Jewishurban enclaves
• 3rd wave, 1960s
• Latin America
• Asia

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Internal migration patterns

• Black migration from rural South to North
• In 1900, 76 lived in rural areas, 96 in South
• 1980, 82 urban, only 53 in South
• Latino Asian immigration to Southwest and other
  pockets
• Blacks still most segregated group in urban
  America

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Source Data from U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Current Population Reports, Series P-60.
Reported in Fainstein, N. (1995) Black
Ghettoization and Social Mobility in Smith,
Michael Peter and Feagin, Joe, eds. The Bubbling
Cauldron Race, Ethnicity and the Urban Crisis
(Berkeley UC Press)., p. 129.
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Take-home messages

• Urban poverty has specific racial dimensions,
  with blacks and Latinos having greater poverty
  levels
• Urban poverty has specific spatial dimensions
  that reinforce racial segregation
• Residential segregation is the result of both
  personal choice and economic factors, with both
  push and pull elements
• Ending poverty will require addressing racial
  discrimination on multiple levels