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Residential racial and class segregation produce or exacerbate distributive injustice and political exclusion. Integration as the dispersal of a concentrated minority among the majority, however, often has its own harmful consequences. An alternative ideal of differentiated solidarity combines positive affinity grouping with non‐discrimination and regional government that encourages attention to shared problems and inequality.

This chapter examines the residential contexts of immigrant families, which also affect the starting point for the second generation. Fears that immigrants and their children will end up living in “parallel societies” like the black ghettoes of American cities are vastly overblown. Nevertheless, neighborhoods of immigrant concentration, at least for low-status groups, may create marked disadvantages. The chapter assesses the actual extent, and consequences, of residential segregation, and looks at the role of public policies in shaping these patterns. Neighborhoods are often the places where immigrant minorities and native majorities have initial contacts and thus where the impacts of immigration on the mainstream society are particularly salient. The chapter then considers the emergence of “super-diverse” neighborhoods.

This chapter examines research on racial segregation and health. It argues that both theoretically and empirically, research on neighborhood effects needs to relate neighborhood characteristics to broader social processes such as class segregation, racial/ethnic segregation, and residential mobility. So far, U.S. research on segregation and health has not addressed this type of question. Multilevel studies that assume that neighborhoods do not occur in isolation but are influenced by their metropolitan area may enrich the research on neighborhoods and health.

Whether, or to what degree, minority students are able to learn together with majority peers in schools is among the important context factors for their integration paths. In this chapter we investigate the extent of ethnic segregation in lower secondary schools in the four CILS4EU countries. We demonstrate that there are vast differences in majority exposure at school, both across the four countries as well as across ethnic groups within each country. Further analyses suggest that these group differences may be due to at least three reasons: ethnic differences in residential segregation, in the allocation across different ability tracks as well as ethnically specific school choice preferences. Finally, we show that low levels of majority exposure at school may not always come with a disadvantaged learning environment: in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden schools with low majority shares tend to hold fewer learning-related resources; the opposite seems to apply for schools in England.

Demographers and sociologists have long been interested in social inequality, including as it relates to space. Residential segregation is a specific type of social sorting that results in the spatial and physical separation of where individuals live in residential space. Residential location anchors the life course geography of opportunity and therefore drives the health-relevant exposure profile of individuals. This chapter develops an understanding of segregation as a spatiotemporally dynamic process rooted in history, with contemporary consequences. Sections on conventional and newly emerging measures of residential segregation (e.g., spatial and aspatial; local and regional), hypothesized mechanisms linking segregation to health, and future direction in segregation-health research are covered.

This chapter explores spatial patterns and processes of residential segregation in St. Louis and Cincinnati using spatial analytical methods. Mapping Blacks by the location quotient and local Moran’s I shows that Blacks are more spatially clustered in St. Louis, and are more concentrated in Cincinnati. Spatial housing submarkets, local market segments with the distinct preference structure, are delineated using multivariate techniques; results demonstrate that St. Louis has more divided and polarized housing markets than Cincinnati. Spatially varying impacts of factors underlying housing market segmentation were examined using geographically weighted regression. It was shown that a premium for life cycle (or preference for family-oriented areas) is significantly high in few western suburbs of St. Louis whereas a high premium for job skills is pronounced in northern suburbs of Cincinnati. It appears that political fragmentation and topography is a culprit for unique market segmentation in St. Louis, and Cincinnati, respectively.

This chapter begins with a Schelling problem that introduces the themes, “micromotives,” individual's intentions, and “macrobehavior,” which is the aggregate outcome of individual decisions. After some discussion on the problem of Schelling's view on “purposive” and “contingent” behavior, the chapter considers discrete and continuous variables. The discrete variable section is about “segregation and integration” and begins by distinguishing segregation from congregation. A Schelling experiment concerning how segregation takes place is described, involving a checkerboard with markers representing relatively tolerant people on the board. The inevitable result of following the instructions is that segregated pockets develop all over the board. This is true although all have a preference for integrated neighborhoods, so long as they are in a majority. The chapter challenges this assuming an understanding of attitudes based on existing patterns of housing and segregation. The final section is concerned with continuous variables, in other words, mixing and sorting within one variable. It also explains two Schelling problems. The second problem raises an interesting question about allowing free choice, because with free choice all will end in an unsatisfactory position, but turning the assignment over to authority yields a result much closer to actual desires.

This chapter focuses on educational and housing segregation prevailing during the period. It notes that the U.S. Supreme Court had issued the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling, declaring segregation in public education unconstitutional. It further notes that over the next few years, the Louisville Board of Education, peacefully integrated public schools, achieving national and even international praise. It also reports that in the newly developed suburb of Shively, a violent confrontation over residential segregation brewed where a black family had moved into a home on Rone Court and faced a rising wave of harassment and intimidation. It observes that in both episodes activists relied on interracial cooperation to challenge the racial status quo, and the resulting events garnered national media attention that shaped Louisville's reputation. It notes that the educational and housing segregation were inextricably linked because Louisville tied school attendance to residence.

This chapter focuses on the complex and troubled history of interethnic violence between blacks and Latinos. It compares prevailing conditions in areas such as New York's Staten Island, where the chief violence is perpetrated by African Americans on Latinos, and California, where the opposite pattern prevails, and examines the asserted justifications made by the authors of such violence. The chapter concludes that the constant force in reproducing such violent behavior, irrespective of the group responsible, is the surrounding conditions of race-based poverty and residential segregation. The chapter shows that in the end, only a renewed societal focus on combating the institutional forces of poverty and racism, along with segregation, can address interethnic relations nationwide.

Gary Orfieldfocuses on racial issues, explaining the intertwined character and baneful consequences of segregation in housing and schools. Educational opportunity is directly and deeply connected with housing. Segregated neighborhoods linked to segregated schools produce unequal education. From the 1960s through the 1980s, school desegregation efforts opened middle-class, all-white schools to millions of students of color, particularly Black students in the South. Now, however, most of the gains of urban desegregation have been lost. The United Statesis again becoming a very stratified and segregated country, but it will soon have a non-white majority whose children will be largely excluded from essential educational opportunities because of where they live. Rights to equal housing and education must, Orfieldargues, again be fought for and won.

This chapter illustrates both the site-relatedness of residential segregation in Dakar by the beginning of the twentieth century, and comparatively its inter-colonial, transnational facets. The chapter also examines the symbolic and actual relationship between toponymic issues and sanitary considerations in Dakar’s urban planning, together with the process of dissemination of medical and planning ideas amongst the European colonising nations in Africa. The last issue is especially important in giving a more nuanced understanding how planning ideas and practices, such as residential segregation, were globally distributed. This is not only through the export of these ideas via bilateral channels (i.e., from the French métropole into the African brousse), but rather through a mediation upon multilateral and complex frontiers across nations, colonies and linguistic borders.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the motivations behind this book, namely, the growing trend of residential segregation, whether by class or race-ethnicity; the emergence of new concepts and methods to analyze neighborhood variations in health; and the launching of new initiatives and studies with neighborhoods as their focus. It then reviews the multilevel evidence on one of the most common health outcomes studies so far—the risk of dying from any cause. Following the overview of the multilevel studies of neighborhood effects on mortality risks, the chapter then discusses a set of emerging conceptual and methodological challenges in neighborhood research.

This chapter introduces the social and cultural engineering behind the two decades-long project of housing privatization and its wide-ranging impact on the redefinition of urban social distinction through extreme forms of residential segregation. It argues that the increase in residential segregation is greatly influenced by the state's strategy of selective incentives, which favored groups “within the system” over others. Individual housing careers and access to material resources is therefore determined by one's position with respect to the system of public employment. Residential settings reflect the structure of access to homeownership created by subsidization policies and is consistent with other policies to “make” a high-consuming cluster of society. The chapter challenges the normative assumptions generally made about the role that the middle class can play in pushing China toward democratization and reveals how the growth of a property-owning middle class is the result of a process of social engineering.

The chapter introduces the book’s central questions: How do residents of a racially and economically mixed neighborhood make sense of and live with diversity? How do neighborhoods shape the perceptions, behaviors and opportunities of residents? It reviews the harms of residential economic and racial segregation and discusses the paradoxes of integration. While integration holds promise for bridging social divides and reducing inequality, the tensions and conflicts associated with diversity pose challenges to community engagement, order and stability. This book begins to fill gaps in our understanding of integration through an ethnographic exploration of how residents of a diverse neighborhood make sense of their local experiences and negotiate difference. The chapter previews a place-sensitive analysis that focuses on Riverwest’s geographic location, material form and investment with meaning (i.e. culture). It closes with a description of the author’s approach to participant observation and an overview of the chapters.

This chapter discusses the postwar black housing crisis and residential segregation in Atlanta. It describes how the black leaders decided to address the crisis within the racial parameters demanded by white elites, and through diplomacy rather than confrontation. It argues that the practices and policies of Atlanta’s Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC)—supported by the black pragmatists—helped to entrench segregation and create the central city ghettoes that the Atlanta NAACP branch decried beginning in 1965.

This chapter focuses on the responses of African Americans and Mexican Americans to Proposition 14—dubbed the antifair housing initiative—in Los Angeles, with particular emphasis on the interracial cooperation and tension that marked the battle against the proposed amendment to California's constitution that allowed homeowners and landlords to sell or rent—or refuse to sell or rent—their property to anyone they wished. Proposition 14 was an effort in 1964 to basically overturn California's Rumford Fair Housing Act and to open the door once again to residential segregation. Activists, especially in the African American community, developed an intensive campaign to overturn the initiative. Early plans calling for cooperation with Mexican Americans never materialized. This chapter shows that Blacks were able to overcome their class divisions and close ranks in the fight against Proposition 14, whereas Mexican American remained a split community and vote.

This introductory chapter establishes the setting of the study at Oxnard, California, whose educational past lends itself to original analysis of schooling discrimination and contributes to national discussions of racism, segregation, civil rights, community resistance, and educational policy. It reveals four strategies of segregation that complicate previous narratives: establishing a racial hierarchy, building a permanent link between residential and school segregation, utilizing a school-within-a-school model of racial separation, and omitting a rationale for segregation. Furthermore, the chapter links Oxnard's narrative with that of prevailing scholarly literature on labor and housing and draws parallels between Mexican American and African American struggles in both the housing and educational sectors.

The built environment in cities and the distribution of individuals within it have profound implications for the prospect of justice. Racial residential segregation raises issues of justice because of both how it came about and how it limits the quality of life for many African Americans. Some scholars argue that the solution to the disadvantages of concentrated black poverty is to “deconcentrate” the urban poor through housing vouchers. This chapter criticizes this approach as both impractical and as entailing significant costs to African Americans that are too often ignored or down-played. A better approach is to improve conditions in poor neighborhoods.