Slippery Segregation

Discovering or Manufacturing Ghettos

Bibliographic Data

ID7843840
AuthorsCeri Peach (University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume35
Issue9
Pages1381-1395
Publication date2009-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13691830903125885
OpenAlexW2057444227
LanguageEN
Citations received106
References cited26

Controversy exploded in 2005 over a paper at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers which claimed that ethnic segregation in Britain was increasing, ghettos had formed and some British cities were more segregated than Chicago. The paper asserted that indexes failed to measure segregation and should be abandoned in favour of a threshold schema of concentrations using raw data. These assertions were repeated by Trevor Phillips, Director the Commission for Racial Equality, in an inflammatory speech claiming that Britain was sleepwalking into American-style segregation. The argument of this paper is that the index approach is indeed necessary, that ethnic segregation in Britain is decreasing, that the threshold criteria for the claim that British ghettos exist has manufactured ghettos rather than discovered them. A Pakistani ghetto under the schema could be 40 per cent Pakistani, 30 per cent White, 20 per cent Indian and 10 per cent Caribbean. In 2000, 60 per cent of Chicago's Blacks lived in a true ghetto of tracts that were 90–100 per cent Black

Archaeology · Commission · Ethnic group · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Demography · History · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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