Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-07T16:27:35.941Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Residential segregation in the American metropolis: concentration, dispersion and dominance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Olivier Zunz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Measuring residential segregation is a challenging and crucial task. Many important questions in urban history can be understood fully only after correctly assessing the importance and significance of the clustering patterns of different groups of urbanites. However, the extent to which and the ways in which various social classes, races, and ethnic groups congregated in the expanding industrial metropolis of nineteenth-century America form the subject of heated debates among historians. With large black ghettos now existing in all major cities, experts and lay citizens alike agree that Americans live in a ‘separated society’. In the first half of the twentieth century, metropolitan areas took the form of ghettoized central cities with white suburbs. With the transfer of many urban functions to suburban units, and the shift of America from a nation of urbanites to a nation of suburbanites, a complex pattern of suburban segregation also developed. The universal concern about the magnitude of today's segregation makes the historical debate intriguing. Was it once different? Was there a time when cities were integrated? At some time in the past, many believe, American cities were better places in which to live—hence we should strive to recover our lost community.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 7 , May 1980 , pp. 23 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Marjorie Spruill and Patricia R. Schroeder for their comments on the manuscript.

References

1 Danielson, M., The Politics of Exclusion (New York, 1976), 1.Google Scholar

2 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, 1968), 119Google Scholar, quoted in Danielson, op. cit., 7.

3 Hershberg, Theodore defined ‘dominance’ as ‘the proportion of an area's total population accounted for by a single group’ in The Philadelphia Social History Project: A methodological history (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Stanford, 08 1973), 293.Google Scholar

4 Wirth, L., The Ghetto (Chicago, 1928), 283.Google Scholar

5 Cressey, P. F., ‘Population succession in Chicago: 1898–1930,’ American Journal of Sociology, xliv, 1 (07 1938), 61.Google Scholar

6 Higham, J., Send These to Me (New York, 1975), 215.Google Scholar

7 Addams, J., Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York, 1911), 246–7.Google Scholar

8 Handlin, O., The Uprooted (Boston, 1951).Google Scholar

9 Nelli, H. S., The Italians in Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York, 1970), 44.Google Scholar

10 Thernstrom, S., ‘Reflections on the new urban history,’ Daedalus (Spring 1971), 359–75Google Scholar, and Thernstrom, S. and Knights, P. R., ‘Men in motion, some data and speculations about urban population mobility in nineteenth-century America,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, i (Autumn 1970), 7–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Warner, S. Bass Jr and Burke, C., ‘Cultural change and the ghetto,’ Journal of Contemporary History, iv, 1 (1969), 173–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Chudacoff, H., Mobile Americans: Residential and social mobility in Omaha, 1880–1920 (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, and ‘A new look at ethnic neighborhoods: residential dispersion and the concept of visibility in a medium-sized city,’ Journal of American History, lx (1973), 76–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and TheEvolution of American Urban Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975), 90–124.Google Scholar

13 Katz, M B., Doucet, M. J. and Stern, Mark J., ‘Migration and the social order in Erie County, New York: 1855,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, viii, 4 (Spring 1978), 669.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Thernstrom, S., The Other Bostonians (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Park, R., ‘The urban community as a spatial pattern and a moral order,’ Human Communities, The City and Human Ecology (Glencoe, Ill., 1957), 177.Google Scholar

16 Goldfield, D., ‘The Black Ghetto, “a tragic sameness”, Journal of Urban History, iii, 3 (05 1977), 361–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Gans, H., The Urban Villagers (Glencoe, Ill., 1962).Google Scholar

18 Warner, S. Bass Jr, The Private City (Philadelphia, 1968), 50.Google Scholar

19 Vinyard, J., The Irish on the Urban Frontier: Nineteenth century Detroit (New York, 1974), 174–5.Google Scholar

20 R. Wade, interviewed by Stave, B., in Journal of Urban History, iii, 2 (02 1977), 223.Google Scholar

21 Philpott, T. L., The Slum and the Ghetto (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

22 Duncan, O. D. and Duncan, B., ‘A methodological analysis of segregation indexes,’ American Sociological Review, ii (04 1955), 210–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Massey, D. S., ‘Measuring residential segregation using the index of dissimilarity: problems and interpretations’, Office of Population Research, Princeton University, 09 1978, 25.Google Scholar

24 Burstein, A. N., ‘Patterns of segregation and the residential experience,’ in Hershberg, T. (ed.), The Philadelphia Social History Project, a special issue of Historical Methods Newsetter, ix, 2 and 3 (03–(06 1976), 113.Google Scholar See also Hershberg, T., Burstein, A. N., Ericksen, E. L., Greenberg, S. and Yancey, W. L., ‘A tale of three cities: blacks and immigrants in Philadelphia: 1850–1880, 1930 and 1970’ Annals, AAPSS, cdxli (01 1979), 55–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Conzen, K., Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860, (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 152.Google Scholar

26 Zunz, O., ‘Detroit en 1880: espace et ségrégation,’ Annales E.S.C., xxxi, 1 (Janvier-Février 1977), 106–36Google Scholar, and ‘The organization of the American city in the late 19th century, ethnic structure and spatial arrangement in Detroit,’ Journal of Urban History, iii, 4 (Summer 1977), 443–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Bender, T., Community and Social Change in America (Rutgers, 1978).Google Scholar

28 Greeley, A., That Most Distressful Nation (Chicago, 1972), vii, viii, xxvi.Google Scholar