Abstract
According to the dominant origin myth, the first modern ghetto was created by sixteenth– century Venice, which involuntarily segregated its Jewish population and locked it up at night in the neighborhood of a former iron foundry. Today, ghetto continues to be defined, by academics and the general public, as a place for the involuntary segregation of racial, ethnic, or other minorities, but at least two other definitions are also in use in the United States.
One might be called the race–class definition; it refers to black ghettos marked by extreme or concentrated poverty. The other is a residual definition, sometimes used critically or ironically, for voluntarily or self–segregated populations, such as the occupants of intellectual ghettos, or the affluent residents of gilded ghettos, Jewish and other. As often happens, one word is defined in several different ways.
I think that for researchers, definitions are tools, and they should therefore be as clear, easily operationalized, and widely agreed–to as possible. Applying these criteria, I suggest the ghetto is a place to which the subjects or victims of the involuntary segregation process are sent.
This definition is framed with the United States in mind, but it also useful for comparative research. Since it has a long history, it can be used to compare past and present places and processes. in addition, the definition can be applied in cross–national and cross–cultural research, for example, to compare American black ghettos with those of other involuntarily segregated groups, such as Eastern Europe's Roma, the Japanese Burakumin, and Australia's aborigines.
Moreover, although in today's America only racial minorities are involuntarily segregated in ghettos, even here, the term does not have to be limited to racial minorities, provided it is properly qualified and preceded by an explanatory adjective. Indeed, a historical study would require distinctions between racial, ethnic, religious, and yet other ghettos. Moreover, very poor people, whatever their skin color, who need to find the cheapest housing, are for all practical purposes involuntarily segregated in economic ghettos. 1
The term ghetto is also relevant for analyzing the places that housed what Erving Goffman (1961) described as total institutions, such as prisons, mental hospitals, and reservations for native Americans. However, for brevity's sake alone, this article will be limited to racial ghettos and omit the prefix.
Places occupied by the voluntarily or self–segregated have generally been described not as ghettos but as enclaves. 2 The Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other Latino “barrios” are usually enclaves, although many black Latinos are sentenced to the same involuntary segregation as African Americans.“Mixed neighborhoods,” which are shared by involuntarily and voluntarily segregated people, are thus ghettos for some and enclaves for others.
Involuntary and Voluntary Segregation
The ghetto being a place, it cannot be understood without looking at the processes by which it comes into being and without which it cannot exist: primarily involuntary segregation and ghettoization. Understanding involuntary segregation requires an analysis of the societal Othering process: the selection of minorities who are stigmatized, discriminated against, racialized, and ghettoized. Such an analysis must also ask which minority or minorities are so selected and for what reasons, including the uses to which dominant or majority populations put them.
Enclaves are seen as places settled by racial, ethnic, religious, or other minorities that are not stigmatized by the white majority but self–segregate themselves, for example because they share a language, culture, or nationality. True, such minorities, other than very orthodox religious ones, generally do not seek total self–segregation; most especially want some neighbors from the white or nonethnic majority.
Nonetheless, the most widespread form of voluntary segregation is economic. As long as many people, especially homeowners, at least in America, want secure and if possible rising property and status values, the building industry, real estate market, and zoning officials, among others, are ready to supply them with economic enclaves.
However, the boundaries between involuntary and voluntary (or self–) segregation are not hard and fast. People with limited incomes—even those in the middle class—are not choosing their residences entirely voluntarily, and nor are people who need to live near relatives. in fact, no social being, animal or human, has completely free choice of where to live.
Sometimes the involuntarily segregated participate in their own exclusion, being unwilling to live where they are not wanted. More important, however, by enabling family and friends, as well as culturally similar and like minded people, to live together, involuntary segregation can provide the same support system and sociability as voluntary segregation. Still, the involuntarily segregated know they can live only in places assigned to them by others. The researcher just has to know how to ask them the right way.
Furthermore, voluntary segregation may produce involuntary segregation. White flight from racially mixed neighborhoods also increased the involuntary segregation of blacks. The self–segregation of the very rich is in part influenced by fear of the involuntarily segregated poor. in many parts of the world, the rich live behind walls for fear of kidnapping; in the U.S. they tend to choose gated or guarded communities, sometimes hiring private police forces who patrol for strangers who look like they belong in racial or economic ghettos.
In addition, the boundaries between involuntary and voluntary segregation are often hidden. Segregators generally deny their activities, and the involuntarily segregated mostly remain free to choose where in the ghetto they want to live. in large communities, they can choose between ghettos. Economic segregation is rarely seen as involuntary, because it is usually ascribed to the workings of seemingly impersonal economic forces.
Ghettoization and Deghettoization
Involuntary segregation requires ghettos, which are created by the ghettoization both of people and places. in America, slaves and their emancipated descendants have been ghettoized from birth and many Afro–Caribbean immigrants undergo ghettoization when they arrive here. Conversely, European Jews were deghettoized after their arrival in America, even if a number of neighborhoods remained off–limits to them for many decades and a few still are.
Sometimes neighborhoods have been built as ghettos, but most started as white neighborhoods, which became ghettos, for example when an expanding central business district took over an adjacent ghetto and its residents moved into an emptying white neighborhood. Emptying Jewish neighborhoods seem to be ghettoized more often than those occupied by other white ethnics. If the latter are financially less able or for other reasons unwilling to move, they may resort to harassment of and violence against the first black arrivals, and thus discourage others from moving in.
Ironically, extensive white residential mobility, including “white flight,” has enabled blacks to improve their housing condition. However, in the process, some ghetto areas from which they departed became depopulated and were left to the very poorest of the ghettoized. The resulting concentration of extreme poverty is often accompanied by the departure of stores, public offices, and other community facilities, resulting in the social isolation of the remaining residents (Wilson, 1987). 3
Conversely, gentrification may lead to deghettoization, as the involuntarily segregated are replaced by more affluent white and other residents. The victims of gentrification move to other ghettos, and the white gentrifiers become self–segregated, although not always by choice. Some white and black gentrifiers choose to move to poor ghettos because they say they want to raise their children in economically and otherwise diverse areas.
The GHETTO
The ghetto is merely the place in which the involuntarily segregated are housed; it is the spatial representation of the sociopolitical process of involuntary segregation. in fact, the ghetto is in many respects an ordinary neighborhood, which resembles other neighborhoods similar in age, the socio–economic level of the population, housing stock, and related features. However, like other ordinary neighborhoods, all ghettos are not alike (Small 2007). in addition, a ghetto neighborhood also differs from ordinary neighborhoods in several ways; I will only mention four.
First, ghettos are demographically both more homogeneous and heterogeneous than other urban or suburban neighborhoods. Unless they are changing neighborhoods turning into ghettos, they are likely to be monoracial or nearly so. At the same time, they are generally multiclass areas, especially in communities too small to allow the establishment of class–differentiated ghettos. As a result, the ghettoized classes must live together, or at least adjacent to each other.
Second, ghettos are apt to be more diverse in land use than other residential areas. Because of continuing discrimination, ghettos have to be more self–sufficient than other areas, with a fuller array of stores, public and private facilities as well as professional offices than equivalent white neighborhoods.
Third, ghettos are likely to be qualitatively inferior in almost all respects to neighborhoods of similar age, class, housing stock, etc. Since the involuntarily segregated are a captive audience, they are subject to economic, political, and other kinds of exploitation, including by coethnics and coracials. Ghetto residents usually pay more for housing and most other goods and services than whites, although they earn far less than whites.
Even with income held constant, the ghetto is more crowded than other neighborhoods and has less public open space as well. Most of its stores, public and private facilities as well as professional offices are of lower quality than those in white areas.
At the same time, the ghetto may contain more of the land uses and facilities that other neighborhoods do not want, for example, bus depots, sanitation facilities, and other noisy and toxic land uses. Partly as a result, ghettos are noted for their high asthma rates.
Fourth, the ghetto absorbs and reflects the varieties of marginalization, harassment, injustice, and stigma imposed on the involuntarily segregated. For example, poverty combined with discrimination by financial and other institutions leaves more of the ghetto economy off the books than the economy of white neighborhoods (Venkatesh, 2006).
Ghetto pathology rates are normally higher than those in white neighborhoods when class and other factors are held constant. School performance rates are lower; drug and alcohol addiction rates are higher, as are depression, stress, and stress–related diseases. Street crime is more prevalent, and thus so are police presence, harassment, and arrest rates. Having a ghetto address reflects and adds to the stigma born by its residents, and can add to their difficulties in obtaining jobs.
Some of the differences between ghettos and other neighborhoods reflect the greater poverty of involuntarily segregated populations. Nevertheless, other characteristics associated with the ghetto could once be found in poor white neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods have virtually all disappeared, however, since most of today's white poor live amidst their economic betters.
Conclusion: Disconnecting Process and Place
Ghettos as commonly defined can exist only in societies that involuntarily segregate some of its members, and most of the ghetto's distinctive spatial features are effects of that process. Not only must the analysis of process be separated from that of place, but the causes of what takes place in the ghetto are found in one or another aspect of the processes that together produce involuntary segregation.
To be sure, ghettos are not uniform, but the differences between them often have little to do with place. Affluent ghettos differ from poor and middle–class ones, although these differences are the effects of class—and the same class differences associated with white neighborhoods.
Although concentrated poverty has been studied almost entirely in ghettos, it actually reflects patterns of class stratification that have little to do with race. in the days when many whites were poor, their neighborhoods also included areas of concentrated poverty. 4 Jacob Riis and other muckrakers assisted the twentieth–century housing reform movement by identifying such areas in a number of American cities.
Finally, the search for neighborhood effects has also been limited largely to the ghetto, but to my mind, researchers have not made a case that residential neighborhoods, including ghettos, have effects that can be attributed to the neighborhood per se. Neighborhoods are imagined communities with boundaries often determined or imposed from outside. While the boundaries sometimes generate social, economic, and political effects, most neighborhood effects stem from economically or politically powerful institutions and populations within these boundaries. Even in the very poorest areas, the deleterious effects of poverty are not caused by the neighborhood, but by institutions, most of them outside the neighborhood, that initiate or perpetuate poverty and conditions associated with it. The ghetto itself does not often impoverish people.
Too much emphasis on place gets in the way of antipoverty policy. Enabling the poor to escape poverty requires policies creating or strengthening the institutions that make that escape possible. Improving the places in which the poor, black or white, live will not hurt but it will normally raise the income only of those who do the improving. Moreover, places are local, yet neither poverty nor racial segregation can be eliminated by local policies.
The disconnection of process and place is particularly necessary now that sociologists have rediscovered space and place. Whatever the virtues of spatial sociology, it can easily be infected with the spatial or physical determinism of architects and urban designers. Their professions may impel them to believe that space, place, or the built environment determines social and other processes, but sociologists must remember that these processes are causally prior. Ultimately, space and place are causally relevant mainly because gravity forces human societies to be attached to the surface of the earth.