Distinguish Between The Ghetto And The Urban

Village Essay, Research Paper

The Œghetto¹ and the Œurban village¹ are two very distinct phenomena. They differ fundamentally both in their structure and in their function. In this essay I hope to outline the difficulties in distinguishing between them and then arrive at a functional definition of the two phenomena. Furthermore there have been a number of differing theoretical and methodological approaches to their analysis. Of these, I shall outline and contrast the humanist, marxist and quantitative approaches to the ghetto and the urban village. These are three radically different aprroaches to the problem and I hope to show that an amalgamation of all three might provide a firm basis from which to approach this major affliction of, in particular, North American cities. For many the ghetto is a term referring to a very poor, run down, inner city area with a host of social and economic problems. For some the inhabitants might simply be those on the bottom rung of the social ladder, for others the inhabitants may be predominantly black. Massey and Denton in their book American Apartheid, suggest that the ghetto refers only to racial make-up, irrespective of class, defining it as such. The ghetto “.. is a set of neighbourhoods that are exclusively inhabited by members of one group, within which virtually all members of that group live”. This situation is clearly different to the popular conception of a ghetto, a multiracial society with many social and economic problems. In fact the African Americans of Northern America are the only ethnic group in the US to have ever experienced ghettoisation. The institution of the ghetto was built by the white population of America to deny blacks housing markets and thereby reinforce spatial segregation. Massey and Denton argue that “The urban ghetto…represents the key institutional arrangement ensuring the continual subordination of blacks in the United States”. This definition clarifies the distinction between the urban village and the ghetto. The ghetto describes a situation of involuntary segregation, whereas the urban village or enclave, describes voluntary and temporary segregation of more than one ethnic group. Three further differences between the ghetto and the ethnic enclave arre identified by Massey and Denton: 1. The immigrant enclaves were not homogenous, but instead consisted of a multitude of nationalities. 2. Not all of the ethnic group inhabiting the enclave actually lived within the enclave. 3. The ghetto is a permanent feature of black residential life, where as the immigrant enclave is merely a transitional stage in the process of immigrant assimilation. In a classically quantitative analysis, The Slum and the Ghetto, Thomas Lee Philpott provides evidence to support these three observations. His data refers to his analysis of neighbourhood deterioration and middle-class reform in Chicago, between 1880 and 1930. His data is reproduced below. Group Group¹s city population Group¹s ghetto population Total ghetto population % of group ghettoised Group¹s % of ghetto population Irish 169 568 4 933 14 595 2.9 33.8 German 377 975 53 821 169 649 14.2 31.7 Swedish 140 913 21 581 88 749 15.3 24.3 Russian 169 736 63 416 149 208 37.4 42.5 Czech 122 089 53 301 169 550 43.7 31.4 Italian 181 861 90 407 195 736 49.7 46.2 Polish 402 316 248 024 457 146 61.0 54.3 African American 233 903 216 846 266 051 92.7 81.5 Source T L Philpott The Slum and The Ghetto (1978)pg 141 His major observation was that, contrary to the teachings of Burgess, who in 1933 published a map showing the spatial location of Chicago¹s various immigrant groups, identifying German, Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Swedish and Czech ghettos, thses ghettos were actually made up of on average by 22 different nationalities. In none of these ghettos did the ghettoised group constitute a majority of the population, except the poles who constituted 54.3% of their, so called, ghetto. Where a Black ghetto was identified, 81.5% of the population was identified as being African American. Indeed most european ethnics were found not to live in immigrant ghettos. Consider Burgess¹s Irish ghetto. This so called ghetto was home to only 2.9% of Chicago¹s Irish population in the 1930¹s. 49.7% of Italians lived in “Little Italys”, yet 92.7% of African mericans lived in the black ghetto. It is very interesting to note at this point that even during the highest levels of European immgrant assimilation and segregation, the levels of segregation were relatively low. At the end of the peak decade of northern European in migration in 1910, among the 100 or so indicies that Stanley Lieberson computed for seven European ethnic groups in seventeen cities in 1910, only seven had isolation indicies above 25% and all but two were under 40%. The highest recorded levels of spatial isolation were for Italians in Boston (44%), Buffalo (38%) and Milwaukee (56%), and for Jews in New York (34%). In contrast African American isolation exceeded 25% in eleven of the seventeen cities Lieberson examined in 1930. Furthermore, black ghettos were only in their very early stages in 1930 and had not yet begun to approach their maximum isolation. The ethnic enclave is a transitory phenomenon. It is a stage in the proces of assimilation. For europeans enclaves were places of absorption, of adaptation and of adjustment to American society. Massey and Denton sum this effect