Geopolitical fragmentation: A force in spatial segregation in the U.S.?!

Despite a widely accepted ideal that favors integrated residential development, metropolitan areas in the United States remain segregated by race, ethnicity 2 and class. Preliminary analysis of data from the 2000 census shows little change in community’s racial and ethnic integration over the last decade (Lewis Mumford Center Report, 2001). While these results could be interpreted to mean that governmental integration policies made little progress toward changing settlement patterns rooted in the past, other explanations may come closer to truth. Persistent ethnic and racial segregation may, in part, be a result of the beneficiary effects attributed to spatial segregation, such as social support networks, protection against discrimination and preservation of cultural heritage etc. (e.g., Suttles 1970, Boal 1976). The forces that contribute to segregation are complex and neither easily determined nor measured. Furthermore, as society and economies are changing, conditions and forces contributing to segregation are likely to change as well. Over the past decade or so, scholars began to detect new types and patterns of segregation. Marcuse (1997), for example, pointed to the development of extreme conditions of economic segregation, the ‘outcast ghetto’ and ‘citadel’. Moreover, segregation patterns vary by geographic region. When comparing different metropolitan areas, racial and ethnic segregation appears most intractable in older cities of the Northeast and Midwest whereas minorities and Whites seem to mix more freely in the newer cities of the Sunbelt and Western United States