Segregation
Urban segregation is the spatial separation of the population by income, origin or ethnicity: rich neighbourhoods and poor neighbourhoods that never touch, each with its schools, services and opportunities. It is inequality turned into a map, and it reproduces itself because where one is born conditions where one gets to.
Chicago was its twentieth-century laboratory —redlining denied mortgages to Black neighbourhoods—; Santiago de Chile is today one of the most studied cases of income segregation in Latin America. It is measured with dissimilarity indices and fought with dispersed social housing and transport that connects.
Videos on this term (31)
- Urban form
Learn how invisible borders define life in the neighborhoods
Two people pass each other on a street and take only seconds to decide how to behave. A glance can communicate…
3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urbanized Fear: Security, Segregation and Resistance in the City
Teresa Caldeira explains how fear designs the city: the talk of crime, fortified enclaves in São Paulo, the paradox…
3 min read - Housing
Mike Davis: Risk Is Not Natural but a Construct of Power
Mike Davis argued that urban disasters are built before the emergency through segregation, speculation and unequal…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Housing
Wacquant: Advanced Urban Marginality and Territorial Stigma
Loïc Wacquant explains how precarisation, social retreat and the penal state produce advanced urban marginality,…
3 min read - Public space
Security Through Walls: Protection or Segregation?
Gated communities privatise surveillance and empty the street. What Caldeira, Low and Sabatini show about fortified…
3 min read - Infrastructure
The 15-Minute City Conspiracy: How Proximity Became a Lockdown
How Carlos Moreno's 15-minute city, a century-old proximity idea, became a conspiracy theory after Oxford's 2023…
3 min read - Urban history
Friedrich Engels and the Industrial City: The Origins of Urban Justice
Engels described in 1845 how Manchester hid its workers and in 1872 why housing cannot be solved by reform. His…
Friedrich Engels 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
David Theo Goldberg: Race, Space and Power in Cities
David Theo Goldberg shows that racism organises urban space: ghettos, peripheries and zoning manufacture race.
David Theo Goldberg 3 min read - Public space
Lefebvre: urban space as a field of struggle
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre separates perceived, conceived and lived space, and shows where capital and…
Henri Lefebvre 2 min read - Shrinking cities
Robert Beauregard: Urban Decline and Postindustrial Cities
Robert Beauregard explains in Voices of Decline how the decline of Detroit, Cleveland or St. Louis was at once fact…
Robert Beauregard 3 min read - Public space
Setha Low: Spatial Justice and the Right to Public Space
Setha Low studies what makes a public space just or exclusionary. Her ethnographies of plazas, parks and gated…
Setha Low 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis by Mbembe and Nuttall
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall read Johannesburg as a modern African metropolis rather than an exception. The…
3 min read - Shrinking cities
Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff
Charlie LeDuff narrates in Detroit: An American Autopsy the collapse of the Motor City: relocation, white flight,…
3 min read - Urban economy
City of Quartz by Mike Davis: The Inequality That Made Los Angeles
City of Quartz (1990) by Mike Davis excavates the power that built Los Angeles: developers, homeowners, police and…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Urban history
Robert Caro and Robert Moses: The Legacy of The Power Broker
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro, tells how Robert Moses transformed New York without ever being elected: parks,…
Robert Caro 3 min read - Housing
Loïc Wacquant: why the ghetto is not an accident
Wacquant compares American ghettos with French banlieues and shows that advanced marginality is not residual but…
2 min read - Public space
Richard Sennett and the Decline of Public Life
In The Fall of Public Man (1977) Richard Sennett explains how the tyranny of intimacy emptied public space. Key…
Richard Sennett 3 min read - Housing
Alfredo Rodríguez: Santiago, Social Housing and Los con Techo
Alfredo Rodríguez documented how Chilean housing policy produced ghettos on Santiago's periphery.
Alfredo Rodríguez 3 min read - Public space
Urban Territoriality: Inclusion and Exclusion (Low and Delaney)
Urban territoriality explains how groups and institutions mark and control city space. What Setha Low and David…
3 min read - Public space
Edward Soja and Spatial Justice: The City After Chicago
Edward Soja defined spatial justice: geography produces injustice and changing space is doing justice.…
Edward Soja 2 min read - Urban form
David Rusk and Metropolitan Fragmentation: Cities Without Suburbs
David Rusk explained in Cities Without Suburbs how metropolitan fragmentation produces inequality: elastic and…
David Rusk 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Racial inequality and spatial segregation in the city
How race structures the city: Wacquant (Urban Outcasts), Elijah Anderson and Ruth Glass on segregation,…
2 min read - Public space
Spatial justice: what it is, after Soja and Fainstein
What spatial justice is and how Edward Soja (Seeking Spatial Justice) and Susan Fainstein (The Just City)…
2 min read - Public space
Urban Space and Power: Foucault, Massey and Soja Explained
Urban space is an instrument of power and a field of resistance. What Foucault's panopticon, Massey's power…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Socio-Spatial Segregation: Wacquant, Massey and Sassen
Socio-spatial segregation sorts rich and poor into separate neighborhoods. How Loïc Wacquant, Douglas Massey and…
2 min read - Urban economy
Richard Florida's The New Urban Crisis: Inequality in Cities
The New Urban Crisis (2017) by Richard Florida explains why the most prosperous cities push out the people who…
Richard Florida 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira's City of Walls: Segregation and Fear in São Paulo
City of Walls (2000) by Teresa Caldeira explains how fear of crime turned São Paulo into a city of fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Mobility
Women's Mobility and Urban Transport: The Mobility of Care
Women travel differently and transport was planned as if they did not. What Susan Hanson and Inés Sánchez de…
3 min read - Urban psychology
Urban Violence and Insecurity: Caldeira, Wacquant and Davis
Urban violence and fear reorganise the city into gated enclaves and abandoned peripheries. What Teresa Caldeira,…
2 min read - Urban psychology
Urban Violence and Security Policies in Unequal Cities
Citizen security policies swing between the iron fist and prevention. What Teresa Caldeira and Lucía Dammert show…
3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urban Militarisation: Surveillance and Control (Graham and Davis)
Urban militarisation brings the tactics and technologies of war into the surveillance of cities. What Stephen…
3 min read
