The terms ghetto, slum, commune, and urban village have frequently been used inter changeably in the creative writing on the isolation of itinerant groups within the town district. It is usually acknowledged though that the ghetto is actually its very own occurrence which is essentially dissimilar in its arrangement, configuration and purpose. In terms of this article I hope to categorize and give explanation for the differences between the ghetto and other expressions for spatial developments of segregated settlers.
Furthermore I will analyse the different theoretical and ideological approaches to the subject matter as they produce very different ways of identifying the causes and understanding the internal and external workings of ghetto communities. There is considerable debate between the positivists and Marxists as to whether the ghetto is a product of racial factors or economic forces. Whilst the humanists look at the ways in which the ghetto community develops in response to the hostile wider society.
An 'urban village' or 'ethnic enclave' is a residential district usually in the inner city that has a significant clustering of people of similar culture or ethnicity, but by no means has a homogenous population. Whilst there is a considerable ethnic grouping, this does not constitute the vast majority of the total population of the groups within the city. For example, Philpott cites the instance of the Old Jewish 'Ghetto' of Chicago in 1894 whose population was 90% Jewish, although this only constituted 14,000 of the 75,000 Jews living in Chicago at the time. It is a focal point of migrants to the city and is often subject to chain migration, with information and money send back to the migrant’s place of origin. Clustering allows for an easier psychological and economic assimilation and also makes provision for migrants’ cultural requirements such as specialist food stores and places of worship. The populations of urban villages are free to enter, free to stay and free to leave, when the move up the economic scale, in accordance with the ecological model of assimilation. Urban villages are generally seen as the first stage in the ecological model of assimilation and the migrant populations then gradually assimilate with time outwards to the suburbs, as they raise their economic status.
In Philpott’s classically quantitative analysis, The Slum and the Ghetto, we see the first separation of the terms ghetto and urban village. Philpott purported that of all those areas that Burgess had identified as ethnic ghettos in Chicago in the 1930s only one or two could actually be considered to be a ghetto. The so-called Irish, Polish, Russian, Swedish and Czech ghettos were in fact inhabited by on average 22 different nationalities. In none of these ghettos did the ghettoised group constitute a majority of the population, except the poles and African Americans who constituted 54.3% and 81.5% of the population of their ghettos respectively. Indeed most European ethnic migrants were found not to live in immigrant ghettos at all. For example the Irish ghetto was only home to 2.9% of Chicago’s Irish population, furthermore only 47.7% of Italians lived in ‘Little Italy’, yet 92.7% of African Americans lived in the black ghetto.
With this data in mind, Massey and Denton (1993), put forward their definition of a ghetto in their book American Apartheid. They identify the ghetto as ‘a set of neighbourhoods that are exclusively inhabited by members of one group, within which virtually all members of that group live’. They argue that the African Americans in North America are the only ethnic group in the United States to ever have become ghettoised. ‘The urban ghetto represents the key institutional arrangement ensuring the continual subordination of blacks in the United States’. In this way Peach argues that there is a fundamental difference between the experience of European immigrants and African-Americans immigrants. The initial segregation of Europeans is essentially voluntaristic and positive, and is likely to result in the formation of an urban village. This is a transitory stage in the process of assimilation; immigrants are initially absorbed into the enclave to aid the adjustment to life within the charter group. Whilst on the other hand; the African-American experience is negative and imposed, what results is the formation of ghettos which are both produced and maintained through charter group actions and hostility as well as immigrant group cohesion.
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