Housing policy, (de)segregation and social mixing: an international perspective

Abstract

Much of the academic and policy literature on residential segregation has emphasised the negative effects of the enduring concentration of households from particular ethnic or socio-economic groups. Often drawing directly on the US experience of ‘ghettoisation’, many contributors have pointed to persistent black minority segregation in particular as a benchmark of failure with regard to social and economic integration, and equality of opportunity in housing and the workplace (for example, Fortuijn et al., 1998; Johnston et al., 2002; Peach, 1996; van der Laan Bouma-Doff, 2007; Walks & Bourne, 2006). As Fortuijn et al. (1998, p. 367) have contended ‘the black ghetto in American cities symbolises the accumulation of the miseries of modern Western societies’.