Abstract
The rapid growth of Asian and Hispanic populations in urban areas is superceding traditional classifications of neighborhoods (for example as white, transitional, or minority). The “global neighborhood” that includes all groups (white, black, Hispanic and Asian) is one important new category. We examine the emerging spatial pattern of racial/ethnic composition in the Chicago metropolis, documenting an expansion of all-minority neighborhoods in the city and just beyond its borders, a shrinking set of all-white neighborhoods in the outer suburbs, and more diverse neighborhoods including whites mainly in between. The most novel element of this pattern is how large the zone of diversity has become and how far it extends into suburbia, upending the old dichotomy of “chocolate city” and “vanilla suburbs.” In addition to comparing the distance of different kinds of neighborhoods from the urban core, we also analyze their adjacency to neighborhoods of the same type or other types. There is a strong tendency toward spatial clustering of each neighborhood type and also for transitions on the boundaries of clusters either to expand or to contract their territory.
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Notes
Other researchers have experimented with alternative classifications. Wright et al. (2014) classify tracts using three levels of “diversity” (measured with an entropy index) and the identity of the largest racial/ethnic group to create 13 categories. Holloway et al. (2012) reduce these to one category of “highly diverse” tracts, plus four categories of “moderate diversity” tracts and four more categories of “low diversity” tracts defined by their largest racial/ethnic group. Other schemes are implemented by scholars like Ellen et al. (2012), Friedman (2008) and Fasenfast et al. (2006). Regardless of the classification scheme, these studies converge in demonstrating the co-existence of both increasing racial diversity and persistent racial segregation in many metropolitan areas. The principal advantage of our approach is that it explicitly defines which groups are found together in a tract and how that composition changes over time.
We have tried out other standards of adjacency, such as first order or second order contiguity, and from 5 to 42 nearest neighbors. The patterns of the findings remain, though the magnitudes of the odds-ratio change.
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Acknowledgements
This research was partially supported by the US2010 Project with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation. General infrastructure support was provided by Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) and by the Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University (R24 HD041020).
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Zhang, W., Logan, J.R. The Emerging Spatial Organization of the Metropolis: Zones of Diversity and Minority Enclaves in Chicago. Spat Demogr 5, 99–122 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-017-0033-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-017-0033-0