Abstract
Continuing high levels of racial and class segregation in American cities, the spread of ghetto-like conditions to European cities like Paris, London, and Amsterdam, and the explosive growth of megaslums of Johannesburg and other cities of the global South raise two questions. How has segregation evolved over time? And how does it manifest itself differently across the globe? Historian Carl H. Nightingale seeks to answer these questions in Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by focusing on the key role played by three institutions in the spread of segregation: government, “networks of intellectual exchange” (e.g., professional organizations), and the modern capitalist real estate industry (including, but not limited to, banks).
Nightingale introduces us to ancient and medieval practices of city-splitting before race mattered, that is, temple districts of Mesopotamia, merchant districts in Constantinople, scapegoating ghettos (Venice’s Jewish ghetto), and the Arab harim (or harem). Around 1700 color and race entered into the picture. In Madras, the British East Indian Company constructed fortress walls around the European settlement, “Christian town.” The London–Calcutta connection made it possible for segregationists to spread their ideas worldwide via (1) the administration of the world’s first modern colonial empire, (2) ocean-crossing intellectual exchanges among scientists and public health reformers, and (3) money flow within an early form of a multicontinental urban real estate market.
Racial segregation surged during the nineteenth century with the introduction of the stations of the British rule (Raj) in India, segregated military and administrative hill-town outposts that multiplied across India. Two interconnected segregationist shifts took place along the Pacific Rim between the 1850s and early 1900s. European populations moved to small white enclaves in Chinese cities and Chinese populations clustered in Chinatowns along the West Coast of North America as a form of protection from violence that was “reinforced by racially sensational sanitation rhetoric and by more potent references to the idea that Chinese people brought down the value of white property” (136).
In the late 1890s, segregation became an emotional political rallying cry. The main reason: bubonic plague. Public health–driven segregation was used to protect Europeans in Hong Kong, India, and tropical Africa. During the period 1900 to 1920, called the age of “segregation mania,” the international city planning movement endorsed segregation. For example, when in 1911 and 1912, respectively, the British moved India’s capital from Calcutta to New Delhi and the French moved Morocco’s capital from Fez to Rabat, their plans combined racial segregation with the goal of “monumentality and beauty [which] would express nothing less than the highest aspirations of Western empires” (193).
Segregation mania set the stage for South Africa’s and America’s varied forms of “archsegregation.” In the early twentieth century British Empire officials created legislation that, after 1948, created apartheid. Under the Native (Urban Areas) Act, becoming law in 1923, “municipalities . . . had the power to ‘proclaim’ sections of the city as white areas and to move all black people who lived there to native locations—as long as authorities could provide those displaced with adequate housing” (292). Carrying out these policies proved difficult, because white areas resisted black housing projects. Sound familiar?
America’s city-splitting involved a subtler form of segregation. Because the U.S. government could not support urban segregationists in the early decades of the twentieth century, segregationists were forced to turn to state and local governments, then to neighborhood “protection” organizations, and finally to mob violence. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a Louisville, Kentucky, city ordinance prohibiting the sale of real property to African Americans violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which protected freedom of contract. Beginning in the 1920s, segregationists turned to nonracial zoning, racial covenants, and racial steering by realtors. Ironically, these reinvented and camouflaged conditions for segregation in the United States proved more successful than conditions created in South Africa where the Natives (Urban Areas) Act “had done little to rid Johannesburg of its multiracial slums” (330).
The mid-twentieth century saw the world’s three most radical white movements for racial splitting: Nazi Germany used hyper-segregated Jewish ghettos as staging grounds for mass murder; South Africa’s urban apartheid, drawing from the country’s infatuation with fascism, depended upon a police state that declared war on opposition movements that emerged in the black townships; and the U.S. federal government “camouflaged its driving dynamics within state sponsored dual and unequal urban housing markets” (334). For example, the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA’s) city racial maps―rating neighborhoods from A (most desirable) to D (least desirable) were used by banks to withhold mortgage funds from predominantly black and racially changing neighborhoods. After World War II the FHA and the Veterans Administration provided financing that made it possible for whites to leave central cities. In Chicago, discriminatory real estate practices guaranteed a sharp boundary between white and black areas, but the boundaries of the ghetto shifted over time. By contrast, in Johannesburg the government removed most blacks, Indians, and “coloreds” from the central city to impoverished townships on the city’s periphery (356).
The postwar victory of archsegregationists was more definitive in South Africa than the United States. The Group Areas Act of 1950 gave the national government rather than local authorities the power to lead in segregation (i.e., to create group areas). The result: a nearly all-white Johannesburg, a buffer zone, and a new native group area, “Soweto” (acronym for Southwestern Townships).
The post-1960 period’s good news included Indian independence, the end of apartheid, and the undoing of Jim Crow laws in the American South. The dire news included continuing high levels of racial and class segregation across the United States, the spread of American ghetto-like conditions (including riots) to European cities, and the growth of shantytowns in Third World countries.
I found Nightingale’s discussion of the post-1960 period in America overly simplistic and politically biased. According to him, a primary cause of America’s urban problems from 1960 to 1990 was a nearly all-white “New Right” counterrevolution swept into power, most notably in the United States and Britain. It offered new ways for whites to defend their institutionalized privileges without appearing to embrace white supremacy. (386)
Because Nightingale exclusively relies on the prism of “repression” to examine urban crime, he ignores the fact (1) that white concerns were real and legitimate and (2) that strong anti-crime policies (which influenced other cities) under a succession of right-center New York City mayors (Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg) improved the city for all people, white and nonwhite. Similarly, Nightingale’s discussion of gentrification is unbalanced, emphasizing the “costs” of gentrification (displacement) but not the benefits (income mixing in the case of partial gentrification, better public services, and expanded shopping opportunities).
As for Europe, Nightingale is equally myopic. He sees Islamophobia as the principal cause of urban tension, yet he ignores the unwillingness of non-Western immigrants (specifically Muslims) to adopt the values of host countries. An anti-integrationist attitude has contributed to a sense of alienation and in turn a disproportionately large prison population among young Muslim men. Fundamentalist clerics find this alienated immigrant population an attractive target audience for further radicalization. European concerns about ghetto problems are legitimate.
Nightingale’s Epilogue has serious flaws for understanding urban segregation in the global North. What does “right to the city” really mean? If, as Nightingale recommends, people were better able to revive their own slums through community-based nonprofits, would this not reinforce segregated housing patterns? And would not growth boundaries around cities that are aimed at controlling sprawl have just the opposite effect of raising prices in central city neighborhoods, thereby increasing income segregation? His recommendation that the United States use France’s anti-segregation strategy as a model is unrealistic. Unlike France’s highly centralized system, America’s decentralized form of government has power shared with states and localities. In praising France’s public housing restructuring, Nightingale fails to acknowledge the successes of HUD’s HOPE VI programs. Having visited two of Paris’s more notorious banlieues in 2010, I believe that the challenges facing planners there (high unemployment, alienated Muslim youth) are as great as, if not greater than, the challenges facing their American counterparts.
Segregation has two key flaws. The first is the limited discussion of voluntary self-segregation. Nightingale questions whether it is possible to “assert the ‘goodness’ of any form of segregation—even if it creates successful cultural havens” (12). He ignores the fact that ethnic enclaves allow immigrants to adjust to their new country, to remain close to relatives and friends as well as to religious institutions. Toronto’s mosaic of ethnic neighborhoods shows the benefits of voluntary segregation. Second, Nightingale seems unable to decide whether the link between race and property values is real or illusory, implying that beliefs about a possible correlation are pure fantasy and a product of racist thinking. However, on page 355 he acknowledges that in Chicago racial change has often been accompanied by declines in property values: “because credit for maintenance was both scarcer and more expensive, blacks’ properties were doomed to lower rates of appreciation.” Growing economic scholarship shows that blacks are less likely than whites to benefit from home ownership because they are concentrated in neighborhoods with stable or declining home values.
Despite these flaws, this book is impressive and worthwhile because of its historical and geographic scope. Because planning “heroes” like Daniel Burnham, Frederick Olmstead, and Ebenezer Howard appear as “villains,” their work seen as supporting urban segregation, the book is useful as a supplementary text in a variety of courses, including planning ethics. While acknowledging the book’s weak treatment of contemporary anti-segregation policies, I nevertheless recommend it, especially when read in conjunction with books like Fair and Affordable Housing in the U.S. and Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective.