ABSTRACT

This chapter describes historically used spatial confinement to buttress social control and economic exploitation of those thus confined. Public policies have historically played a critical role in the maintenance of ghettos. A dispersed or de-spatializing ghetto is located a distance from the central business district, often in the suburbs, less racially concentrated, more middle-class, but with residents still discriminated against economically and socially in a variety of forms, and sometimes limited in extent by state actions. More specifically, a ghetto should be defined as a bounded area of spatial concentration of an oppressed group, defined by an ascribed identity, in which the confinement is used for the purpose of social control over and economic subordination of the resident population. Ghettoization is the process of creating and maintaining ghettos, as generically defined. Dilution of the ghetto is the movement toward gilding the ghetto-retaining its spatial characteristics but softening their control functions.