ABSTRACT
Segregation is a conspicuous phenomenon in our social and urban experience. Segregation even seems to shape the city or at least to impregnate many of its localities. If we think of segregation as a form of restricting contact, we can perceive that it involves the body and is enacted in the presence or absence of the body as a key aspect of the materiality of social relations. A fixation on territorial segregation related to systems of identity might be traced back to the origins of the concept: a persistent ethno-racial segregation in American cities and elsewhere since the time of Burgess and Park. By providing a critique of the ways in which we assume space as an explanation for social distance, the chapter explores the grounds for a reinvigorated study of the problem – an approach intended to introduce the relations formed by our encounters as possibilities for recognising the other.
