ABSTRACT
Ethnicity is one of the most powerful dividers of society. Class differences are subsumed within it far more than it is subsumed within class. The classical urban models which added ethnicity as a social garnish on an economic class recipe may now have to have the balance of the ingredients reviewed. Ethnicity teaches us, perhaps, that it is not the spatial organisation of society that is the focal point of geography but the social organisation of space. There are three competing paradigms for the spatial investigation of ethnicity, the positivist, the marxist and the phenomenologist. The positivist paradigm has been the strongest and longest-lived in the field so far and has yielded through the use of the index of dissimilarity one of the most successful examples of cumulative social science. It treated ethnicity, however, as if it were a categorical category rather than a negotiated, transactional status.
