ABSTRACT
The rise of the twentieth-century American suburb went hand in hand with a cultural imperative of racial segregation. The feeling of separation is one of the important effects of the fragmented American metropolis. Many narrative threads make up the story of how American suburbs became fragmented into a patchwork of segregated neighborhoods, subdivisions, and independent suburban jurisdictions. Originally, the strategies used by suburbs to maintain residential segregation were aimed specifically at minorities, new immigrants, and the poor, most of whom remained clustered in decayed neighborhoods in central cities and, sometimes, in nearby older suburbs. But with the rise of multiethnic suburbs in the 1980s, the metropolitan turf wars have become more complicated. The many suburban jurisdictions that exist in a typical metropolitan region act as a powerful force preserving racial and socioeconomic segregation. The possibility that the poor might disperse throughout metropolitan areas threatened people living in exclusive neighborhoods, both in central cities and in suburbs.
