Report: Black, White, and Shades of GreyAuthor(s): Barrie MorganSource: Area, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1980), pp. 304-306Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20001629 .

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304 Black, white, and shades of grey

lines. There are seven sites in east Caithness from which eight chambered tombs are visible but Cam Righ stands out from the others in having a higher cutpoint index.

It should be apparent that this example is illustrative of the general application of the cutpoint index and is not an exhaustive appraisal of the set of data. The possibility of weighing points and lines in a graph with values proportional to the importance of the parts of the real-world network which the graph represents has been ignored. Also, the possibility of substitution of paths in the network has not been considered. These, and other standard questions in network analysis, must be considered in conjunction with every specific problem. However, the cutpoint index does provide another tool which may be of use in the description of some networks.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Lindsay J. Paterson for his help in the preparation of this paper.

References Hammond, R. and McCullagh, P. (1974) Quantitative techniques in geography: an introduction

(Oxford) Harary, F. (1969) Graph theory. (Reading, Mass.) Henshall, A. S. (1963) The chambered tombs of Scotland Vol. One (Edinburgh) Nijenhuis, A. and Wilf, H. S. (1975) Combinatorial algorithms (New York)

Black, white, and shades of grey

Some reflections on the symposium on Ethnic Segregation in Cities, held at Oxford, 21-23 March 1980.

St Anthony's College, Oxford was the setting in March for an international, inter disciplinary symposium on ethnic segregation in cities. The symposium, which was organized by Ceri Peach, was made possible by the munificence of Professor Kenneth Kirkwood, Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford, who made funds available to support eight distinguished American guests. Participants seemed unanimous in the view that it was one of the most valuable and stimulating they had attended. Our hosts had got the chemistry right. The strict limit on the number of participants facilitated very valuable, informal mixing across national and disciplinary boundaries; the pre-circulation of papers, the range of expertise of the participants, the appointment of a discussant for each paper made for some excellent discussions in the formal sessions. Sixteen papers were presented during the three days-seven focusing on aspects of ethnic segregation in British cities, nine on American cities. In a brief report, it is impossible to do justice to these many papers, some of which were outstanding. What follows is a highly selective set of comments and personal reflections.

Inevitably, there was much emphasis in the British contributions on the impact of planning on the segregation of Asians and West Indians, and the implications of this segregation for future planning. Less inevitably, their focus was on Birmingham. Philip Jones (University of Hull) traced in detail the impact of the evolution of planning in the 1960s and 1970s from comprehensive redevelopment to rehabilitation and improvement on the distribution of the ethnic population. The cumulative effect of these

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Black, white, and shades of grey 305

changes has been to trap immigrant households in the middle ring, a zone of pre-1917, frequently sub-standard, housing between the inner redeveloped areas and the inter-war suburbs. The resulting degree of concentration is an acute cause for concern if the preliminary results are reliable from a 1977 household survey of the whole city by Robin Ward and Robin Sims (SSRC Research Unit in Ethnic Relations). They calculated an index of dissimilarity of 80 6 between black and white manual owner occupiers over five zones in the city, over four times that between manual and middle class white owner-occupiers.

Notwithstanding the social consequences of intervening in complex urban systems, planning as yet lacks an official viewpoint on its professional relationship with ethnic

minorities. But is it alone? Fred Boal (Queens University, Belfast) suggested that western tradition, particularly when expressed in intellectual, political and planning circles, tends to be opposed to residential clustering, whereas urban tradition elsewhere seems more accepting of urban separation as a natural and permanent state. This may be so, but many whites in the inner city believe that the problem of racial conflict should be solved not simply by segregating the immigrant minorities, but by repatriating them. John Rex (University of Aston) argued that, in the face of these conflicting con stituencies, there is a policy vacuum. He demonstrated this in terms of inter-city policy.

Whereas for many people the inner city problem is commensurate with problems of racial conflict, the White Paper Policy for the Inner Cities contained only two implicit references to the condition of the immigrant population. It specifically commented that

whereas the policy might incidentally help black people, the problem of racial dis crimination is a matter for the Commission for Racial Equality. Rex argued strongly that we should accept the social reality of immigrant concentrations, and plan with, and for, immigrant communities. Planning for multi-racial areas is a considerable challenge, but one which has yet to be taken up.

The danger of prematurely generalizing about Asian settlement in British cities was brought home by two papers. Vaughan Robinson (University of Oxford) examined its chronology. Whereas literature on housing preference has consistently stressed the Asians' predilection for property ownership, he was able to show a substantial movement, pioneered by East African Asians with no myth of return, into council housing in Blackburn. Howard Aldrich, John Cater, Trevor Jones and David McEvoy (Liverpool Polytechnic) interpreted the growth of Asian retailing in Bradford, Leicester and Ealing in terms of ethnic exclusiveness, with Asian businessmen concerned primarily to serve their own ethnic clientele. But, as they noted, other research in London has identified Asian business communities for whom the minority market is comparatively insignificant.

Brian Berry (Harvard University) opened the batting for our guests, and the problems of desegregating the American city, however strong the will of the authorities, became immediately apparent. He described an evaluation of the experiment set in train in

Chicago in 1966 to develop a colour blind housing market. The experiment was a dismal failure. White households voted with their feet; black households were not prepared to be pioneer integrationists at a time when there was an abundant supply of good housing in the black-submarket. Harold Rose (University of Wisconsin) usefully complemented this by examining the attitudes of a group of black professionals, the most likely integrationists, to non-black markets in four large metropolitan areas. Mixed markets, 10-29 per cent black, were the preferred environments in all cities. This seemed ironic

when most work suggests the tipping point is somewhere in this range. Taken with Karl Taeuber's (University of Wisconsin) paper on school desegregation, it was difficult to escape the conclusion that our American colleagues were more closely involved with detailed monitoring of policy initiatives.

The papers focusing on the quantitative analysis of ethnic segregation came in for more than their share of criticism. The attempt by Robert Woods (University of Sheffield) to simulate the spread of ethnic groups in Birmingham in the sixties in terms of in-migration, diffusion and housing structure seemed too simplistic in terms of what

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306 Black, white, and shades of grey

had gone before. Richard Morrill (University of Washington) outlined a conditional assignment, linear-programming model for American cities based on competition for space, but did not empirically test it. Much quantitative work, of course, employs the index of dissimilarity as the standard measure of segregation, which has been advantageous in that it has led to the development of a large body of cumulative knowledge. Stanley Lieberson (University of Arizona) suggested that measures based on the probability of interaction between groups may have been dismissed too pre maturely because they were not independent of group size. But it is sometimes difficult to interpret dissimilarity indices, as was illustrated by Nathan Kantrowitz (Kent State

University). Only first and second generation immigrants are recognized by the American Census, third and later generations being classed as native whites, the group which is the baseline of comparison. This, allied with the very slight decline in dis similarity indices between 1950 and 1970, led him to dispute the establishment view that ethnic segregation is declining in American cities. But first and second generation European immigrants are now a small group, and few participants were inclined to accept this interpretation.

Peter Jackson (University of Oxford) examined the segregation of Puerto Ricans, the most recent immigrants in New York. He seemed surprised that they were more segregated in 1970 than 1960 although, as was pointed out, the port of entry model

would predict this. Anyone doubting the degree of ' pile-up ' in the port of entry in the early stages of migration, should have been quickly convinced by Donald Deskins (University of Michigan) stunning series of dot maps showing the growth of the black ghetto in Detroit. Finally, a conflict between the spatial and non-spatial view of assimilation was examined by Ceri Peach (University of Oxford). He reworked data for

marriages in New Haven between 1900 and 1950 to show that there wasn't a triple melting pot (intermarriage between ethnic and national groups within three continuing religious divides-Protestant, Catholic and Jew). There was a close relationship between degree of ethnic segregation and ethnic intermarriage, which meant few marriages, for instance, between Italians and Poles, two of the major Catholic groups.

Many of us left Oxford on an academic ' high'; specialist symposia of this type are all too rare in the geographical calendar. I hope I have succeeded in conveying some of

my enthusiasm to the reader, who may be interested to know that the papers are to be published as a book.

Barrie Morgan King's College London

Office location research at University College London The library and non-confidential records of the Location of Offices Bureau have been transferred to the Department of Geography at University College London, following the Bureau's recent closure. The material has been catalogued and is available for use (by prior appointment only) by any bona fide research workers.

The former Senior Research Officer of the Bureau, Diana Morris, has been appointed as an Associate Research Fellow at UCL. With Gerald Manners, she will be working in the first instance on a project financed by the Social Science Research Council, reviewing British experience in office location policy over the past two decades.

Enquiries to Diana Morris, Department of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAP (Tel. 01-387 7050 Ext. 545).

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