Ghetto

Category: Fields of research

Historically, the term ghetto used to describe the legally sanctioned segregated area of a city inhabited by a discriminated ethnic group, especially the Jewish minority. In modern usage concept of ghetto refers to any part of a city occupied by impoverished and disadvantaged groups. Slum is a concept related to ghetto, a main difference being that slum is a type of ghetto with high population density and inadequate housing – houses and buildings are purely made with low-quality materials, while the whole settlement has bad or unexciting infrastructure (electricity, running water, sewage, etc.).

Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, in their book The City (1925), used maps to present the ecological structure of an American city - a set of localized and isolated zones, each with its own category of the population. These zones often have the shape of concentric circles. In the center of a city is a business zone, outside it is a transition zone characterized by ghettos, slums, and crime; the next is the working-class residential area –populated by second-generation immigrants. Outside of these is the residential zone, and the last is the suburban zone. Urban zones are going through their own evolution, and the main driving force of that evolution is competition. People are fighting for land and other urban resources within the city. City districts and neighborhood relations in them operate relatively independently of the wider physical and social urban environment. A big problem for many cities is the class and/or racially isolated neighborhoods, known as ghettos. Within such ghettos, a specific moral order is often formed.

Louis Wirth wrote the book Ghetto (1928), where he studies the life of Jewish immigrants who lived in two city districts of Chicago. Wirth called one city district a "ghetto", comparing it to the real ghetto in which Jews lived in medieval Frankfurt. He believed that the experience of living in medieval ghettos, in which Jews were forced to live in isolation, imprinted the "ghetto experience" on the Jewish mind, which, in the United States, also, now voluntarily, began to live in isolated neighborhoods. Wirth believed that, with the increase in the assimilation of immigrants, their residential mobility also increased. Harvey W. Zorbaugh conducted empirical research on the slums in Chicago and wrote about it in the book The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929).

William Foote Whyte did empirical research in Boston, in a slum where Italian immigrants lived. His research method was participatory observation. He lived with an Italian family and observed the daily life of the residents of that neighborhood. This allowed him to focus more closely on the goal of his research, which was the activities of members of juvenile gangs. This research resulted in the very influential book Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (1943). Observing the gang members, but also the wider immigrant society, Whyte discovered a culture that had a special structure, and was caused by forced isolation and poverty. In addition to scientific research, Whyte has been involved in advocating for solving the problems of poverty and poor working conditions in slums.

In the book The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), William Julius Wilson emphasizes the importance of race for the life chances of African Americans and presents data on the highly vulnerable position of urban poor African Americans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans began to move from the rural South to the industrialized North of the United States. Lacking qualifications, they performed the worst industrial jobs and had no chance of advancing. Their poverty and physical isolation in the ghettos led to an increase in white prejudice, which further worsened the position of African Americans. A further deterioration in the situation of a large number of African Americans occurred in the early 1960s, due to several structural factors. The decrease in the number of well-paid jobs in the manufacturing sector in cities, and at the same time the increase in low-paid service jobs, contributed to the reduction of employment, but also to the reduction of real wages of those who were employed. This led to impoverishment, so there was an increase in crime among the male population, as well as an increase in the number of people sentenced to prison terms. The consequence of that was an increased number of single-parent families, in which only the mother was present.

References:

Breckinridge. The Delinquent Child and the Home (1912);

Burgess, and Park. The City (1925);

Gans. Urban Villagers (1962);

Hannerz. Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (1969);

Hall. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (1976);

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993);

Ohlin. Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs (1960);

Rex. The Ghetto and the Underclass (1987);

Shaw. Deliquency Areas (1929);

- Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (1931);

Thrasher. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (1927);