Housing Policy, (De)segregation and Social Mixing: An International Perspective

Much of the academic and policy literature on residential segregation has emphasised the effects of the enduring concentration of households from particular ethnic or -economic groups. Often drawing directly on the US experience of ‘ghettoisation’, contributors have pointed to persistent black minority segregation in particular as a of failure with regard to social and economic integration, and equality of in housing and the workplace (for example, Fortuijn et al., 1998; Johnston al., 2002; Peach, 1996; van der Laan Bouma-Doff, 2007; Walks & Bourne, 2006). Fortuijn et al. (1998, p. 367) have contended ‘the black ghetto in American cities the accumulation of the miseries of modern Western societies’.