The Racially Fragmented City? Neighborhood Racial Segregation and Diversity Jointly Considered

This article reflects on the racial configuration of urban space. Previous research tends to posit racial segregation and diversity as either endpoints on a continuum of racial dominance or mirror images of one another. We argue that segregation and diversity must be jointly understood; they are necessarily related, although not inevitably as binary opposites. Our view is that the neighborhood geographies of U.S. metropolitan areas are simultaneously and increasingly marked by both racial segregation and racial diversity. We offer an approach that classifies neighborhoods based jointly on their compositional diversity and their racial dominance, illustrated by an examination of the neighborhood racial structure of several large metropolitan areas for 1990 and 2000. Compositional diversity increased in all metropolitan areas in ways rendered visible by our approach, including a sharp reduction in the number of highly segregated white neighborhoods, transitioning mostly into moderately diverse yet still white-dominated neighborhoods, and a fourfold increase in the number of highly diverse neighborhoods. Even so, many highly segregated spaces remain, especially for whites and blacks. Latino-dominated spaces show a mix of persistence and emergence. Although compositional diversity is increasing, highly diverse neighborhoods are still rare and are the least persistent of all racial configurations. Our approach clearly demonstrates the “both/and”-ness of segregation and diversity.