ancient cities

312 Ghetto
Denoting African American Communities
Gilbert Osofsky’s landmark study Harlem: The
Making of a Ghetto (1963) marks the common
usage of ghetto to refer to African American communities
(the second edition of the book was published
in 1971 with a concluding chapter titled
“The Enduring Ghetto,” which argues that the
essential nature and structure of the ghetto have
remained in the north since the end of slavery).
Osofsky’s work was followed by many other studies
of the history of Black settlement in the urban
north, including Allan Spear’s Black Chicago
(1968), Kenneth Kusner’s The Making of a Negro
Ghetto (1976), and Thomas Philpott’s The Making
of the Second Ghetto. In geography of the same
period, Harold Rose would describe the African
American ghetto as a new urban subsystem and
refer to suburban Black communities as minighettos.
By the 1970s, the use of ghetto to describe
not just specific areas within the city, but African
American communities as a whole, had become
solidified.
By the end of the century, the ghetto migrated
from popular culture to scholarly research and
then back into popular culture—with a vengeance.
Indeed, the ghetto is ever present: in popular
music, in the cinema, in consumer products (boom
boxes became known as ghetto blasters), and of
course, in the ever-present labeling of speech,
behavior, and dress: that’s so ghetto!
The ghetto remains a central concept in sociological
research and in urban studies more
generally. William Julius Wilson has published
important books based on two decades of study in
Chicago (The Truly Disadvantaged, When Work
Disappears), and Loïc Wacquant reprised his own
research from the same inner-city Chicago neighborhoods
and the Paris banlieues in Urban
Outcasts. Mary Pattillo has suggested that the
boundaries of the Chicago ghetto (roughly the area
encompassed by Drake and Cayton’s Black
Metropolis—although they did not consider all of
Bronzeville to be a ghetto) should be expanded to
include segregated neighborhoods for Blacks even
if they are not poor, arguing that this would be
more comparable to the original use to define
Jewish communities. In 2007, City magazine published
“Banlieues, the Hyperghetto, and Advanced
Marginality: A Symposium on Loïc Wacquant’s
Urban Outcast,” a 60-plus-page collection of
essays focusing on the work of Wacquant. And a
recent symposium on the ghetto in City and
Community invited scholars from several disciplines
(and three continents) to discuss the usefulness
of the term ghetto in the study of urban
communities. This symposium notes that the gentrification
of former ghettos such as Harlem and
the Fillmore District in San Francisco, depopulation
and gentrification on Chicago’s south side
(the area studied by Wilson and Wacquant), dispersal
of African American populations from
inner-city neighborhoods in other cities, and the
like suggest that it is time to evaluate the conceptual
merits and usefulness of the ghetto for understanding
emergent patterns of social exclusion
across the metropolitan region. In Chicago and
Harlem, the visitor may take guided tours of the
ghetto, and the earlier zones of exclusion now
appear in the official city websites for tourists.
With the commercialization of ghetto spaces,
important questions emerge as to the usefulness of
the ghetto to understanding the social exclusion of
ethnic and racial minorities in the United States
and other countries.
Ray Hutchison
See also Banlieue; Chicago, Illinois; Ethnic Enclave; Favela
Further Readings
Chatterton, Paul, ed. 2007. “Banlieues, the Hyperghetto,
and Advanced Marginality: A Symposium on Loïc
Wacquant’s Urban Outcast.” City 11(3):357–421.
Curiel, Roberta and Bernard-Dov Cooperman. 1990. The
Ghetto of Venice. London: Tauris Parke.
Davis, Robert C. and Benjamin Ravid, eds. 2001. The
Jews of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. 1945. Black
Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hutchison, Ray and Bruce Haynes, eds. 2008.
“Symposium on the Ghetto.” City and Community
7(4):347–98.
Pattillo, Mary. 2003. “Expanding the Boundaries and
Definitions of the Ghetto.” Ethnic and Racial Studies
26(6):1046–57.
Sennett, Richard. 1995. Flesh and Stone: The Body and
the City in Western Civilization. New York: W. W.
Norton.