Title: Beyond the Ghetto - an interdisciplinary perspective on patterns of ethnicity in the built environment
Abstract: Despite a century of research into residential settlement patterns, not enough is understood about the patterns of immigrant settlement. This topical issue requires radical thinking, particularly as it is currently dealt with by a range of disciplines, each of which tends to rely on its own research paradigms. There is an underlying problem surrounding research into the relationship between society and space. Whilst the social sciences tend to lack an understanding of the independent contribution of the built environment to the way in which communities change over time, the spatial sciences lack an understanding of the political and cultural dynamics underpinning statistical measures of segregation. There is a need for an interdisciplinary approach to take account of both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of cities and migration. The aim of the UCL Cities and Migration working group is to challenge the orthodox view of the relation between social structures and the urban environment over time and to cross traditional research boundaries with a combination of architectural, geographical, sociological, anthropological and historical approaches to the topic of segregation. This report summarises the discussions which took place in May 2010 at the invitation of the UCL Grand Challenge: Sustainable Cities. A gathering of thirty academics and other interested parties came together to hear presentations by UCL scholars from The Bartlett (Sonia Arbaci), Geography (Pablo Mateos), Geomatic Engineering (Muki Haklay) and Public Health (Ilaria Geddes). These were followed by responses from three invited experts: Professor Pnina Werbner (Social Anthropology, Keele), Professor Ceri Peach (Social Geography, Oxford) and Professor Ludi Simpson (Population Studies, Manchester). The following report is the distillation by the UCL academics of the workshop discussions the event’s Chair, Laura Vaughan, and does not necessarily replicate the views of the participants.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
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