On the Spatiality of Segregation and the Governance of Change

Abstract

This article presents segregation as a fundamental, longstanding, and widespread problem that impedes democratic urban life, and further, a problem that is intelligible from a critical geographic perspective. Ignorance is spatially produced by segregation at multiple scales, in places and across space, thereby legitimizing and perpetuating silence about problems among marginalized groups. This spatialized understanding explains inequality along any of many axes of difference (not just class, as in conventional political economy perspectives). Understanding segregation in terms of the spatial production of ignorance prompts an agenda that forefronts the creation of new social knowledges. The focus here is on the everyday economy as a crucial but commonly overlooked context for developing such knowledges. I re-present a theory of knowledge creation developed for the pursuit of firm competitiveness and reconfigure it to mesh socio-political with economic goals, thereby dissolving an implicit binary that pervades academic scholarship.A central challenge is to change prevailing discourses that produce and reproduce ignorance by cultivating new practices that entail meaningful interaction among people otherwise segregated, namely the development of overlapping business networks constituted by diverse actors (by class, race/ethnicity). Efficiency becomes a means to social as well as economic ends, as respect and trust via collaborative experience (among people who might otherwise not interact) generate new social understandings. The possibilist framework developed here rests on the difficult coordination of processes operating at multiple scales.