Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Urban Core and Suburban Periphery of Large Urban Areas in the U,S., 1980-2010

Abstract

A division of large urban areas into an urban core and a suburban periphery is presented as an alternative to the traditional central city-suburb distinction, which has problems. An index of diversity is presented and used to calculate racial and ethnic diversity among whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians for the core and periphery of 59 large urban areas for the census years from 1980 to 2010. Average levels of diversity have increased over the period for both portions of the urban areas. That increase was greater in the suburban peripheries, resulting in diversity closer to the cores and showing that the suburbs are far more diverse than the earlier assumptions that the suburbs were largely white. For a quarter of the urban areas, the suburban periphery was actually more diverse than the urban core in 2010.