Uncertain Segregation: The Challenge of Defining and Measuring Ethnicity in Segregation Studies

Abstract

The study of residential segregation has gained great attention over the last decade in the developed world amidst public worries about the apparent failure of multiculturalism and a shift in policy from the celebration of diversity towards the promotion of social integration of minority communities. An increasing ‘assimilationist’ public discourse demands more detailed measures of socio-spatial separation. Although great attention has been devoted to the complex issues involved in the measurement of residential segregation, efforts have focused primarily on spatial issues (e.g. geographic scale or units of analysis) and on population dynamics (e.g. concentration thresholds or demographic change). However, aspects related to the measurement of ethnic groups have been largely overlooked, in favour of an often uncritical reliance on official classifications of race and ethnicity. This paper argues for alternative understandings and measurements of ethnicity and race in the analysis of residential segregation. It illustrates this need through analysis of London using an innovative methodology based upon people’s names origins (Onomap), applied here to the electoral register. In doing so, it demonstrates some of the effects that alternative delineations of human groups can have on segregation indices. It is hoped that the results presented here place some doubts on previously established evidence on the most segregated ethnic groups in London, as well as the validity of the rather blunt White/Non-White duality commonly found in the segregation literature