Landscapes of Inequality: Spatial Segregation, Economic Isolation, and Contingent Residential Locations

Cities contain clusters of jobs and people. These clusters or groups lead to the formation of districts. In the case of firms, transactions costs and networks facilitate spatial concentration; in the case of people, chain migration and social networks reinforce group propinquity. Together, these clusters come to form the socioeconomic fabric of metropolitan areas. The end result is a city made up of labor markets and residential enclaves. This simplistic representation of urban form is at the heart of many efforts to model the residential or place-of-work location decision. Reflective of this verbal schematic of a city, the articles in this issue ask, each in their own way, two questions: do industrial and social groups overlap; and what factors, market and nonmarket, structure residential location options and therefore either facilitate or retard access to jobs by social groups? In these articles, immigrants and underrepresented minorities are the objects of investigation, and the metropolitan region, captured in multiple spatial scales, is the geographic unit of observation. The literature on immigrants’ propensity for employment suggests that the demand for low-wage labor, on the one hand, and ethnic networks, on the other hand, together help to explain the spatial location of ethnic employment concentrations. Similarly, a prominent explanation of the underemployment of underrepresented minorities emphasizes the discrepancy between residential location and the suburban location of work. At work are markets for housing and labor. At the scale of the city, this description of cause and effect is attractive and even compelling. But it ignores preexisting spatial segregation and residential discrimination that fix in space and reinforce patterns of spatial inequality that shape and reshape the location of residents and their access to work. At work is the unfolding process of uneven development, a persistent quality of capitalism that plays out across multiple spatial scales and effects differences in levels and rates of economic development across time among places, people, and broader economic activity. The articles in this issue consider, in different and novel ways, the residentiallocation decision of social groups and the corresponding links between the site of residence and the site of work, overlaid on longabiding problems of social and economic inequality that are defined by race, income, and uneven development (Fox Gotham 2002; Orfield and Lee 2005; Watson 2006). These location decisions are encumbered geographically by a segregated landscape that, once acknowledged, stands as a testaEditorial Landscapes of Inequality: Spatial Segregation, Economic Isolation, and Contingent Residential Locations