Iveta Shalna
GEOG 175
Dr. Cope
Ghettos and Gated Communities
Socio-spatial dialectic is a process which cities are shaped and formed. This notion explains that people shape the city as well as the city shapes people. The main aspect among cities is social inequality, and social inequality is both the cause of and caused by the rise of residential segregation such gated communities and ghettos. “Residential segregation is the most prominent form of urban inequality and there is a long standing academic tradition among various discipline studying the causes, aspects, and consequences of segregation”(Falk, 2007,109). Amongst these residential inequalities and segregations there are commonalities that are seen to explain how ghettos and gated communities reflect and share the same social spatial processes. Exclusion, economic deprivation and disinvestment, and congregation are a few processes that reflect the formation and perpetuation of both ghettos and gated communities.
The first social spatial process that undertakes in urban areas among ghettos and gated communities is the concept of exclusion. By allowing some part of society to exclude it self spatially, social fragmentation processes will begin to show fault lines and social inequality will in effect become social exclusion. The power to exclude themselves spatially is the power to exclude others in many other ways. People in ghettos don’t chose to be excluded from the city; they are to be excluded by societies standards. David Wilson interviews a several people that are living in a ghetto in his article, Cities and Race, America’s New Black Ghetto, one Indy resident expresses his thoughts about living in the ghetto, “Its not just us, but them,” he said. “The city and society lock us up here, where it’s tough and brutal life.” “I’m not sure I could live elsewhere,” he said. “but at least I could be given the chance”(2007, 81). People living in ghettos are constrained to stay there because...