Introduction

This chapter presents analyses of changes in the level of ethnic residential segregation in Britain taking a life course perspective. Changes are separately analysed for age cohorts, ethnic groups and subnational areas. The results show ethnic residential desegregation in the 1990s across age cohorts and ethnic groups, and this is particularly marked for young adults. The second part of the chapter examines how age differentiation in migration patterns might explain these changes in segregation. It shows that what has been described as ‘White flight’ and ‘minority self-segregation’ (see also Chapters Two and Six, this volume) can alternatively be seen as one of the dynamics of desegregation in which age-differentiated migration is common across ethnic groups: young adult urbanisation and family/older adult suburbanisation with immigration of a similar magnitude to the least and most diverse areas. The chapter concludes that it is necessary to take age into account to understand ethnic residential segregation and its dynamics. The chapter uses census-based population and components of population change estimates for small areas linking the 1991 and 2001 Censuses in England and Wales and also 2001 UK Census micro-data.

The fear of ethnic ghettos has been established over centuries (Wirth, 1928), although the modern idea that has dominated the topic both theoretically and methodologically was developed during the first decades of the 20th century by the ecological paradigm of the Chicago School of Sociology. Since the seminal work on the subject by Robert Park (1924) on The concept of social distance and Ernest Burgess (1928) on Residential segregation in American cities, the study of separation of groups has drawn on the political and intellectual idea of how elites have viewed the relationship between ethnicity and poverty in the city (Ward, 1989).

In his classic book The ghetto, Louis Wirth (1928, p 6) incorporates the ‘Little Sicilies, Little Polands, Chinatowns, and Black Belts in our large cities’ as the equivalent of Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe. In Duncan and Lieberson's (1959) classic paper, the authors demonstrate an inverse relationship between residential segregation and assimilation of immigrants.