Reconsidering both Diversity and Segregation: A Reply to Poulsen, Johnston and Forrest, and to Peach

The recent debate in JEMS between Ceri Peach on the one hand, and Mike Poulsen, Ron Johnston and James Forrest (henceforth PJF) on the other, has two main foci, one narrow and the other broad. The narrower issue concerns whether or not Britain has ghettos. Peach argues in the negative (1996, 2009, 2010); in particular, he exposes PJF’s expansive and fluid definition of ‘ghetto’. PJF provided evidence, for example, that Leicester’s Indian population ranks with African Americans in Chicago in terms of segregation (eg. Johnston et al. 2002; Poulsen 2005) but appear now to equivocate regarding the degree of ghettoisation in England (see Johnston et al. 2010). More broadly, the debate represents a new round in the arguments over depicting and measuring ethnic and racial segregation and diversity in urban residential neighbourhoods. Peach reminds us that the coins of the realm in segregation research have been single-number indices of segregation and that they still retain considerable value. PJF respond by defending approaches which supersede singlenumber indices and which can better account for nuance and complexity in racial and ethnic neighbourhood mix. Like Peach, we, too, question PJF’s neighbourhood classification criteria and worry about any careless deployment of the heavily freighted term ‘ghetto’. More generally, we re-assess all the labels PJF deploy in their classification scheme. Akin to PJF, however, we are also concerned about the limitations of single-index measures of segregation in a time and place*the contemporary US where we perform our own analyses*that is increasingly characterised by both segregation and diversity.