Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and Nob Hill also serve as icons of segregation
and discrimination. Hoyt's (1939) sector model
was strongly influenced by his identification of
high-grade residential areas, and Firey (1947)
provided a classical analysis of the way in which
residents of 'old Boston' worked to maintain the
character and status of Beacon Hill as it came
under threat from city centre expansion. He
spoke of the sentiment and symbolism associated
with the area and the cultural motives of the
families who strove to preserve it. In a later study,
Domosh (1992) studied the comparable high-
status area of Back Bay in Boston. She argued
that by the late nineteenth century Boston's
upper classes were remarkably cohesive and the
Boston Association had been established to
protect their interests. The Back Bay residential
development embodied the ideologies of the
elite and allowed them to distance themselves
from new immigrants. Whereas Beacon Hill
belonged to 'old Boston', Back Bay provided
residences for the new moneyed upper-income
groups. Both places were outcomes of the felt
need for the wealthy to segregate and to place
distance between themselves and the lower
classes.
From new cultural geographers there have
emerged studies of the ways in which specific
residential areas have acquired and retained
segregated high status, often in the face of
significant difficulties. Shaughnessy Heights in
Vancouver is an elite landscape with strong
historical roots and a modern reproduction
(Duncan 1992). Originally, Shaughnessy Heights
was a high-status development featuring English-
style country houses, which carried the dual
connotation of a link to the gentry and to
Englishness. In response to threats to its status and
character, residents successfully organised a
preservation movement and were helped by a
wide cross-section of the urban population that
recognised its symbolic significance to the city as
a whole.
structures; it is also a cultural (reproduction in
that it reproduces the meaning of belonging to
an Anglophile elite in a west Canadian city.
(
ibid.
: 50)
FINANCIAL EXCLUSIONS
A key economic mechanism that stems from
discrimination and produces forms of segregation
is related to the control of financial credit. The
term 'financial exclusion' has been used to
describe a situation in which large numbers of
people are denied access to credit and the benefit
of financial services. Some people, such as those
on very low incomes, will be 'outside' the
financial system by choice (Ford and Rowlinson
1996), but for many their inability to achieve
inclusion in financial services is an increasing
disadvantage (Box 30.1). The broadest correlate of
financial exclusion is social class, but there is
evidence of the relevance of other factors such as
race, age and gender.
Some of the older forms of financial exclusion
reveal both racial and social class dimensions and
has led directly to spatial segregation. Leyshon and
Thrift (1997:229) argued that the geography of
income and wealth shaped access to the financial
system.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer as
lending flows towards wealthy areas, with low
credit risks, and in high volumes per capita as
credit available is often a multiple of income.
In poorer areas there may be a downward spiral
of decline as residents of such areas find it hard
to sell or buy property and businesses are unable
to obtain credit.
(Dymski andVeitch 1992)
The impact of financial exclusion policies in the
housing market has been evident for some time.
Building societies in Britain practised a policy of
'red-lining' by which they refused loans in specific
areas of perceived high risk. A study of inner city
Birmingham (CDP 1974) showed that only 7 per
cent of owner-occupiers held a mortgage at the
prevailing rate of interest, and low-income families
Shaughnessy Heights is not simply a cultural
production (a material landscape)
interpenetrated by political and economic
