Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
for developments on the outskirts of town. Housing in the
European city is often combined with places of work, with
work spaces on the bottom fl oors of buildings and hous-
ing above. Large zones of housing in Europe typically
begin in a ring around the outside of the city center, in
what Ernest Burgess called the zone of transition. After
the war, many European governments built public hous-
ing structures in the spaces leveled by bombing
around
the
city center.
of housing, if you walk through the public housing zone
of Amsterdam, you will fi nd a family from Suriname liv-
ing next to an Indonesian family and a Moroccan family,
not just other Surinamese. The housing and neighbor-
hoods are multicultural. The ethnic groups maintain
their local cultures through religious and cultural orga-
nizations rather than through residential segregation. In
Amsterdam, the call to Friday prayer for Muslims rings
out all over the immigrant areas, as Muslims from various
countries are spread throughout the city.
Government Policy and Immigrant
Accommodation
Immigration is changing the spatial-cultural geography
of European cities. As immigrants have settled in large
numbers in the zone of transition, locals have moved out.
Walking from the city center of Paris out through immi-
grant neighborhoods, one can see the cultural landscape
change to refl ect the signifi cant number of i
Ethnic Neighborhoods in the Global Periphery
and Semiperiphery City
In cities of the periphery and semiperiphery, a sea of
slum development typically begins where the perma-
nent buildings end, in some cases engulfi ng and dwarfi ng
the central city. If you stand on a hill outside Lima (Peru)
or overlooking the Cape Flats near Cape Town (South
Africa), you see an unchanging panorama of makeshift
shacks built of every conceivable material, vying for
every foot of space, extending to the horizon. You will
notice few, if any, trees, and you will see narrow foot-
paths leading to a few unpaved streets that go into the
central city.
Millions of migrants travel to such ominous envi-
ronments every year. The total number of people living
in these types of slum developments is uncertain because
government control is impossible and enumeration
impractical. In Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the migrants build
their dwellings on dangerous, landslide-prone slopes; in
Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea), the migrants sink
stilts in the mud and build out over the water, risking wind
and waves. In Calcutta (India), thousands of migrants do
not even try to erect shelters: there and in many other cit-
ies they live in the streets, under bridges, even in storm
drains. City governments do not have the resources to
adequately educate, medicate, or police the burgeoning
populations, let alone to provide even minimal housing
for most.
Even the people living in the squalid conditions of
shanty settlements are not really squatters—they pay rent.
When the settlements expand outward from the central
city, they occupy land owned by previous residents, fami-
lies who farmed what were once the rural areas beyond
the city's edge. Some of the farming families were favored
by the former colonial administration; they moved into
the cities but continued to own the lands their farms were
on. As shanty developments encroached on their lands,
the landowners began to charge people rent for living on
the dilapidated housing the new residents built on the land.
After establishing an owner-tenant relationship, the land-
owners steadily raise rents, threatening to destroy the
fl imsy shacks if residents fail to pay. In this way, powerful
mmigrants
from the “Maghreb” of Africa, the region of North Africa
around Algeria and Morocco. Maghrebis are by far the
most numerous inhabitants in the tough, hardscrabble
immigrant neighborhoods around Paris, where unemplo
y-
ment is high, crime is widespread, and resentment festers.
Whether a public housing zone is divided into eth-
nic neighborhoods in a European city depends in large
part on government policy. Urban geographers Christian
Kesteloot and Cees Cortie studied housing policies
and zones in Brussels, Belgium, and Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. They found that Brussels has very little pub-
lic housing and that immigrants live in privately owned
rentals throughout the city. Kesteloot and Cortie also
found that immigrant groups in Brussels who came from
a distinct region of their home country (especially rural
regions), such as the Turks in Brussels, tend to cluster
in ethnic neighborhoods. In contrast, the researchers
reported that immigrant groups who came from cities,
such as the Moroccans in Brussels, chose rental units scat-
tered throughout the city and therefore did not establish
ethnic neighborhoods in Brussels.
Amsterdam is quite different from Brussels:
Amsterdam has a great deal of public housing and few
ethnic neighborhoods within the public housing units.
When immigration to Amsterdam from former colonies
(Indonesia, Surinam) and noncolonies (Morocco and
Turkey) increased in the 1960s, Amsterdammers moved
from the transition zone of public housing to neighbor-
ing towns such as Almere. The Dutch government then
implemented a policy in the public housing zone that
slowed the creation of ethnic neighborhoods. The Dutch
government allots public housing to legal immigrants by
assigning homes on a sequential basis in the city's zone of
transition, where some 80 percent of the housing stock
is public housing. As a result of government assignment
