Urban Ethnic Encounters: The Spatial Consequences

A characteristic feature of cities had been their ethnic heterogeneity, caused by the arrival of job seeking immigrants, refugees, temporary guest workers and tourists. Urbanization and ethnic differentiation, with all their concomitant conflicts, have been two of the most persistent social changes of the last century and continue to be to the present day. Urban Ethnic Encounters attempts to answer the two leading questions of how urban space structures the life of ethnic groups and how ethnic diversity helps to shape urban space. A multidisciplinary team of authors searches the various dimensions of the spatial organization of inter-ethnic relations in cities and countries around the globe. Unlike most ethnographies in which authors write about the other in faraway places, the majority of the contributors have studied their own society. The case studies are from four different continents. Material is presented from diverse locations such as the cities of Toronto, Philadelphia, Vienna, Beirut, Jakarta, Tehran, Osaka and Albuquerque, and the countries of Israel, Brazil and Taiwan, presents a unique opportunity for comparative analysis of ethnicity and spatial patterns.