Ghettos

The ghetto is a constrained area occupied almost exclusively by members of an ostracized group, generally black, and within which nearly all members of that group are constrained to live. Black ghettos are doubly exclusive: nearly all blacks are in it; nearly all in it are black. The process of ghetto formation has important implications for consumption in terms of unequal access to housing and other vital services such as education.

In South Africa, under its apartheid regime, racial and ethnic segregation was rigorously legislated. Cities were zoned to separate each racial group. Black townships, such as Johannesburg's Soweto, were established distant from the city in which the Africans worked to not blight white urban expansion in their direction.

The term ghetto originated in medieval Venice, where it applied to the Jewish quarter to which Jews were obliged to return by nightfall. However, it became a generic name for such areas in medieval towns. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland, they were referred to as shtetls, though these were small Jewish market towns.