Ghetto

The concept ghetto is much debated and controversial in Anglophone geography, the social sciences, and public policy. Conflicting and clashing ideologies—conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—all proclaim a definitive unearthing of its essence. Many agree that the concept today references a distinctive space inhabited by one stratum of the American population: the poor and relatively isolated. This space, almost universally associated with U.S. cities, identifies a core of underemployed and unemployed persons whose limited social and spatial mobility confines them to the inner city. In this context, a population disproportionately black and Latino is distinguished on the basis of material deprivation, lack of opportunities for upward mobility, limited spatial mobility, and immersion in disinvested neighborhoods. The pathbreaking exposition of black ghettos in urban America by Harold Rose in 1971 was pivotal to centering this notion within contemporary Anglophone human geography.

Yet there is much disagreement about the ghetto's specifics, that is, the causes for its existence and perpetuation and for its precise social attributes. Neoconservatives posit a space-trapped population who fall prey to their own production of a pernicious, ensnaring “ghetto subculture.” Poor people, in often dire realities, reflexively and consciously opt for a lifestyle of limited responsibility, peripheral commitment to wage labor, and adherence to short-term, hedonistic pursuits, as place-specific, “ghetto” values are mediated and acted on. Ghettos here evolve as increasingly separate, distinctive social worlds whose unique values seamlessly circulate in life's everyday circuitries to produce a problematic type of being: “ghetto people.”

Alternatively, liberal and radical perspectives chronicle a contemporary ghetto with different social attributes. Both are remarkably similar in identifying a resource-deprived space that embeds a population and institutional fabric bearing hopelessness, the struggle to achieve against great obstacles, and discord in the face of class and racial oppression. A reality comprising barriers, racism, discrimination, and lack of access to resources and facilities is seen to be ceaselessly mediated by and shaping a population's everyday life and sense of future material prospects. Ghettos, then, are seen to house a population struggling to be the same rather than choosing change, opting for an alternative demographic. What ghetto residents most desire—decent material foundations, steady jobs, meaningful lives, resource-rich communities—is identical to the desire of every other population group but is extremely difficult to obtain in these isolated, deprived, and stigmatized spaces. Where there is deviance and deformity, it is suggested, there is the debilitating impact of hopelessness spawned by racism, grinding poverty, and the everyday struggle to survive.

At the same time, much disagreement exists about the reasons for this space's continued existence. Neooconservatives emphasize the driving power of a humanly created subculture: “the subculture of poverty.” This perspective emphasizes the interconnection between human choice, created cultural traditions, and individual character, which places cause in the realm of human actions and choices. Here, the creation and sustaining of ghettos is a culturally driven affair. Faced with difficult everyday realities, people create their own social worlds via conscious decision making to adapt to marginal circumstances. The [Page 1276]construction of different norms allows people to attain goals, ones that are frequently impugned by the larger society. Amid pervasive feelings of resignation, passivity, fatalism, and powerlessness, the failure to self-discipline, an unwillingness to defer gratification, and the marginalization of the work ethic propel the formation of a distinctive population and space. In the end, people have difficulty holding jobs, fail to see the utility of working hard, and become transient economic actors who perpetuate poverty, reduce life chances, and sustain the economic and social environment of a ghetto.

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