San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tech creates a modern urban ghetto
How a new kind of segregation is taking hold around the world
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ponte delle Guglie bridge in Venice, Italy, is engulfed with tourists, crisscrossing from one end to the other. An easy walk today, this passage was under tight control until the 18th century, when the bridge was the main entrance into the only legal home for Venetian Jews, sealed off at night by city policy. This neighborhood was called the “ghetto” — an oft-forgotten origin point for one of the most contested, contentious descriptors of modern urbanity.
The first ghettos were physical ghettos, and their distinguishing feature was physical separation. Some have referred to them as “urban condoms,” preventing the citizens of medieval Europe from encountering Jews on the streets. After World War II, the term came to more generally denote disadvantaged neighborhoods across the world. This new kind of ghetto was not marked by explicit mobility restrictions — but obvious differences in demography and social life that made them clearly visible to the naked eye.
Today, after successive waves of gentrification and inner-city migration, ghettos are becoming increasingly invisible. However, our cities are now marked instead by the emergence of subtler forms of segregation. The modern ghetto taken on a new forms — we propose calling them “liminal ghettos” — and it takes new, technologically augmented eyes to see them.
Big Data revolutionizes the way we see our built environment, particularly by moving our focus from the physical city — long the primary subject of our quantitative investigations — to the human interactions that take place within it. Adorned with electronic prosthetics, homo electronicus leaves ubiquitous traces of her passage. These leftovers, harvested from phones, smart watches and the like, can be transformed into valuable raw material for the experimental urban scholar.
Leveraging this data, our group at the Massachusetts Institute Technology has shown how modern segregation takes subtly different forms. For example, we used two types of cell phone data — anonymous location tracking and calling between contacts — to create two distinct indices. The first index, physical segregation, estimates the probability that people from different socioeconomic strata bump into each other on the street. The second, communication segregation, measures how often people from different backgrounds connect with each other.
Instead of being split obvious dividing lines — as in the ancient Venetian ghetto — we quietly divide ourselves according to where we go and whom we talk to in the course of a day. These “liminal,” transitional ghettos are delineated by invisible fault lines, like bone fractures visible only through the use of X-rays. Society is ghettoized when shared human experiences fall beneath a certain threshold.
In the motions of everyday life, people are now ghettoizing themselves.
In Stockholm, for instance, we see that people are more likely to be exposed to people with similar levels of income and education even as they exit their home neighborhoods. In the transitional spaces of daily life, the wealthy interact with the wealthy and the poor interact with the poor. This effect is more than just a spillover of residential segregation: given two areas the same distance from one’s home, with the same concentration of amenities, any given Stockholm resident is more likely to travel to the one that is socioeconomically similar to their own.
Working toward socioeconomically integrated residential neighborhoods, in other words, without accounting for these divisions will fail to further genuine integration.
Beyond the physical fabric of the city, changes in day-to-day culture and ways of life are playing a role in the construction of our new liminal ghettos. The growth of home delivery companies, which allow urban consumers in the industrialized world to have food, clothes and almost anything else delivered at the touch of a button, erodes opportunities for social interaction in shops and restaurants. To the extreme, it becomes possible for those who can afford it to seclude themselves even more from interaction with people from different walks of life, incognizant of the essential labor that goes into their consumption. We have measured such phenomena in another European city, Porto, Portugal, which had drops in diversity of interaction among its residents of up to 35% as COVID-19 cases peaked in January 2021. These drops were more acute for certain groups of people: women and older people became especially “ghettoized” and even more restricted in their social encounters to those socioeconomically similar to them. The very rich and the very poor also saw larger pandemic-era decreases in social segregation, while the middle-class remained relatively wellmixed. These differences between identity groups in level of access to some of cities’ most valuable resources — diverse interactions with other people — pose critical questions about urban equity. It remains to be seen how permanent these drops will be, and monitoring them should be a consistent part of the conversation about recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beyond understanding liminal ghettos, we also need to develop tools for reintegration. Recently, economic research in New York has elucidated for the first time a causal relationship between parks and social integration; parks have an exceptional ability to attract visitors from all walks of life. In Stockholm, together with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, we have found a significant correlation between schools and integration; campuses encourage relationships among students and staff that persist well beyond initial moments of contact in classes and dining halls.
Yet, the mere understanding of liminal ghettos will give us a new advantage as we seek to manage the two key forces that have been at play in cities since their inception around 10,000 years ago: integration and segregation. We need cities to focus on the former and perform their first primordial function — making us exceed the sum of our parts, free from the interference of division and exploitation. To do so, we will need to identify invisible urban fault lines and build new bridges to cross them — just as today we can cross Venice’s Ponte delle Guglie with ease.
(This is the second of a two-part series.)
Ihad already been driving for two hours, as I retraced my mom’s holiday drives on surface streets, in the time before freeways, 80 miles across Southern California. And I was only halfway from Hawthorne, the city where she’d grown up near LAX, to Redlands, the San Bernardino County city where her family had lived.
Imperial Highway, my route for the first half of the journey, would get me no closer; the road, once extending all the way to Imperial County, now expires at the Anaheim-Orange border.
So, I turn north head through Brea Canyon on a dusty, trafficcrammed road paralleling the 57 freeway. Without a map, I’m in search of Baseline, where I’ll turn east.
It was once among the most important routes in all of California.
Indeed, Baseline is older than almost everything around it. In the 1850s, U.S. government surveyors, charged with establishing an “initial point” for Southern California surveys established a northsouth meridian line and an eastwest baseline to guide future surveys.
That baseline became Baseline, which today goes by various names — Base Line or Baseline, Baseline Avenue or Baseline Street, or, in Upland, 16th Street. Just as the 105 freeway shadows Imperial Highway, the 210 tracks the Baseline corridor it replaced over the past two generations. The housing is newer here — my mom recalls the Baseline as a strip of development and services, running largely through groves and farms. But the buildings seem sun-bleached and in need of repair — a reminder that California’s housing stock is older than that of the Rust Belt states.
I head through Upland, with ranch houses and a few parks, and then into Rancho Cucamonga, which seems to have a dozen dentists along Baseline. “Why all the dentists?” I ask myself. Then I think: It’s all the doughnut shops!
In Rialto, Baseline becomes a divide. On the south are homes,
Baseline Street in San Bernardino runs along what federal surveyors set as the north-south meridian and east-west baseline of the state. protected by sound walls. On the north are warehouses, their “Now Hiring” signs getting big as I go deeper into the Inland Empire, now an American center for logistics.
Sidewalks are replaced by dust, and the landscape gets browner, except for the brilliant green colors of Eisenhower High School. I feel like I’m in the country — until I enter the city of San Bernardino.
To this point, the roads have been relatively smooth. But San Bernardino only emerged from municipal bankruptcy in 2017. Baseline here is full of ruts and potholes, and my Prius bounces up and down.
I’ve been driving for more than three hours, and I’m getting close to my destination. A few minutes east of San Bernardino, I reach East Highlands, where my greatgrandmother and other relatives worked in the orange groves and packing houses after arriving from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.
The packing company provided a small, green house for the family to live in here in East Highlands; that’s where my mom was heading from Hawthorne six decades ago. That green house, in a line of houses once known as the Green Row, is long gone, but I find the spot, on a hillside in a planned community.
Baseline dead-ends at an orange grove, which provides a bit of agricultural respite, and beauty, between the development and a dry hillside crisscrossed with hiking trails. Many of the oranges lay unpicked, rotting on the ground.
My great aunt and uncle, Fern and Don, remain in Redlands, near the 800-square-foot house my grandparents saved up to buy that we would visit on those traffic-choked drives on the 10. I turn south, taking Orange Street through the Redlands downtown and up to the retirement community where Fern and Don now live.
More than eight hours have passed since I started. My total drive time, excluding stops, has been more than four hours. But the journey has felt even longer, with time moving in reverse as I retrace my mom’s family drives from six decades ago, and follow thoroughfares that date to the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.
After navigating the community’s COVID checks, I knock on my aunt and uncle’s door. I hug Fern, and spend a half-hour arguing good-naturedly with Don about what he’s watching on Fox News. But I am eager to get home, without delay.
In less than five minutes of driving, I’m on the 10, heading west toward L.A. This drive will take me only 90 minutes, because of some traffic around West Covina. The route is not particularly scenic. But as I drive home, I suddenly feel fresher and renewed — with new memories of Southern California surface streets and with my mother’s enduring gratitude for our freeways.
A few minutes east of San Bernardino, I reach East Highlands, where my great-grandmother and other relatives worked in the orange groves.