settlement and residential segregation. More
specifically, analysis of the spatial segregation of
minority groups from majority populations has
dominated debate (see, for example, Jones, 1978;
Lee, 1977; Peach, 1975; Peach et al., 1981). Within
North America and western Europe this focus has
been narrowed further by the increasing associa-
tion of the urban with ‘multiracial’ and immigrant
populations. In such societies the geography of
race has become equated with the study of the
city. The ‘spatialization of race’, Cohen (1993)
notes, has led to the inner city connoting black-
ness. Also drawing from the British context, Watt
points out that this process ‘reflects the racialised,
and in certain cases, racist pathologisation of
urban areas, as seen for example in the press
reporting of the urban “riots” of the 1980s’ (1998:
688; for discussion see Burgess, 1985).
Stanton argues that the spatialization of race is
even more extreme within the USA: ‘Conceptu-
ally the city is left to the poor and racially mar-
ginalised ... For the media, the barometer of the
national consciousness, the American city is now
the black city’ (2000: 129). The darkening of the
city’s image is associated by Stanton with the
devaluing of the city, its demotion to a ‘hopeless’
and irrational landscape. To illustrate this
process Stanton offers the following anecdote:
Canal Street, the teeming main downtown New
Orleans, was described as ‘dead’ by white residents
when I arrived in the city. The energetic ‘Third World’
and African-American commercial presence there was
not registered as a realm of the living. (2000: 129)
Since, in recent years, the partial ‘revitalization’
of many US urban cores has gone hand-in-hand
with the ‘return’ of white people to the city (see
Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum, 2000; though see
Frey and Liaw, 1997), there is a slightly dated
ring to Stanton’s assessment. Moreover, it needs
to be remembered that such narratives are far
from universal and should never be accorded a
paradigmatic status: the attempt to demote the
city to ‘urban jungle’ has little currency outside
certain countries within the west (most notably,
the USA). Moreover, even in those countries
where the ‘urban jungle’ became a ubiquitous
discourse, white dominance remained an ever-
present reality of city life.
Drawing on his studies of the connections
between local and national ‘racialized space’
within Sweden, Pred emphasizes that race is con-
cretized, made to appear real, through its fixing
in space:
The social construction of race becomes one with the
physical occupation of space. The racialized become
the segregated, and racial meaning becomes inscribed
upon space. The discursively Otherized becomedeclared out of bounds, the physically Elsewhereized
and Isolated. The categorically excluded become
physically enclosed. The socially marginalized become
out of reach, not easily socially knowable. The socially
barred become locationally removed from opportunity-
yielding social, economic, and political networks. The
culturally distanced become the pushed out and areally
stigmatized ... Another feat of ontological magic. The
implacable taken-for-granteds and idea-logics of cul-
tural racism are – abracadabra, hocus-pocus, simsal-
abim – concretized. (2000: 98–9)The most interesting work in urban cultural
geography has moved away from attempts to
generalize about the implications of minority
group settlement, and towards the deconstruction
of the, often conflicting, representational strate-
gies that surround particular racialized places
and events. Significant geographical work on the
kind of dynamics to which Pred alludes has also
been provided by Jackson in his studies on the
Notting Hill carnival (1988) and ‘race’ and crime
in Toronto (1993; see also Jackson, 1987; Jackson
and Penrose, 1993). Other important examples
include Jacob’s (1988; 1993; 1996) studies on
racialized conflict over landscape use and sym-
bolism in Australia; Smith’s (1989a; 1989b)
research on the racialization of residential space;
Sibley’s (1988; 1992; 1995) accounts of the
geography of ‘outsiders’; Robinson’s (1996;
1998) analysis of the changing dynamics of race
and space in South Africa; Anderson’s (1993a)
work on the ‘Aboriginal space’ of Redfern; and
Keith’s (1993) writings on the spatialized con-
struction of ‘race’ and ‘riots’ in 1980s London.
As Anderson stresses, the process of spatialized
racialization needs to be understood as histori-
cally contingent. This point has also been made
by Keith in his studies on the antagonistic
‘racial’ geographies of the police and ‘black
community’ in London. Keith makes the valu-
able suggestion that the study of the generation
of spatial meanings should be accompanied by
the analysis of their ‘closure’ or contingent com-
pletion. However, Keith implies that the closure
of these metaphoric, metonymic and syntagmatic
associations is provisional, contingent and arbi-
trary. The meanings arrived at by different
groups may reflect the unconscious, common-
sense formation of prejudice or self-conscious,
strategic forms of ‘race-place’ essentialism (for
example, the ghetto as focus of Black Pride).
Yet, in either case, they are geographically and
historically mutable, liable to change, challenge
and reformation. The suggestion that ‘places are
moments of arbitrary closure’ (Keith, 1991a: 187)
is supported by Keith in his book Race, Riots and
Policing: Lore and Disorder in a Multi-racist
Society (1993; see also Keith, 1987; 1988a;CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF RACIALIZATION 3033029-ch15.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 303