Ethnic residential segregation in Britain : "White Flight" versus "Ethnic Comfort Zones"

Abstract EN

Ethnic residential segregation has been a major feature of ethnic minorities’ experience in contemporary Britain.

Importantly, this urban phenomenon is so complex and complicated that so many explanations have been offered to explain and understand its manifestations, triggers, and potential outcomes.

Noticeably, the concern about the urban patterns of the white Britons is somewhat a novel endeavor.

Possibly, this concern has been an effect of what came to be called “White Studies’ which made British white ethnicity a legitimate sub-field of the British ethnic studies.

In this context, the pressing question is: who is to blame for promoting such ethnic residential patterns (whites included)? Our scrutiny of this urban phenomenon in some British cities such as Birmingham, Bradford, and Oldham yielded some interesting results.

Ethnic residential patterns are both a choice (self-segregation) and a constraint (concentration).

In this paper, we mainly examine and study the constraint factors that generated and sustained such residential patterns.

Among other factors, the phenomenon of “white flight” is highlighted as a white strategy of avoidance of newcomers which creates boundaries and hampers any genuine interethnic communication in contemporary Britain.

Thus, the strategy of “flight” that the British white majority seemed to opt for is considerably responsible for the lack of genuine cultural diversity and social cohesion in Britain.

Yet, arguably, the same strategy and technique are used by ethnic minorities themselves to settle and rest in their socio cultural “comfort zones”.

Thus, the flight is a shared tool that does not seem to solve inter-ethnic conflicts but rather postpones them.

This paper hypothesizes that encounter rather than flight is the catalyst to authentic cultural diversity and cultural communication within an increasingly multicultural British society.

Methodologically, this study is a case study based on a representative corpus extracted from different official reports and websites, especially the Office of National Statistics (ONS), and websites of local councils of the cities of London and Bradford.

The research method employed is the quantitative survey one, used to treat the relevant statistics on the ethnic residential distribution of the cities of Bradford and London which yielded several interesting results.