How Surprising Neighborhood Changes Are Bringing Down Black-White Segregation

The Program on Urban Studies, with the Department of Sociology, welcomes the Stanford community to the 20th annual Model Scholar lecture featuring John R. Logan. 

About the talk: It is well known by now that the overall level of Black-white segregation in American urban areas is going down.  One surprise is that the largest contributions to this decline are coming from predominantly Black neighborhoods that are remaining very disproportionately Black.  To a large extent these are the poor inner city neighborhoods that were built up by the Great Migration in the mid-20th Century era of near-apartheid.  Their Black residents are leaving them in large numbers and not being replaced by whites or other groups.  In itself this exodus is large enough to have a powerful deconcentrating effect.  But the second surprise is what is happening in the rest of the metropolis.  Neighborhood changes that lower segregation by increasing racial diversity in neighborhoods are outweighed by counter-trends in the opposite direction.  Most striking, the positive effect of Black growth in established white neighborhoods -- a new and positive trend, to be sure -- is more than counterbalanced by the continuing Black growth in a different set of Black neighborhoods.  If this is the end of a century of segregation, as some have described it, it is arriving with many of the old patterns still in place.

John R. Logan completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. Before coming to Brown he was Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Administration at the University at Albany, SUNY; Director of the Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research; and Director of the Urban China Research Network. From 2004 through 2016 he served at Brown as Director of the research initiative on Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences. Dr. Logan is co-author, along with Harvey Molotch, of Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. His most recent edited book, Diversity and Disparities, was published by Russell Sage Foundation in 2015.