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SEGREGATION

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................xiIntroduction............................................................11 SEVENTY CENTURIES OF CITY-SPLITTING...................................192 WHITE TOWN/BLACK TOWN.................................................473 RACE AND THE LONDON-CALCUTTA CONNECTION...............................754 THE STATIONS RAJ......................................................1135 SEGREGATING THE PACIFIC...............................................1356 SEGREGATION MANIA.....................................................1597 THE OUTER LIMITS OF COLONIAL URBANISM.................................1938 THE MULTIFARIOUS SEGREGATION OF JOHANNESBURG..........................2299 THE FURIES FLY IN THE SETTLERS' CITY..................................26110 CAMOUFLAGING THE COLOR LINE IN CHICAGO...............................29511 SEGREGATION AT THE EXTREMES..........................................33312 OUTFLANKING A GLOBAL REVOLUTION......................................383Epilogue: People, the Planet, and Segregated Cities.....................421Notes...................................................................431Index...................................................................483

Chapter One

Before Race Mattered

When did we first start dividing our cities into separate, unequal, and compulsory residential zones? And when did we start to spread such practices across the world?

The answers to these questions cannot simply be chalked up to a human instinct to distance ourselves from those we find unfamiliar. Throughout our history, we have defined the boundaries between in-groups and out-groups—the "us" and the "them"—in many ways. Our cities' politics have reflected changes and variations in those definitions, each of which gave rise to a different type of segregationist politics. The idea that humanity is divided into separate "races," for example, is relatively young. It was not until the 1700s that Westerners first used race as a universalized category to explain human differences, and it was only then that it became important to the practice of dividing cities.

Sadly, though, people did not need to wait for the invention of race in the West to start dividing cities, nor to replicate urban segregation over large regions of the world. In fact, for about seventy centuries—arguably since the invention of cities themselves—we have repeatedly committed acts of inequitable and forcible city-splitting. Along the way, we have justified our actions in the name of just about every other concept of human difference imaginable, marking offseparate residential territories for different classes, clans, castes, craft s, nations, religions, civilizations, and even sexes. The most successful forms of ancient segregationist politics were based on more complex and specific combinations of these ideas: that the gods should live in separate, more splendid places than mere mortals; that city dwellers should live separately from those in the countryside; and that foreigners should live apart from local people.

Unlike the case of racial segregation, no single civilization was responsible for the invention and replication of these ancient forms of city-splitting. Instead, each of humanity's urban civilizations adopted these segregationist practices for the most part on their own. They did this at approximately the same time that they built their first cities and that they invented three institutions crucial to segregationist politics: authoritarian governments, castes of elite religious intellectuals, and institutionalized inequalities of wealth that included efforts to monopolize control over urban land. These were the direct ancestors of the institutions that would spread racial segregation worldwide during the modern era.

The Long Shadow of the Ziggurat

Sometime around 5000 BCE—seventy centuries ago—the Mesopotamian god Marduk is said to have commanded his priests and worshipers to build a temple at a place called Eridu. Archaeologists uncovered this city, which many consider the oldest of all, under a mound of windblown desert sand in 1854 in today's Iraq. Long before that, though, in 600 BCE, a gaggle of Babylonian poets had already identified Eridu as the birthplace of segregation by claiming that the city came into being when Marduk ordered his followers to surround "his holy house ... of the gods in a holy place" with separate dwellings for ordinary mortals charged with the place's upkeep.

Human settlements contained all sorts of dividing lines long before Marduk's power move into Mesopotamian real estate. On the most elementary level, of course, the walls and roofs of all dwelling places intrinsically "segregate" sheltered spaces from exposed ones. Towns and cities, for their part, have no existence without their honeycomb-like built environment, made up of clusters of such walls and roofs. But it is certainly possible to imagine a settlement without the type of segregation that Marduk proposed. In fact, archaeologists found exactly such a "protocity" during the 1960s at a place in Turkey called Çatalhöyük. The interiors of Çatalhöyük's houses, more than a thousand years older than Eridu's, were themselves subdivided in simple and familiar ways. Cooking space was marked off by hearths; food-storage areas contained dugout grain bins; prayer, sleep, and lovemaking happened elsewhere; and there was also a separate place for the dead—buried under the floor. The status of men and women was apparently much more equal than in later cities, and they seem to have shared the same spaces, though some may have been closely associated with the daily activities of one sex more than the other.

Outside, Çatalhöyük was divided into separate cells by the walls of its houses. But within the honeycomb of the town there was little evidence of the separation of the diverse activities or functions that help distinguish a city from simpler settlements. All of Çatalhöyük's residents did more or less the same thing: they farmed. Some townsfolk moonlighted as artisans, but their workshops seem to have occupied yet another space inside their houses. The only clear large-scale dividing line was that which separated the town itself from the surrounding fields and wild places. Çatalhöyük's builders never even set aside space for streets between the town's buildings, which snuggled right up next to each other and shared each others' walls (to get around, people probably climbed a ladder through a door in their ceilings and walked on the rooftops). All of the houses also looked more or less the same. A few were a little bigger than others, and some had more bodies buried under their floors than others, a hint that some might have been more important ritual spots than others. But all of them had approximately the same sized bins for storing grain, implying rough economic equality. Questions about dividing space may have led to some complex political dramas. Exactly which spaces belonged to different members of the community could have caused quarrels, for example—the kind of conflicts that in some societies could result in boundaries between pieces of private property. Whether or not...