Hypersegregation

Rima Wilkes & John Iceland

When a group is so segregated that its members have little chance of contact with outsiders, that group is hypersegregated. In the case of residential location, hypersegregation means that the members of different groups are extremely unlikely to live together. U.S. experts primarily pay attention to the spatial distances between whites and blacks, with increasing attention also paid to the residential patterns of growing Asian and Latino/a populations (some studies have also examined the segregation of Native Americans). Of key concern has been the fact that many whites do not live in neighborhoods with members of other groups, a form of urban segregation documented also in other countries, including Canada, England, France, and Germany. In an often-cited 1988 study, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton compiled 20 existing segregation measures and identified five dimensions of residential segregation: evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering. Evenness refers to the distribution of groups Exposure ...

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