• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.511-525
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• 2008

Residential segregation is often considered to be one of the social problems that intensify urban inequality This study reviews three different frameworks about the causes of residential segregation and tests their validity in the real world. The review focuses on racial/ethnic residential segregation in U.S. cities since it has been blamed for persistent socio-economic gap among racial/ethnic groups. The three different segregation frameworks include 'spatial assimilation' that attributes segregation to low degree of assimilation and acculturation, 'place stratification' to discriminatory practices in the housing and mortgage markets such as steering, blockbusting, and redlining, and 'resurgent ethnicity' to racial/ethnic preference in residential choice, particularly in-group attraction. As an effort to test their validity, the paper examined residential pattern changes of the four major Asian nationality groups through 1990s and found that their residences got decentralized but re-cluster in some selected suburbs. This supports 'resurgent ethnicity' largely and 'spatial assimilation' only partly.