Critical Reviews on Latin American Research - CROLAR

Wallner, Alexandra Ortiz

  CROLAR  -­  Critical  Reviews  on  Latin  American  
El   Salvador,   así   como   el   de   todos   estos  
insiste   en   que   existe   la   coincidencia   de  
centroamericanos  constituyen  una  de  estas  
y  académicos  internacionales  que  se  habían  
dominaba  en  aquel  momento:  el  sandinismo  
Edelberto  Torres-­Rivas  y  los  estudios  centroamericanos
        CROLAR,
estudios   literarios   y   culturales   iniciamos,  
literaturas   centroamericanas,   del   cual   han  
En   consonancia   con   los   cambios   de  
todas  las  dimensiones  de  los  debates  que  se  
locales   y   nacionales   y   sus   coincidencias   y  
Los   actuales   estudios   centroamericanos  
  CROLAR  -­  Critical  Reviews  on  Latin  American  
alumnos  que  han  ido  quedando  en  cada  uno  
centroamericanas   han   contribuido   a   que  
que   es   Centroamérica;;   y   es   necesario  
este  se  inscriba  adecuadamente  en  la  trama  
en  aquel  momento  reubicar  a  Centroamérica  
concebida  hasta  entonces  al   interno  de   las  
sobre   las   sociedades   centroamericanas  
como   se   evidencia   en   Revoluciones   sin  
reciente   son   a   la   vez   lecturas   críticas   y  
la   violencia   (en   el   caso   de  Guatemala   con  
        CROLAR,
Cortez,   Beatriz,   Ortiz   Wallner,   Alexandra   y  


Spanish

Edelberto Torres-Rivas y los estudios centroamericanos

Natera, José Miguel

Estudio Social de la Ciencia y la Tecnología desde América Latina by Antonio Arellano Hernández and Pablo Kreimer (eds.) (2011)

Hochmüller, Markus

Editorial. Políticas, sociedades y culturas en Centroamérica

Olmos Giupponi, Belen

De las dualidades a las ecologías by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2012)

Quandt, Christiane

Latinos y otros peregrinos & Cuatro ciudades by Juan Manuel Chávez (2013)

Rodríguez Medina, Leandro

Center and periphery: Essays in Macrosociology by Edward Shils (1975)

Nupia, Carlos Mauricio

Tecnología, Desarrollo y Democracia. Nueve estudios sobre dinámicas socio-técnicas de exclusión/inclusión social by Hernán Thomas; Mariano Fressoli; Guillermo Santos (orgs.) (2012)

Weis, Anna Rabea

Saber y poder. Testimonios de directoras de la UNAM by Norma Blazquez Graf and Olga Bustos Romero (2013)

Rodrigues-Silveira, Rodrigo

      CROLAR, Vol. 4 (2013): Lo Urbano | 49
On the contrary, the articles reveal that 
inequality is neither a necessary nor sufficient 
condition to promote urban segregation. The 
articles emphasize configurations that include 
segregated cities with low levels of inequality 
(Copenhagen), unequal settlements without 
segregation (such as the case of Madrid, 
Athens or Hong Kong) and cases where low 
levels of inequality are combined with almost 
no segregation (Taipei and Tokyo).
The explanations are univocal in assigning 
particular causes related to history, political 
decisions in terms of public policy, previous 
levels of inequality and social stratification, 
as well as institutional legacies. As a whole, 
these factors combined are, as the editors 
designate, “contextual” causes influencing 
segregation in each country.
Most of the authors recognize that public 
housing policies, universalistic welfare 
states, and low levels of inequality tend to 
avoid or reduce the levels of segregation in 
metropolitan areas. The role of the state in 
this respect is undeniable and goes beyond 
social policy, including interventions in 
economic development and labor market 
Thomas Maloutas and Kuniko Fujita (eds.) (2012)
Residential Segregation in Comparative Perspective: Making Sense of 
Contextual Diversity
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 329 p. 
Reviewed by Rodrigo Rodrigues-Silveira
desiguALdades.net, Freie Universität Berlin
The book edited by Maloutas and Fujita 
represents a collection of texts on urban 
segregation in metropolitan areas in three 
different continents and eleven different 
cities (six in Europe, four in Asia, and São 
Paulo in South America). The volume is 
structured upon a simple, but inspiring idea: 
segregation in urban settlements is highly 
influenced by contextual effects. These 
effects range from particular institutional 
trajectories and legacies to economic profiles 
and also to cultural settings that foster or 
reduce the probability of spatial segregation 
of social groups inside big cities.
Another strong argument, observed by 
the reading of the entire volume, is that 
there is no theoretically general and causal 
pattern capable of explaining segregation. 
This phenomenon is characterized by 
a multidimensionality that makes some 
aspects of social life more salient to explain 
segregation than others. The Chicago 
School paradigm (valid for most of the U.S. 
metropolises) of “segregated and unequal” 
can be observed solely in some of the cases, 
such as Beijing, Istanbul and São Paulo, but 
not in the remaining ones. 
 CROLAR - Critical Reviews on Latin American Research | 50
The second major limitation of the volume, 
on the whole, can be observed in the 
selection of cases. The book excludes most 
of the Americas (especially works on the 
U.S. since they are particularly criticized in 
the book), and the entire regions of Africa 
and Oceania. There is a particular focus on 
two regions: Europe, with six metropolises 
(Athens, Budapest, Copenhagen, Istanbul, 
Madrid, and Paris), and East Asia, with 
four cases (Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, and 
Tokyo). Nonetheless, although the book 
just covers São Paulo, the Latin American 
audience would be most benefited by the 
experience observed in cities belonging to 
other developing countries.
 
Despite the severe critique of the uncritical 
adoption of general and US-generated 
theories on urban segregation, all texts seem 
to be too attached to the same American 
theories they criticize since they limit their 
analyses to big cities (generally capitals or 
economic hubs), and employ the categories 
of occupation, income, and ethnicity to 
assess segregation. 
The work would have benefited from the 
inclusion of some particularly interesting 
cases that do not conform to this pattern 
or seem to explain urban segregation by 
really different contexts such as religion, 
international conflict, or border and 
immigration issues. Some clear examples 
could be obtained in Jerusalem, the Tijuana 
– San Diego or Ciudad Juarez – El Paso 
dyads, among other potentially interesting 
cases. 
 
initiatives. These initiatives are responsible 
for reducing the pay-offs (or incentives) 
for social segregation in cities, observed 
more clearly when state policy is absent or 
residual.
In methodological terms, the work is 
characterized by an astonishing uniformity in 
terms of measures employed, combined with 
different analytical methods. Firstly, most 
of the texts make use of the Dissimilarity 
Index (DI) to represent the degree of spatial 
segregation of urban residents. Secondly, 
almost all use some combination of income, 
education, immigration, and occupation as 
base for mapping segregation. Finally, the 
wide range of methods – from frequency 
tables to multivariate regression analysis 
– enables the use of different approaches 
to the same problem. In addition to this, 
some of the authors are some of the most 
recognized experts on the subject (such as 
in the contributions on Beijing, Paris, and 
São Paulo). 
 
Despite the undeniable value of the volume, 
it has some significant limitations that cannot 
be overlooked. The first is that the term 
“comparative”, included in the title, is not 
at all applicable to the chapters it contains. 
Every single essay is a case study, with 
the conclusion being the only attempt to 
systematize and compare the results using 
the previous texts as an empirical source. 
In this sense, there is no real comparison 
beyond the reader’s interpretation. A 
comparative analysis, properly speaking, 
would require more refined controls and 
appropriate techniques to evaluate each 
case in relation to the others.
      CROLAR, Vol. 4 (2013): Lo Urbano | 51
On top of that, just some of the texts 
explicitly use spatial techniques to measure 
segregation in terms of spatial clustering of 
residents. This is surprising, because there 
is a great deal of literature on geography 
and urban studies that points out the limits 
to segregation measures that do not account 
for spatial contiguity or proximity. Most of the 
essays are limited to visualization techniques 
(mapping) of different socioeconomic 
indicators.
 
Finally, although the multidimensionality of 
segregation was covered in most studies, 
none of them were able to address the 
problem analytically. What would be the 
consequences of the difference between a 
segregated and unequal city from another 
city which is segregated but equal? What 
can be said when more than one dimension 
is combined (immigrants, poor, and ethnic 
groups) instead of just one dimension in 
order to generate segregation? These 
questions emerge while reading the text, but 
they require a truly comparative perspective 
in order to be properly addressed. 
In conclusion, the reading of the text provides 
the reader with new and interesting insights 
on the question of residential segregation and 
elicits new questions and research problems 
that still require more attention before a clear 
perspective on the matter can be reached.
Aside from these cases, there is no 
analytical thinking on the role of scale and 
scalar change in the results. Some authors 
use different scales interchangeably without 
accounting for the potential aggregate 
problems resulting from scalar change itself. 
Others try to use loosely-related information 
(usually census tracts) also without any 
analytical guidance on what kind of spatial 
units would be most appropriate to measure 
and analyze segregation. 
In this sense, while some causes (in particular 
inequality) were severely questioned as 
factors responsible for generating spatial 
clustering of groups, the scale at which the 
empirical evidence is organized and assessed 
received no attention at all. Despite the 
existence of a large amount of literature on 
geography concerning the Modifiable Areal 
Unit Problem (MAUP) and other aggregation 
problems, none of the chapters gave more 
in-depth consideration of how changing from 
one scale to another would affect the results. 
Additionally, there was no discussion at all 
on the theoretical consequences of scalar 
change on segregation studies. 
This leads to several questions, such as: 
What is the impact upon the results if data 
is aggregated in a larger area rather in 
census tracts? What would be the role of 
neighborhoods? What are the possible 
structural variations to the areas usually 
defined as neighborhoods? What is the basic 
unit of real symbolic and cultural significance 
for residents in each country? Not only were 
such questions not answered in the book, 
they were not even posed.


English

Thomas Maloutas and Kuniko Fujita (eds.) (2012): Residential Segregation in Comparative Perspective

Marini, Candela

Elsa Drucaroff (2011): Los prisioneros de la torre. Política, relatos y jóvenes en la postdictadura

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