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meaningful interchanges” (2001: 9). Furthermore, on September
22, 2005, following Michael Poulsen’s (2005) research and in
response to the bombings on July 7 in London,
5
Trevor Phillips,
then Director of the Commission for Racial Equality, asserted in a
speech that “Britain was sleepwalking into segregation” and “that
cities like Bradford and Leicester were comparable in their levels of
ghettoization to Chicago” (Peach, 2009: 1381). On the other hand,
as Cantle points out, “much of the denial” of self-segregation is
“based upon the view that the very idea is tantamount to ‘blaming
minorities’ for the problems of multiculturalism” (2012: 59). The
geography scholar Deborah Phillips argues, for example, that,
central to the Community Cohesion Review Team’s assertion of “a
series of parallel lives” is “the claim that people of South Asian
origin, particularly British Muslims, are failing to be active citizens
by withdrawing from social and spatial interactions with wider
British society” (2006: 25).
The area defined as a ghetto has changed slightly over time,
although several common characteristics have been strongly etched
into people’s impressions, and especially strongly associated with
ethnic minority groups. According to the
Encyclopedia Britannica
,
“ghetto” was “formerly a street, or quarter, of a city set apart as a
legally enforced residence area for Jews” (ghetto, 2014), and one
of the earliest “forced segregations” of Jews can be traced to
Muslim Morocco in 1280, when Jews “were transferred to
segregated quarters called
millahs
.” Although the ghettos for Jews
were no longer enforced in Western Europe after the 19th century,
and were only briefly “revived by the Nazis during World War II,”
the meaning of the ghetto as “enforced residence area” has been
retained, and “more recently the term ghetto has come to apply to
any urban area exclusively settled by a minority group.” The most
5
The bombings on July 7 in London were a series of coordinated suicide attacks
using the public transport system, which resulted in the deaths of 52 commuters.
Three of the four suicide bombers were of Pakistani descent and from
Leeds
—
where Pakistani immigrants have become concentrated over time.