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- Info
The new geography of population shifts:Trends toward balkanization
| Author: |
Frey, William H. |
| Date: |
[nd] |
| Periodical: |
In: Farley, Reynolds, ed. State of the union: America in the 1990s, volume two: social trends. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation |
| Abstract: |
Urban growth and migration patterns continue to shift in unexpected ways and are creating sharper divisions across space. Back in the 1970s, urban scholars were baffled by the so-called rural renaissance, when rural and small communities in most parts of the country grew faster than large metropolises-
reversing decades of urban concentration. Later, a broad review of that period's reversals concluded that the 1970s were really a transition decade for U. S. population redistribution, where the "transition" referred to new social and economic contexts for redistribution rather than to specific geographic patterns (Frey and Speare 1988). Since then, the geography of growth has again shifted, as industrial restructuring and the global economy have created more fast-paced and unpredictable distribution dynamics for the 1980s and 1990s (Frey 1990). Just as these new redistribution forces began to take shape, increasingly large waves of immigrants from abroad, dominated by racial and ethnic minorities from Latin America and Asia, began to pour into selected parts of the country. They impact heavily on the sizes, diversity profiles, and economies of their destination areas and add vibrancy and vitality to these communities. However, they also contribute to dislocations and increased government spending. These new population shifts do not necessarily adhere to familiar classifications-Snowbelt and Sunbelt, rural and urban, or even city and suburb. Minority segregation is no longer confined to individual neighborhoods or communities. In fact, there is emerging a new type of "demographic balkanization"-a spatial segmentation of the population by race, ethnicity, class, and age across regions and metropolitan areas, driven by both internal and international migration. While recognizing the ever-dynamic state of the nation's population geography, this review of 1990 census findings emphasizes the following trends which emerged over the 1980s and are likely to characterize the 1990s as well.
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