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By Root 1669 0

local government, mass transportation, and urban infrastructure. The retreat of heavy industry created neighborhoods of low-cost housing that could be bought and improved as a source of family capital. Today, neither the preformed desirable neighborhoods nor the floods of public investment are certain to be there. As the economy opens up again, demographic growth slows, and new waves of low-skilled immigrants are needed in coming years, it is important that North American and European cities pay attention, in advance, to the needs of the villagers entering their perimeters.

Arrival-city neighborhoods, however successful, raise some disquieting questions. Are we wise to spend public money on creating and maintaining such enclaves, rather than on efforts to integrate new immigrants directly into the core society? Do low-cost urban neighborhoods packed with village migrants really provide the best pathway to inclusion, integration, and arrival? Should they be encouraged and promoted, or should governments find ways, if they can, to prevent the great migration from forming enclaves of newcomers in their less-popular urban spaces?

To embrace the arrival city is to put aside generations of thinking, which held that success is measured by dispersal. The original theory of urban assimilation, developed by the sociologist Robert E. Park and his colleagues of the Chicago School, beginning in the 1920s, is built around the earliest understanding of the arrival city. Based on an analysis of U.S. cities (especially Chicago) during a period of heavy rural-origin migration, Park concluded that immigrants start out in highly concentrated populations in rented quarters in poor inner-city areas with low property prices but become integrated and successful only as they leave the ethnic enclave behind and disperse into integrated mainstream society. In this theory, the uni-ethnic nature of these inner-city neighborhoods and their separation from the more established city were the cause of their poverty. “Social relations,” Park wrote, “are inevitably correlated with spatial relations.”18

But it is equally possible to become fully integrated, economically and culturally, within the confines of the original arrival city. Indeed, a sizable new body of scholarship shows that ethnic “clustering” can be the most effective pathway to social and economic integration. The most challenging examination of supposedly segregated neighborhoods comes from the British scholars Ceri Peach, Nissa Finney, and Ludi Simpson, whose detailed examinations of notorious arrival-city enclaves, such as Tower Hamlets and Bradford, have found that these neighborhoods are no more prone to poverty or social isolation than non-clustered neighborhoods, and that such places—that is, arrival cities—“disperse” approximately the same number of their ethnic group outward into ethnically mixed middle-class neighborhoods as they take in from abroad.19 That is, they remain poor only because they are constantly receiving new (poor) arrivals.

And segregation, contrary to media stereotype, may actually deter violent extremism. Peach and Finney looked at Islamic terrorism among immigrant groups and found it far lower among arrival-city inhabitants. Of the 75 alleged al Qaeda members arrested in Britain on terrorism charges between 2004 and 2009, only 17 came from neighborhoods with more than 18 percent Muslim populations; a majority of 42 lived in places with fewer than 6 percent Muslims.20 While extreme religious-fundamentalist movements can and do form among disenchanted second-generation youth in dysfunctional arrival cities like Slotervaart and Beeston, Leeds (which produced three of the four suicide bombers who carried out the July 2005 attacks on London), there is no correlation between ethnic concentration and terrorism—that is, it is just as likely to arise, if not more so, in places other than arrival cities. Anecdotally, there are strong suggestions that the tight-knit networks of arrival-city culture tend to deter the worst forms of extremism. In fact, it seems to be universally