Global Neighborhoods in Less Diverse Metropolitan Areas, 1980-2010

Wenquan Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
John R. Logan, Brown University

Global neighborhoods, where Hispanics and Asians are substantially present alongside blacks and whites, has been demonstrated as a persistent phenomenon in the nation’s most diverse metropolitan areas. Our purpose here is to extend the research to the broader metropolitan America, inquiring particularly the track and trends of neighborhood transition in varying diversity conditions. We introduce a four-category typology representing different types of diversity conditions: non-minority metros, old-minority metros, new-minority metros, and multi-ethnic metros. Our results show clear links between the paths to global neighborhoods and the group composition of different types of metropolitan areas. The examination of the transition patterns at metro level suggests the similar dynamics at work as the micro-level trend toward global neighborhoods, and the variations of the concurrent group presence and of the expected mobility tendency are likely to shape up a new metropolitan landscape.