London's Changing Ethnic Landscape, 2001Œ2011
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London’s Changing Ethnic Landscape, 2001–2011: A Cartographic Exploration Ron Johnston, Michael Poulsen, and James Forrest Abstract London’s population became increasing more diverse ethnically over the decade 2001–2011, a period when the White population declined, with many commentators suggesting that there has been ‘White flight’ from some districts in the face of ‘invasion’ by members of ethnic minority groups. To examine how extensively the city’s ethnic landscape changed during that period – and whether suggestions of the operation of ‘invasion and succession processes’ are valid – this article reports on statistical mapping of small area data for the two censuses. The results identify clearly-defined, substantial blocks of territory within the urban residential fabric where members of each of the main census respondent self-identified ethnic groups are concentrated. These have expanded outwards, into areas from which the White population has clearly withdrawn, though in most cases the rate of cluster areal expansion has been less than the groups’ numerical growth. Publication of the results of the 2011 Census of England and Wales in early 2013 stimulated considerable media debate regarding the country’s changing ethnic composition, with commentators focusing their attention on the substantial changes to London’s ethnic mix.1 Some emphasised the geography of those changes, in particular the expansion of parts of London – as well as other cities – where Whites were now in a minority. How extensive have the changes in London’s residential landscape been? We use a recently- developed method of identifying the areas where different ethnic groups are concentrated to portray the city’s changing ethnic geography. The urban studies literature is replete with analyses of neighbourhood change and putative explanations for its origins and geography. The classic studies of Chicago still underpin much of that work, with its arguments that an immigrant group (i) is initially established in certain parts of the city – usually although not always its inner, relatively deprived areas – and (ii) as its numbers grow, the area in which its members form above average proportions of the total expands from that core, displacing the groups formerly concentrated there. This process – widely known as invasion-and-succession – involves an expansion of the area occupied by the ethnic group under consideration away from the core and towards the outer suburbs, with in turn the majority occupants of the suburban areas ‘invaded’ moving further out. To many, this response to the growth of London’s non-White groups and the spatial expansion of the areas where they are concentrated has 1 R.J. Johnston, M.F. Poulsen and J. Forrest, ‘Multiethnic Residential Areas in a Multi-ethnic Country? A Decade of Major Change in England and Wales’, Environment and Planning A, 45 (2013), pp. 753–759. 38 London’s Changing Ethnic Landscape, 2001–2011 been interpreted as ‘White flight’. Thus The Economist referred to a process of what the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission termed ‘majority retreat’,2 but on the BBC News website Mark Easton suggested that this ‘flight’ was as much a consequence of ‘working class aspiration and success’ as ‘the indigenous population forced out of their neighbourhoods by foreign migrants’.3 Whatever the causes, however, The Economist cites David Goodhart, Director of the think-tank Demos, arguing that British cities are becoming ethnically more segregated, which was ‘hindering the assimilation of new immigrants’; in a brief news item The Times (6 May 2013) reported the same Demos source showing that ‘Thousands of white Britons have moved out of areas with a high proportion of ethnic minorities in the past decade, leaving many neighbourhoods mostly black or Asian’4 – a finding that is at odds with other analyses which suggest that segregation levels declined between 2001 and 2011.5 Most of these early analyses have used relatively coarse-scale spatial data, with little detailed analysis of the changing geography. The cartographic procedure adopted here identifies in detail the areas where each ethnic group was concentrated at both census dates, and allows an initial evaluation of the relevance of the mid-twentieth century North American model to contemporary London. Have the non-White areas of London been expanding while those where Whites predominate have contracted? To what extent has the city’s ethnic landscape changed over a decade? London’s ethnic diversity London is widely recognised as an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-cultural city. A large number of different cultural groups is established there, many of them associated with particular parts of the city. Identifying the majority of these groups from census data is not straightforward – though it can be done using information on language, religion and birthplace, for example – so most attention is focused, as here, on the ethnic classification deployed by the Office of National Statistics. This relies on a self-assessment question regarding a respondent’s ethnicity, in which the major categories relate to either country of origin/identification (e.g. Bangladeshi, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani) or colour (e.g. Black 2 ‘Racial Segregation: Everyone Out’, 11 May, 2013, pp. 27–28: http://www.economist.com/news/britain/ 21577384-whites-are-fleeing-britains-inner-cities-so-everybody-else-everyone-out [14 January 2014]. 3 M. Easton, ‘Why Have the White British left London’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21511904 [14 January 2014] 4 ‘White Britons Quit Black or Asian Areas’ http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article3757125.ece [14 January 2014]. The study referred to – ‘Half Full or Half Empty? How has Ethnic Segregation in England and Wales changed between 2001 and 2011’ by Eric Kaufmann – is available at http://www.demos.co.uk/ files/ethnicdistributione+w.pdf [14 January 2014] 5 L. Simpson, More Segregation or More Mixing? (Manchester: University of Manchester, ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, 2012). Available at http://www.ethnicity.ac.uk/census/ 869_CCSR_ Bulletin_More_segregation_or_more_mixing_v7NW.pdf [14 January 2014]. G. Catney, Has Neighbourhood Ethnic Segregation Decreased? (Manchester: University of Manchester, ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, 2013). Available at http://www.ethnicity.ac.uk/ census/885_CCSR_Neighbourhood_Bulletin_ v7.pdf [14 January 2014]. 39 Ron Johnston, Michael Poulsen and James Forrest Table 1 The Population of London’s Main Ethnic Groups, 2001–2011 Ethnic group 2001 2011 % change White 5,103,176 4,887,435 –4.2 Bangladeshi 153,841 222,127 +44.4 Chinese 80,124 124,250 +55.1 Indian 437,084 542,857 +24.2 Pakistani 142,719 223,797 +56.8 Other Asian 133,109 398,515 +199.3 Black African 378,924 573,931 +51.4 Black Caribbean 343,616 344,597 +0.3 Other Black 60,311 170,112 +182.1 Other Non-White 112,812 281,041 +149.1 Mixed 226,282 405,729 +79.3 TOTAL 7,171,998 8,173,941 +14.0 African, Black Caribbean). Because of changes in that classification between the two censuses of 2001 and 2011, we focus on eleven major groups (Table 1). One key feature of Table 1 is that whereas London’s population grew by 14 per cent over the decade, its White component (which includes Irish) declined by 4.2 per cent. Most of the non-White ethnic groups grew very substantially. The main exception to this overall trend was the longer-established Black Caribbean group. Migration from those islands has declined in recent decades and in addition social and cultural assimilation of those members well-established in London, especially young adults, has probably contributed to the very substantial growth of those self-identifying as of Mixed ethnicity. The four main Asian groups have grown very considerably, however: is this reflected in the city’s geography? Mapping spatial concentrations The goal of this mapping exercise is to identify those parts of London into which each of the census ethnic groups was clustered at each of the two census dates – those contiguous blocks of neighbourhoods where they formed a significantly larger share of the local population than they did in London as a whole. This used data at the smallest spatial scale available – the census Output Areas (OAs) which are subdivisions of the local authority wards specifically designed to be relatively homogeneous on two criteria (dwelling type and tenure). In London they had an average population of 297 in 2001 and 326 in 2011, and the majority of those OAs were unchanged between the two censuses.6 Data at this very small scale – each OA contains approximately 100–125 households – provide a very fine-grained geography of ethnicity in the urban area. Grouping together contiguous OAs where members of a particular ethnic group are concentrated better 6 Of the 25,053 OAs in London in the 2011 Census, 23,406 (93 per cent) were unchanged from those used for the 2001 Census. 40 London’s Changing Ethnic Landscape, 2001–2011 identifies those areas of than do data at the ward or borough scale. For this purpose we have used a local statistics measure – the Getis-Ord G*.7 (The statistical formulae are set out in the Appendix to this article.) For each OA, the G* value for an ethnic group identifies whether the average percentage of its population who are members of that group plus the percentage in all of its neighbouring OAs (in these analyses, all those within 1000 metres) is significantly larger (using conventional significance limits) than that across London as a whole.8 Contiguous blocks of territory with large G* values are thus those districts where the group’s members are clustered and mapping the clusters for each of the 2001 and 2011 censuses allows exploration of London’s changing ethnic geographies. Given the numerical growth of most of the capital’s non-White ethnic groups over that decade, have the areas into which they are clustered expanded commensurately? Cartographic explorations This section discusses a sequence of maps derived from the G* analyses.