Pocket Ghetto Research Paper

A “pocket ghetto” is a small area of low-income housing with high minority group concentration that is isolated by physical barriers. The term began to be used by geographers as they studied postmodern cities. Michael Sorkin in his book, Variations on a Theme Park, described three dominating characteristics of the postmodern city: generic globalization, theme park commercialization, and an obsession with security. The third characteristic, an obsession with security, is the most important in terms of this research because the function of a pocket ghetto is to contain or ‘secure’ certain people within a certain area. Pocket ghettos form by either intentional construction or containment or by the negligent evolution of urban form. In cases like
Los Angeles’ South-Central, the containment is clearly intentional and can be defined by the area’s “walled-and-policed urban containment zones”. However, in the case of Butler Place in Fort Worth, the formation of a pocket ghetto is still up for debate.