Race, Colonialism and the City

John Rex

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415417518
• eBook ISBN: 9781135669959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

John Rex is well known as one of Britain's leading sociologists and for his special interest in the sociology of race relations and the sociology of the city. In the present book these two related areas are brought together. Professor Rex discusses imperialistic social systems, and examines the position of black people at the colonial and metropolitan ends of thoses systems.

This book was first published in 1973.

Part I

Race and the city

1 Inter-ethnic relations in
an urban context

Inter-ethnic conflict never arises solely and simply because of perceived ethnic or physical difference. Such perceived differences may, it is true, be the basis on which individuals within any society are assigned to social positions, but the positions themselves already exist and, by virtue of having to fill them, members of differing ethnic groups find that the conflicts between their groups become exacerbated. In talking about inter-ethnic relations in the city, therefore, while I do not deny that there are various historical reasons why certain groups entering the social system of the city are likely to suffer discriminatory treatment at the hands of their hosts, what I want to do is to show those elements of the urban social structure and conflict system which contribute to sharpening or mitigating intergroup conflict.

There are two aspects of the urban social system which seem to me to be of the greatest importance in this respect. One is the differential distribution of housing opportunity which leads to the emergence of what I have called a system of housing class conflict. The other is the process whereby immigrants coming into the city are gradually socialized into the urban social system.

Differential distribution of housing opportunity would appear to follow from the model of the city as a system of ecologically and sociologically related commumity structures sketched by Burgess (see Park et al., 1925) in his contribution to the original Chicago study of the city. So much of the discussion that has followed the publication of Burgess's essay seems to me to be irrelevant that it is perhaps important to insist that there are certain hints at least within it which are quite crucial to the theory of urban sociology. It matters very little indeed to us as sociologists whether the actual distribution of ecological zones is concentric or wedge-shaped. What matters is that communities are seen as being affected, in their internal structure, and in their relations with one another, by the relationship which they have to landed property and, much more important, to property in buildings.

It is important also here to say a word about the relationship of the theory of housing classes to the work of Marx and Weber. Some Marxists, commenting on the study which Robert Moore and I made in Birmingham (Rex and Moore, 1967) have argued that we have discussed inter-ethnic relations purely in terms of a secondary variable. To this I would answer that while I believe that there is some relationship between a man's relationship to the means of housing and his relationship to the means of production, the former does also have a degree of independence from the latter; that the labour force tends to scatter for residential and community purposes after working hours; and that there are significant divisions opened up within the various classes, as a result of the conflicting interests which arise from their different housing situations. Hence I find it of interest and of value that Weber asks us to see any market situation as a potential class situation and that he specifically mentions (1967, p. 21) ‘owner-ship of domestic property’ as one possible basis of class formation. Another point of interest in Weber's approach to class formation is his emphasis upon the subjective element. He stresses that it is not merely the possession of property but also the meaning given to its possession which determines the behaviour of classes. The implication of this for us is that urban social systems may very well vary according to the culturally given values of the particular society, both with in respect of which housing situation is regarded as desirable, and with regard to the degree with which the system as a whole is regarded as legitimate.

With these theoretical positions stated, it is now possible to turn to the description of one housing class system which we observed in Birmingham, indicating as we go along the features of Birmingham's situation which we regard as unique and the features which we see as of more universal significance. One hopes that as a result of this contribution other sociologists will be stimulated to reconsider the evidence derived from urban societies in other material and cultural circumstances.

Birmingham, like many other cities which came to maturity in the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, can be seen as going through three phases of housing development and, hence, three phases in the development of its system of housing class conflict. The first of these concerns the first emergence of the industrial community, the second the suburban migration, and the third the continuation of the outward movement coupled with the redevelopment of the inner ring.

The initial settlement saw the emergence of first two and then three housing classes, coupled with related life-styles typically associated with these classes. In the first place the owners of the new industries (the phrase ‘captains of industry’ is one which I find useful to indicate the extent to which their differentiation from society at large was more marked than that of those whom we today commonly call the ‘middle classes’) built their gracious town houses so as to enjoy proximity to important civic facilities, while at the same time being well placed in relation to the prevailing winds, so as to avoid the industrial dirt and smoke emanating from their factories. The working class on the other hand lived in the straight rows of red-brick cottages on the cheapest land where speculative builders of the eighteen-fifties built housing for industrial ‘hands’. These two groups produced the two polar cultural types in the modern city, middle-class culture based upon family independence and property, and working-class culture based upon the class struggle and the struggle to make ends meet and stay alive.

By the end of the century the third cultural type emerged, as professional and white-collar workers, together with shopkeepers and a few fortunate skilled workers, bought or rented larger terraced properties where they could go some way towards imitating the life-style of the upper-middle classes. The servant bells in the attics and cellars of their surviving houses testify to this. And, this imitative pattern having been established, the ground was laid for the far more important fact of the move to suburbia which affected first these intermediate groups and then the great mass of the established lower-middle and working classes.

The game of leap-frog, which is the central fact of the sociological dynamics of urban growth, begins with the move of the upper-middle classes to large mansions in their own grounds in the inner suburbs. But what is far more significant is that shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century they are followed, first by the white-collar people and the skilled workers, and then by the great mass of the established working class.

Suburbia is basically a petit-bourgeois phenomenon. That is to say it aims at copying the independent life-style of the upper-middle classes, but is able to do so only with the help of the artificial aids which mortgage and credit facilities provide. Thus in Birmingham, as in other English cities, the typical suburban man is a man who is buying a three-bedroomed, semi-detached house with the aid of a mortgage loan repayable in twenty to twenty-five years. The security of his employment and his loan enable him to feel and act as an independent family man. Yet in English cities, privately owned and mortgaged petit-bourgeois suburbia quickly produces its working-class equivalent. One of the central political facts of the twentieth century is the capture of a measure of political control and hence of control of physical resources by the established and organized working classes. The consequence of this in the development of the city is the public provision of relatively high standard rented housing. The actual architectural styles adopted in these ‘council houses’, however, are ones which derive from petit-bourgeois suburbia, and the way of life which develops on the council estates is something of an amalgam of suburban and working-class styles.

For the vast majority of the population, a transition to either the private suburban or the council estates has been considered in England a desirable destiny, and one which contrasts favourably with the lot of those who remain behind or succeed them as residents of the inner ring. For unless or until a centripetal movement begins, as it sometimes does when office workers and unattached intellectuals begin actively to seek accommodation in the inner ring, those who live there are likely to be those who have failed in a competitive struggle for more highly desired types of housing. Amongst these, the most important groups are the owners of small old houses in the inner ring, whose relative status has declined both because of their increasing age and because of their relative lack of appeal when compared with suburban alternatives, the tenants of old slum property awaiting demolition, including some ‘undesirable’ tenants placed there by the local government, because they are thought unfit for tenancies of new houses, the new owners of the old white-collar terraces who most commonly live in a few rooms of a house which they let as lodgings to the newest immigrants and other disadvantaged groups, and finally these new immigrants and disadvantaged groups themselves.

The existence of these varied types of housing, which give to their inhabitants varying degrees of ownership, control and security, means that, in the city as a whole, there is a class conflict as well as a status order related to kinds of housing, and that, at ward and neighbourhood level, the pattern of intergroup relations will in part be influenced by the position which the various groups of inhabitants occupy in relation to the housing stock.

Since I wish to concentrate on the way in which housing class situations affect immigrant ethnic groups, I propose to concentrate attention on one kind of neighbourhood, namely that in which a good part of the total housing accommodation takes the form of rooms let in lodgings. So far as the urban system as a whole is concerned, I would only note that the people who live in such areas are considered as occupying an inferior position, albeit one which many people hold the inhabitants deserve. They are at the opposite end on a scale of desirability of housing from the inhabitants of both public and private suburbia. The key to understanding this type of area, which Burgess called the ‘zone of transition’, and which comes to be called in England ‘the twilight zone’, is to be found in the motivation of the landlords of the lodging-house. It is often thought that these are ruthless capitalist exploiters, who are themselves rich, and callously disregard the welfare of their tenants. In some cases this may be so, but when it is, this may well represent only the advanced and rationalized form of a process which originally takes another form. The crux of the matter is to understand this other form of lodging-house proprietorship.

Very often, and perhaps more often than not, the entrepreneur who provides housing in the lodging-house zone does so accidentally, in the course of housing himself and solving his own economic problems of survival. Commonly he is an immigrant who fails to qualify for the sorts of financial and other aid which are offered to some by building societies and to some by the local government authority. Hence he is forced to other markets, and finances house purchase in part with short-term loans from banks or moneylenders, and in part by borrowing from friends. It is inevitable that with the heavy repayment obligations which such loans imply the purchaser must then turn his house into a money-earning asset. To do this means turning over part of one's house, not simply to one's own family or others to whom one feels a charitable obligation, but to those who can be regarded as financially exploitable. At the same time it means he will be quite prepared to take tenants who are willing to pay without asking too many questions about their non-financial qualifications.

The complement of the landlord's attitude is to be found in the attitudes of his tenants. For, after the various sorts of selection essential to the allocation of ‘desirable housing’ have occurred, there are bound to remain some who simply cannot qualify and are, therefore, in the desperate position of being willing to settle for precisely the sort of accommodation which the lodging-house landlord has to offer. Thus, while it is true that there is considerable conflict and tension between landlord and tenant, there is also symbiosis. Without intending to do so, they come to need each other.

The kind of housing to which this interlocking pattern of motivation gives rise is by common consent the worst housing in the city. It is not that the houses involved are old or, at the outset of their career as lodging-houses, physically decrepit. Since the houses which are most suitable for letting as lodgings are precisely those which were originally built to house the status-aspiring petit-bourgeoisie, they are inevitably structurally in better condition than the so-called slums. Yet at the very time when housing authorities are clearing the oldest and smallest cottages which are called slums, it is recognized that there is a kind of housing which is even less desirable than that which is officially condenmed as a slum.

It follows from this that the most important conflicts in the twilight zone, or zone of transition, will be not between landlord and tenant in the lodging-houses, but between all the inhabitants of those houses, taken together, and their neighbours in the same urban ward. Of these the most important are the proprietors and tenants of the remaining non-slum houses, which are still in single-family occupation, and the tenants of slum houses. The former will see the spread of muiltiple occupation of houses as still further lowering the status of the streets in which they live, while the latter will see the lodging-house population as having unfairly obtained access to high standard housing and having misused it. The hostility of these two groups is likely to be reinforced by the fact that the local housing and health authorities, unable to provide an alternative form of housing for those who live in lodgings, must none the less act against the proprietors of a form of housing which is well below acceptable standards of health and amenity. The inhabitants of such houses, therefore, serve as a scapegoat for all those who are aware of the deficiencies of the city's housing system. It greatly facilitates this scapegoating process that many of those involved are both foreign and black.

What I have sought to do so far, then, is to show that the housing system of a modern English city is such that the new and poor immigrant who comes to live there does not find himself entering a social system in which there is either a system of equality or a system of legitimized and recognized inequality. What he finds is a system in which his own struggle to house himself places him in competition or conflict with all kinds of other groups and, as a first approximation to defining the position of ethnic groups newly entering the urban social system, we should say that they find themselves in a housing class situation, and that their organizations will tend to take on the characteristics of trade unions on behalf of conflict groups.

Cross-cutting all this, however, is the process which I would call urban socialization. It is a process whereby men from rural, peasant, kin-based social systems must come to be effective role-players in an urban individualistic system based upon property on the one hand and bureaucracy on the other. We have now to see how the associational and community life of new immigrant groups is shaped by the functional demands of the colony, which acts as a staging post on his way towards socialization as well as by the housing class system. Thus the West Indian or Pakistani may live in a mixed race lodging-house, but, for as much of his life as possible, he lives outside that lodging-house in the world of the immigrant colony. Again we may turn to the work of Max Weber (1958; 1961; 1968) for preliminary orientation to the study of this problem. Like Weber we need to distinguish three alternative forms of social order which occur as possibilities in the urbanizing process. The first of these is the social order of traditional society where effective and kin-based ties are strong, and rational calculation as a basis for behaviour is at its minimum. The second is a society of the market-place in which there is no overall social will and no human restraint on the level of exploitation. The third, the main object of Weber's interest and concern, was the kind of social order in which individualism and rational calculation operated within a framework or normative order.

The new immigrant with a minimal relationship to the host society would find himself in a position of the second type. He would have lost his ties with his fellow-countrymen, but his ties with the new society would be simply those of the ‘callous cash nexus’. Not merely would he have purely contractual relations with his employer, but his only larder would be the grocer's shop, his only dining-room, a cheap café, and his only means of sexual and emotional fulfilment, the brothel. Those who have lived in the twilight zones will know that this ideal type is sometimes quite close to the reality which men experience. But it is also true that a life of this kind becomes unsustainable and that very few immigrants could live this way for long without the risk of mental breakdown or suicide. Thus most men new to the city seek out a group within which they can find emotional and moral support and social ties of a less rational-calculating kind.

The problem of what kind of group life men seek and hence of what types of groups are bound to exist in the zone of transitio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A personal and biographical Introduction
• Part I Race and the city
• Part II Colonial migration to Britain 1945–70
• Part III Theory and research on colonial migration
• art IV Pluralism, colonial conflict and black revolution
• Bibliography
• Index