James Forrest

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Macquarie University

ABSTRCT Most studies of urban residential segregation analyse it at a single-scale only, usually the smallest for which relevant census data are available. Following a recent argument that such segregation is multiscalar, this paper reports on multilevel modelling of the segregation of 42 ancestral groups in Sydney, Australia, looking at its intens...

Given the challenge presented by worsening racial and religious relations in many western countries around the world, a closer look at the interplay between racist attitudes among potential perpetrators and experiences of racism among likely targets, focusing on out-group status, can better inform the dynamics of culturally diverse societies. Melbo...

The melting-pot argument, whereby economically heterogeneous multi-cultural societies, characterised by high levels of immigration from a variety of origins, become more homogeneous over time, has attracted much attention, especially in North America.Australia has similarly experienced major waves of immigration from a wide range of cultural backgr...

How school teachers act to challenge racism in schools is a vital concern in an immigrant society like Australia. A 10% response from a self-administered online survey of government (public) primary and secondary school teachers across Sydney, Australia’s largest EthniCity, examines attitudes of classroom teachers towards cultural diversity, goals...

Many cities world-wide are becoming increasingly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic in their population composition. However, little attention has been paid in the massive literature on the resultant residential mosaics as to whether the outcomes of those changes are common across a national urban system or whether there are local variations – or to t...

London has become an ethnically much more diverse city over recent decades but has that growing macro-scale diversity been replicated in its myriad neighbourhoods? Using recently released 2011 census data and an established methodology for classifying small areas according to the ethnic composition of their populations, this paper explores the exte...

A novel exploratory approach is developed to the analysis of a large table of counts. It uses random- effects models where the cells of the table (representing types of individuals) form the higher level in a multilevel model. The model includes Poisson variation and an offset to model the ratio of observed to expected values thereby permitting the...

Segregation across neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces, by ethnicity, age, socio-economic class and gender, for example, provides frequent material for political and social commentators - especially at times of social unrest when it (especially residential and school segregation by ethnicity and by socio-economic class) is often presented as a...

London 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 du...

There was very substantial growth in the Non-White population of England and Wales between the 2001 and 2011 Censuses. This article explores the geography of that growth at two spatial scales: the towns and cities where the various Non-White ethnic groups are concentrated; and the population composition of the neighbourhoods within those places. It...

We use the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia, 2005–2006, to examine the housing tenure experience of skilled immigrants to Australia 6 and 18 months after arrival for relationships with ethnic capital (cultural background), visa category streams, aspects of human capital, demographics, social capital and discrimination. Homeownership e...

This study documents immigration to Australia of South Africans and Zimbabweans over the past two decades, their socio-demographic characteristics and the notion of a continuing middle-class diaspora. It examines the resettlement experience of both groups during their first 18 months in the Australian labour and housing markets, and perceptions of...

There is relatively little research into the housing experience of refugee immigrants to Australia as a category or into variations in their housing careers according to cultural backgrounds. To address this issue, data from the 1999/2000 Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia, the most recent available survey to include refugee immigrants,...

This paper was initially published online with a spelling error in the name of the third author. The online version has now been amended to correct this error. The correct author credit is below: James Forrest, Ron Johnston and Michael Poulsen.

There is little quantitative research regarding the causes and expression of prejudice and discrimination against Middle-Eastern Australians. We report two studies, one from the perspective of new settlers and a second from the perspective of host communities. The first found that Middle-Eastern Australians reported more discrimination compared wit...

As a consequence of changing immigration policy over the past 50 years, contemporary Australia has a culturally diverse population. Focusing on Brisbane, one of Australia's smaller immigrant-receiving cities but where some 19 per cent of the population is born overseas, this study examines attitudes to and perceptions of culturally different ethnic...

Recent studies in the United States and other Pacific Rim countries have identified a new form of ethnic minority group clustering within the residential mosaic—ethnoburbs. These are suburban in location, occupied by relatively high-income, predominantly Asian, immigrants, and low density in their nature: many migrants move directly to those suburb...

Much has been written about ethnic residential segregation in urban areas, a great deal of it deploying single-index numbers to measure its intensity. These give very little detailed appreciation of the extent to which different ethnic groups live apart from each other, and where, within the city, generating the need for an approach that establishe...

Recent work on Asian ethnic minority immigrants to cities in the Anglophone Pacific Rim argues that their settlement patterns do not conform to those of earlier migrant streams. Instead of concentrating in high-density, low-quality, inner-city housing, these new residents are moving directly to suburban areas where they form much less intensive con...

Australia has in the past decade seen a decline in political support for multicultural values. However, public opinion on multiculturalism is contradictory rather than antipathetic: strong levels of support for cultural diversity co-exist with anti-multicultural attitudes. Some of this variation relates to compositional or socio-demographic (aspati...

In a recent special issue of JEMS, Peach challenged the authors' work on the measurement of ethnic segregation and the use of their proposed approach in studies of British cities. Peach argued for the continued deployment of single-number indices—especially those of unevenness (dissimilarity and segregation). This response highlights the major disa...

Most analyses of ethnic residential segregation in cities rely on single-number indices that pay no attention to the degree of spatial clustering of the areas in which a group is either underrepresented or overrepresented. Recently, local statistical measures have been proposed as a set of approaches to overcome this deficiency. One such method—the...

There is a perception that Indigenous Australians are uneasy with or distrustful of multiculturalism. Such unease has been attributed to the problematic positioning of Indigeneity within immigrant focused concepts of multiculturalism and its associated policies in a settler society. What are the attitudinal implications of this concern? There has b...

Much of the work on the spatial assimilation and, more recently, segmented (uneven) assimilation of ethnic group immigrants looks at ‘permanent’ settlement. Less attention has been paid to the settlement outcomes of unrestricted migration flows among linked national labour markets involving circulatory migration. Focusing on the occupational charac...

Cities are indeed places of everyday racism, experienced as ethnocentrism, prejudice and ethnic-based hatred. Drawing on an Australia-wide telephone survey of respondents' experiences of 'everyday' racism in various contexts, conducted in 2006, we examine forms of racist experience, as well as the contexts and responses to those experiences for Syd...

Studies of electoral disproportionality and bias under Australia's alternative electoral system have mainly relied on the two-party preferred (2PP) vote totals for all electorates, irrespective of whether these are needed to determine the election outcome there. We argue that separate analyses should be undertaken for two groups of electorates – wh...

The Alternative Vote system used for elections to the Australian House of Representatives is generally believed to disadvantage the Australian Labor Party in contests with the Liberal and National parties. However, most analyses on which such conclusions are based over-simplify the situation by not separating out the translation of votes into seats...

Most studies of urban ethnic residential patterns rely on various single-number indices to demonstrate the degree of spatial segregation. These have been criticized on a variety of grounds, and various other approaches have been proposed, including the use of measures of statistical autocorrelation and typologies of areas based on their population...

Much work on residential segregation in urban areas has focused on aspatial indices of urban residential segregation, largely ignoring locational aspects of the degree of spatial separation of different ethnic groups. The adoption of measures of global and local spatial autocorrelation has recently been suggested as a way of introducing a more expl...

There is no abstract for this paper.

Residential segregation of ethnic groups is a major feature of cities in multi-cultural societies such as New Zealand's. Measuring the degree of segregation has been the focus of much attention over the last half century, but there are difficulties with comparative studies using most of the measures adopted. An alternative procedure which classifie...

Race and place: equity issues in urban AmericaJOHN W. FRAZIER, FLORENCE M. MARGAI & EUGENE TETTEY-FIO, 2003 Westview Press, Boulder, CO 15 × 23 cm, 304 pp. ISBN 0-8133-4041-1 (soft)From urban enclave to ethnic suburb: new Asian communities in PacificRim countriesWEI LI (ed.), 2006 University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 15 × 23 cm, 278 pp. ISBN 10: 0-...

Few studies have undertaken rigorous comparative analyses of levels of ethnic residential segregation across two or more countries. Using data for the latest available censuses (2000–2001) and a bespoke methodology for such comparative work, this article analyzes levels of segregation across the urban systems of five major immigrant-receiving, Engl...

Contemporary Australia is in a contradictory situation as a nation where multiculturalism co-exists with various forms of what are collectively called racisms. Based on a survey of Sydney residents, this study uses a social constructivist approach to investigate the nature and sociospatial context of racist attitudes in Sydney, Australia's largest...

United States metropolitan area data for three ethnic groups—African- Americans, Asians, and Hispanics—are used to explore the dimensions of res- idential segregation at the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses at the census tract scale. Although set within Massey and Denton's five-dimensional conceptual schema, the study was unable to replicate their ide...

Studies of residential segregation of Blacks and Hispanics in United States' metropolitan areas over recent decades have suggested a convergence between the two groups, as Black segregation levels declined somewhat, whilst those for Hispanics have increased substantially. The latter has been associated with the rapid and very substantial growth in...

A multicultural model of the intergenerational absorption of ethnic immigrant groups is proposed. A recently developed methodology to facilitate comparative assessment of the absolute spatial context of ethnic group concentrations is used to analyze segregation dynam- ics in Australia's three main contemporary immigrant-receiving cities. Ethnic enc...

Racism has become a fact of life in Australia over the past decade or so, yet there are relatively few studies of its nature or extent, and still fewer on its geography. Using a social constructivist approach, this study draws on a survey of 5056 respondents to investigate attitudes to racism and cultural diversity in New South Wales and Queensland...

In the search for environment-diagnostic descriptors of grain size distributions, the use of both least squares statistical procedures and single index or summary measures to characterize sediment distributions have come under increasing criticism. Tests of these approaches highlight the validity of the criticisms. Analysis of sieved samples using...

Tensions between acceptance of policies aimed at creating a multicultural society and British (Anglo or Anglo-Celtic) Australians concerned about loss of their privileged position as members of the dominant society have been an important feature of political debate in Australia in recent years. There is, however, a paucity of empirical evidence ava...

Dear and others associated with the ‘Los Angeles School of Urbanism’ have presented a series of challenging ideas regarding changes in urban form as a consequence of the shift from modernism to post-modernism. Some of those challenges relate to a city’s ethnic diversity and residential segregation, with Los Angeles presented as a paradigm exemplar...

There is considerable public debate over the degree of residential segregation of members of ethnic minority groups in British urban areas. Some claim that this is increasing, others that with economic and social assimilation members of those minority groups are increasingly moving away from the ar-eas of initial concentration. The implication is t...

The spatial assimilation of ethnic minority groups based on ancestry data is an important issue in a major immigrant receiving, multicultural society like Australia. Using a new approach focusing on degree of ethnic ancestry group and host society mixing, we find levels of spatial assimilation in five metropolitan and three major industrial cities...

Summary Most studies of the impact of local campaigning on the geography of election results in single-member constituency electoral systems have been conducted in countries where the ‘first-past-the-post’ system is employed. Australia uses the ‘alternative vote’ (AV) system for elections to the federal and some state Lower Houses, with parties com...

In New Zealand there are substantial variations across the urban system in the degree of residential segregation of those claiming Maori ethnicity. Analyses of those variations, using measures particularly relevant to comparative study, show that Maori segregation was greatest in both 1991 and 2001 in larger urban areas and, especially, in those wi...

Although there are many studies of the residential segregation of ethnic groups in cities in various parts of the world, very few address the degree to which segregation levels vary across an urban system, let alone rigorously analyse those variations. Data on segregation across all US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in 1980 and 2000 at the c...

Recent claims that Sydney's ethnic residential concentrations are a permanent feature and that the city is rapidly turning into a city bifurcated along an ethnic divide cannot be sustained by the evidence. An understanding of multicultural policies as they operate in Australia, and of segregation as essentially a transitory phenomenon there, sugges...

There is a dearth of empirical evidence on the extent of racist attitudes, broadly defined, in Australia. A telephone survey of 5056 residents in Queensland and NSW examined attitudes to cultural difference, perceptions of the extent of racism, tolerance of specific groups, ideology of nation, perceptions of Anglo-Celtic cultural privilege, and bel...

Using an alternative conception of ethnic residential segregation, and associated statistical measures, this paper re-examines Simpson's analysis of the situation of South Asians in Bradford. It suggests that, contra Simpson, segregation of that ethnic group did increase over the period 1991–2001, with implications for public policy. In a recent pa...

Using a new approach to classifying migrant group concentrations, we test for evidence of the effects of globalisation, associated by some with ‘protopostmodernity’, on two Australian cities. Sydney is characterised as an emergent world city and a focus of ‘new economy’ activities. Melbourne is associated with ‘old economy’ activities, dominated by...

The initial releases of data from the 2000 U.S. Census allow exploration of the extent of change, if any, in residential segregation in four major cities, where substantial popula- tion growth has continued to generate increased ethnic diversity. Using a recently established method of classifying residential areas according to their ethnic composit...

The residential segregation of four main ethnic groups over the period 1980–2000 is examined for four US metropolitan areas, within the context of an assumed difference between so-called ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ cities. Using a newly developed measure of residential concentration, that binary distinction is found wanting: Los Angeles clearly diff...

Data from the 1996 New Zealand Census on ethnicity in Auckland Urban Area are used to illustrate a new approach to measuring spatial separation. The traditionally employed single-number indices are found wanting and a method based on thresholds is introduced. This provides more detailed information on the geography of ethnic groups that is consiste...

Recent articles by Dear and Flusty, Logan, Marcuse and Nijmann have initiated a debate regarding the characteristics of modern and post-modern urbanism. One of the differences between the two, it is contended, is in their residential geographies: post-modern cities, it is argued, are more heterogeneous and fragmented than modern cities, which are c...

World cities attract two major streams of migrants - those who occupy the upper levels of their occupational hierarchies (the 'globalized professionals') on the one hand and marginalized, low-skill workers on the other. These two groups are often of different ethnic status, and it is argued that multicultural world cities are thus fractured in both...

Does London conform to the classic American model — based on the work of the `Chicago School' — with regard to the residential segregation of ethnic groups? To address this question, methods of analysing census small area data on ethnic group residential segregation in London are introduced, which provide more detailed information on the degree and...

The residential segregation of ethnic groups in urban areas remains an issue of importance for policy-making in multicultural societies, such as England's, with levels of segregation frequently linked to questions of social exclusion and equal treatment. But how segregated are ethnic groups in England? Most studies answer this question using single...

Many contemporary cities have a diverse ethnic-cultural mix as a result of different international migration streams, with implications for the residential distri-bution of various ethnic groups within those cities. Boal recently suggested a series of scenarios against which the pattern in any one place could be evaluated. These are applied to Sydn...

The National (Country) Party, traditional beneficiary of a countrymindedness ethos in rural and regional Australia, suffered a significant electoral setback at the 1998 federal election from a new conservative force in Australian politics, the One Nation Party. One Nation has been characterised as the party of the ‘old’ Australia, those least able...

Most studies of ethnic residential segregation in Australian cities have used single-measure indices of dissimilarity and segregation, which access the degree of unevenness between two maps. Segregation is a multi-dimensional concept, however, and in this paper we introduce an alternative way of measuring residential concentration which incorporate...

Most studies of ethnic segregation in cities use relative measures to create residential area classifications. We argue that absolute measures are better suited to testing theories of spatial separation, and introduce a classification procedure which provides a robust approach to comparative studies, directly linked to the homogeneity - heterogenei...

The increased volume of international migration is producing a substantial number of multicultural cities with residents drawn from a large number of different birthplaces. Models developed a few decades ago of the intra-urban social geography of where these migrants live suggested that they were initially concentrated in particular parts of the me...

Most studies of ethnic segregation use relative measures of the residential separation of various groups within cities. The models that they are implicitly testing call for absolute rather than relative measures, however, and these are employed here in a comparative study of Maori, Pacific Island and Asian ethnic minorities in New Zealand's 36 larg...

It is commonly assumed that immigrants are disadvantaged in the Australian labour market because of a variety of interacting factors, some related to their skills, some to cultural differences between them and the host society, and some to the time it takes to adjust to their new circumstances. Using specially-prepared cross tabulations from the 19...

There is a substantial debate in the literature regarding the occupational differentiation of migrant groups within their host country's labour market. Are migrants simply disadvantaged because of their educational qualifications, skills, linguistic abilities, and so on, or are they also discriminated against? This paper explores that question usin...

Research into the effects of electioneering at the constituency level suggests positive impacts on voters of campaign spending by one party relative to another. In much of this research, however, the political context of the elections studied is ignored or fitted into Key's category of normal or maintaining elections, where voting patterns remain r...

There is a tendency to assume that election campaigning at the local electorate level has little or no impact on voters subject to the influence of highly centralised campaigns and an increasingly nationalised media. However, as applied to the flow‐of‐the‐vote, this study concludes that local campaign spending has real consequences for vote shifts....

The presence of a state sectional or regional basis to variations in voter behaviour in Australia has long been a matter of debate, with opinion varying between shallow but meaningful state sections and national uniformity. Electoral geographers generally support the former view. This paper investigates an important but under‐researched aspect of v...

Election to the Australian Senate under proportional voting and statewide quotas gives to minor parties of the political centre a chance to win parliamentary representation otherwise denied them in the single member constituency‐based House of Representatives. Focusing on the Australian Democrats, vote splitting in the context of • consistently hig...

The defeat of the Labour government in New Zealand in 1990 followed Labour's unprecedented re-election three years previously on policies very different from those traditionally associated with a Labour administration. Results of that previous election, in 1987, were seen by some to represent quite fundamental changes to the basis of Labour support...

The success with which Labor and the Liberal/National coalition identified with particular categories of voters is examined within the context of successive State elections in New South Wales during the 1980s. Results indicate that class and primary vs secondary economy cleavages dominate voter behaviour, the balance between the two largely reflect...

The relationship between campaign fund raising, campaign expenditure and voter support levels for the two major parties, Labor and the Coalition, is explored by means of regression analysis. Results confirm the existence of significant relationships, in particular that, holding constant other influencing factors, the more a party raises and spends...

The relationship between campaign spending at the constituency level and the level of voting support for the two main party political groupings. Labor and the coalition, is examined by means of multiple regression analysis. Results confirm that the pattern of spending influences the pattern of voting, rather than simply reflecting it, and emphasise...

Contemporary Australian society is highly urbanised. Therefore social differentiation in our cities largely subsumes the broader question of divisions within society generally. Australia has for long been portrayed as unusually egalitarian, with no entrenched class divisions. However, this image bears little resemblance to the actual distribution o...

The general consensus of the literature on migrant voting behaviour in Australia is that the migrant vote, like that of the host population, can best be explained in terms of a general class cleavage (Jupp, 1981: 5). Unlike the United States, Canada, or even Britain, where ethnic differences have long been politically important (Jupp, 1984: 7-9), A...

The role of income in domestic electricity consumption, compared with the influence of other sociophysical characteristics such as household or dwelling structure, has long been under debate. The major problem is one of multicollinearity among the independent variables. Sequential regression models are used to overcome this problem. The role of inc...

Completion of the Atlas of population and housing, 1981 census series (Australia. Division of National Mapping et al.1983, 1984a‐f) marks the culmination of a decade of work in the urban social atlas field. But over that period there is evidence of increasing divergence of purpose, from initially twin objectives, theoretical and applied, to the avo...

Many geographical studies of voting patterns have produced results consistent with what is commonly termed the neighbourhood effect. This note suggests that further investigation of that effect is needed, and provides a typology of spatial‐structural effects. It also uses an improved methodology to test for the existence of some of those effects at...

Presents an alternative approach aimed at overcoming some shortcomings of conventional linear approaches in order to achieve a more accurate characterization of urban sub-areas in terms of their age structures. Develops an entropy procedure which brings out the much greater definition given to the characterization of heterogeneous groupings of sub-...