So what makes this relevant to us today? I believe that the neglect of this field over the course of time has led to consequences that we cannot undo anytime soon. Fixing these issues is going to take years of work. In this regard, housing is just as big of an issue that contributes to this problem.
I grew up with friends who’s ancestry traced back to many different places throughout the world. I later learned in my life that those friends were the ones in my life that could offer different perspectives on so many different things because they did not grow up the same way I did. I believe that larger diverse communities like this could help solve so many problems in our world today. The issue is that we live in areas with other people that have relatively the same educational and economic opportunities that we do and this usually means living in areas with people of the same racial or ethnic background.
This combined with the neglect of integrating people into their surrounding environment is why equality has still not been reached in our country and is also why we are so alienated from each other and this alienation is the cause of this cycle of neglect. We keep building urban environments that end up being occupied by the same people, away from major centers of gathering, so this issue isn’t in plain site for everybody to see. In recent years, many architects and planners have been working together to fix these issues and many projects have turned out to be successful but much of the country still faces this problem, especially poor regions.
Source: Faber, Jacob William (2019). Segregation and the Cost of Money: Race, Poverty, and the Prevalence of Alternative Financial Institutions. Social Forces Volume 98(2), 817–846. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/748278.
