The Inner Geographies of a Migrant Gateway: Mapping the Built Environment and the Dynamics of Caribbean Mobility in Manchester, 1951–2011

Brown, L.; Cunningham, N.

doi:10.1017/ssh.2015.82

The Inner Geographies of a Migrant Gateway: Mapping the Built Environment and the Dynamics of Caribbean Mobility in Manchester, 1951–2011

Brown, L.; Cunningham, N.

Authors

L. Brown

N. Cunningham

Abstract

Between the 1960s and 1990s a series of urban redevelopment projects in Manchester radically transformed ethnic settlement in the city. The ward of Moss Side, which had been a gateway for Caribbean and African immigrants, experienced repeated slum clearances in which whole communities were relocated and large tracts of housing stock were demolished and redesigned. The relationship between these physical and demographic changes has been overshadowed by the persisting stigmatization of Moss Side as a racialized “ghetto,” which has meant that outsiders have constructed the area as possessing a fixed and homogenous identity. This article uses geographic information systems in conjunction with local surveys and archival records to explore how the dynamics of immigrant mobility within Moss Side were shaped by housing stock, external racism, family strategies, and urban policy. Whereas scholarship on ethnic segregation in Britain has focused on the internal migration of ethnic groups between administrative areas, using areal interpolation to connect demographic data and the built environment reveals the intense range of movements that developed within the variegated urban landscape of Moss Side.

Citation

Brown, L., & Cunningham, N. (2016). The Inner Geographies of a Migrant Gateway: Mapping the Built Environment and the Dynamics of Caribbean Mobility in Manchester, 1951–2011. Social Science History, 40(01), 93-120. https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2015.82

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Jan 25, 2016
Publication Date	Mar 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Apr 4, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Nov 26, 2015
Journal	Social Science History
Print ISSN	0145-5532
Electronic ISSN	1527-8034
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	40
Issue	01
Pages	93-120
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2015.82

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Copyright Statement
Copyright © Social Science History Association, 2016 This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.