Differentiated Solidarity

Many notions of segregation and integration idealize a living situation in which every population group is evenly distributed throughout a city or area. For instance, when Metro Analysis calculated the dissimilarity index, the definition of integration for that assignment was that every racial or ethnic group be distributed evenly across the metro area.

In City Life, our class interrogated this flawed notion, particularly through a framework called "differentiated solidarity". Particularly, differentiated solidarity acknowledges the necessity and emphasizes the importance of desegregation, but upholds the benefits that accompany the clustering of communities. Thinking back to St. Louis, a metro area with a very small Pacific Islander community - would Pacific Islanders in St. Louis want to be spread evenly throughout the metro area, or would they want to live in the same area? One would think the latter. Differentiated solidarity thus serves as an important framework to examine issues of segregation and integration; however, it may not be so easy to implement policies that hold well within the differentiated solidarity framework.