Perceiving the Metropolis: Seeing the City through a Prism of Race

Maria Krysan, University of Illinois at Chicago
Michael Bader, University of Michigan

Recent research highlights the choices people make about moving into certain communities as a mechanism helping to maintain patterns of racial residential segregation. Understanding how residents perceive communities in their metropolis and how those perceptions are shaped by race—both of the respondent and in the composition of the community—can help determine if these perceptions perpetuate or attenuate segregation. Building on findings from earlier studies, we report the results of new survey data from Detroit using maps to measure respondents’ knowledge and impressions of a large number of communities. We first examine evaluations of each community and assess the effect of respondent race, controlling for a range of respondent characteristics. Second, we use “community” as the unit of analysis to identify the degree to which racial composition, social class, school quality and geographical location of the community predict overall evaluations.