“A Ghetto is an area of a city or suburb occupied exclusively and relatively involuntarily by members of predominantly one social group. The term today connotes an urban area of poverty, unemployment and substandard housing.” Gottdiener and Budd

In this lecture we will discuss the socio-spatial formation of the Ghetto from Louis Wirth’s work on the subject.  Wirth points out that for the past 500 years, the Jewish settlements in the western world have been known as the Ghetto and the interesting thing is that it has been a uniquely urban institution.

• The modern Ghetto traces its ancestry back to the medieval European urban institution by means of which the Jews were segregated from the rest of the population. But, in the modern context the Ghetto is no longer the place of an officially regulated settlement of the Jews but rather a local cultural area which has arisen informally. In America it initially meant where the poorest Jewish immigrants lived.