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The common prevalent and consequential forms of residential segregation are visually apparent as we move across most major cities in North America. The most encompassing view of residential segregation – the “bird’s-eye” view – sees what proportions of people belonging to different groups live in different neighborhoods across an entire city. These proportions can be color-coded onto a map of the city to reveal broad patterns, or these proportions can be summarized into an “index of dissimilarity,” an index ranging from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating higher levels of segregation, or other measures that seek to capture essential qualities of segregation in a single number. (These indices will be discussed in Chapter 3.) Despite its utility for broad observation, the bird’s-eye view misses a lot of details about segregation that may be important.

If we shift to what we observe driving a car along the roads, we see a bit more detail. For example, driving on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago from the north side to the south side of the city, you can see stark transitions in the racial and economic composition of residents and their neighborhoods. The combined effect of changes in both racial and economic composition of various urban communities can make it easier to visually identify changes during this drive. In the north, you see more middle-class neighborhoods with well-maintained houses and mostly white residents. In the south, you see more poor and working-class neighborhoods with graffiti on the walls and broken windows in some houses. If you are in Canada and visit the northwest end of Toronto, you see high proportions of black residents around the Jane and Finch neighborhood, which is characterized by high proportions of low-income families and public housing. However, despite this greater detail from this “drive-by” view, we still do not yet observe fine details that may be important to understanding residential segregation.

If you get out of your car and walk across the urban cityscape, you will observe a richer texture of differences that represent the communities that live in these neighborhoods. Engaging all your senses, you will smell different ethnic foods, enjoy distinctive types of ethnic architecture and businesses, notice different ways of dressing, hear unfamiliar music, and perhaps feel welcomed or feel like an outsider by how you are looked at or treated. At the street level, from an “on-foot” view, residential segregation and ethnic concentration is experienced socially and felt emotionally. This experiential and emotional connection gives us insight into how segregation is shaped to both social and physical distance.