Class-based neighborhood segregation predates the modern city

Evidence

To paraphrase the old adage, to segregate is human, to integrate, divine: Even in the preindustrial city, where many forces conspired to “mix” the populace, there were strains toward flocking together among the similarly feathered birds. By the eighteenth century, neighborhood segregation by class was already apparent, for example, in London (George, 1965; Chancellor, 1907), and as the city moved outward during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, residential class homogenization intensified. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 398

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes Lofland’s own later coverage of preindustrial spatial mixing discussed in Chapter 3.
• DEFINE: Establishes ‘segregation’ as a human universal impulse rather than a modern invention, grounding later analyses of how strangers sort themselves.