There were signs of the formation of a massive zone of social deprivation in Kingston—notably in West Kingston, dating from the West India Royal Commission Report (1945) and the Denham Town redevelopment project of the late 1930s (Central Housing Advisory Board, 1936; Stolberg 1990), via the Report on the Rastafari movement in the early 1960s (Smith, Augier, and Nettleford, 1960) and an early paper by Clarke (1966), to the research of Clarke (1975a, b) and Eyre (1986a, b) in the 1970s and 1980s. Kingston’s late-colonial slums were redesignated the ghetto after 1970 (Eyre 1986a, b). More precisely, the ghetto had its origins in the recognized slum areas of West Kingston of 1935 (Clarke, 1975a: fig. 25), in the areas in poor condition in 1947 (Fig. 1.9), the areas of poor housing in 1960 (Fig. 1.10), and the overcrowded areas of 1960 (Clarke 1975a: fig. 48). Clearly, the slum/ghetto is associated with deprivation, and with high population density in relation to low social class and poor quality (usually rented) accommodation. What is peculiar about the present-day Kingston ghetto is that it is a predominantly black area (more than 92 per cent), in a city where the black population is 88 per cent of the total (Ch. 4). So, while the ghetto conforms to Ward’s definition (1982) in that it is racially homogeneous (almost all the remainder of its population is mulatto), it is defined as much by the deprivation of its occupants—and their high-density dwelling—as by its exclusive racial characteristics. Moreover, it has not expanded by flight from white residential heartlands on its periphery, as in the case of Morrill’s (1965) US ghetto model. Indeed the middle-class mulatto districts on its northern periphery in Kingston have retained their class status (while becoming noticeably darker) over the last thirty years, and the ghetto has spread into areas that were either vacant (in the west) or have become decayed (in the east) (Knight and Davies 1978). Whereas in 1970, the slum/ ghetto was largely West Kingston, it now extends to East Kingston as well, and the major spatial distinction is between uptown (which is largely upper or middle class) and downtown (which is lower class and houses the core of the ghetto). The precise point of division is often given as the clock at Half Way Tree, hence the terms living above or below the clock (Robotham 2003b).
Middle Class in the West and Central in Russia
