Faisal Bodi: forcing desegregation doesn’t work

Comment is free: Birds of a feather…

Faisal Bodi on a recent review of the Cantle report (PDF) of the 2001 disturbances in northern English towns by the report's author shows its author is "as convinced as ever that communal tensions are the product of social segregation". Communities, Faisal Bodi argues, are "organic entities, built around the magnetic pole of common values and interests", and that history shows that "the expression of these values cannot be suppressed or engineered out of existence":

Frenchwood, on the southern tip of the town centre [of Preston], was a Muslim area when I left it, but it is even more so today. It has grown both in terms of population and geography. Most of the friends and acquaintances I had left behind are still in Frenchwood. Many are busy snapping up the few properties that appear on the market so they can pass them on to their children. The neighbourhood itself has improved. Doses of regeneration finance and the self-help business ethic of the mainly Indian Muslim community has lifted the areas economically and socially. It's not exactly Harrogate but it is clean, safe, and contains all the amenities needed for a modern sustainable community.
For Muslims it's a far more desirable place to live than the white working class estates that ring town, where house prices are lower, fire engines attending emergencies are routinely stoned, and dependency culture is passed down from one dysfunctional one-parent family to the next. Although these residents are my socio-economic counterparts I don't have enough in common with them to embark on the shared enterprise that is building a community.