I'm not calling the writer wrong, but I think it's worth noting that a fully integrated society is not necessarily going to be a society with an even distribution of the various races per geometric unit. People of different cultures are going to cluster together because that's part of how culture and customs work. Culture, for better or worse, tends to tie into our perception of our own race, so there's a sizable, though far from total, correlation between the two, a correlation that probably won't just fade into the wind as racial relations improve.

Integration shouldn't be a mission to eliminate the differences between different cultures, it should be an ongoing effort to maintain healthy communication and mobility between such groups. If people don't cluster around some kind of shared interest or heritage or other important thing, then you have a monoculture, which sounds boring as balls.

Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of segregation and room for improvement, segregation is still a big problem that's forced on people in a thousand large and small ways. The article is right to say that the distributions as they stand today indicate something to fix as time goes on.

actually this is not a result of racism but only of a slight bias in your choice of a neighbourhood.

According to Schelling's segregation model if the average person only wants slightly above 50% of their neighbourhood to be like themselves, you end up with a huge segregation after while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFl3Cfw12bo

(read "is not" as "is most propably not")

Sorry, but no one cares about Detroit. It's a lost cause...

What I found really interesting was how unpopulated the West was compared to the East. Populations cluster in cities in the West, with vast swathes of unpopulated country.

For someone from the UK, which is getting to the stage where you can't swing a cat without hitting some fucker, seeing so much open space is an eye-opener.

That's largely because of climate. A lot of the unpopulated land is just desert. Even Los Angeles borders on being one. It's not like there's lots of room to live. Everyone lives in the cities because there's no other choice, really.

Now, if you want to drive a few hundred miles, there's some great national parks like Yosemite. If that's the "open space" you're looking for, it does exist. Can't live there though.

I would imagine it's land you can expand into ?, not so much the deserts. I think the same way as Mat when I see the huge open spaces of Africa and some of America, Russia. In the UK you probably could get put in the most unpopulated region and still be half a days walk from a road. Even the forests in America I imagine you could get lost in for weeks ?, the deserts you'll end up dead ?.

100 miles in any direction from London will have you see most of the UK and part of Europe lol.

That's quite cool - cheers

Yeah, I didn't even consider Canada for that. I have a friend in Alberta and I remember years ago she telling me how there's some kind of weather rating system for how many minutes a person can live outside because of how cold it gets.