Gastrulation
A ghetto is an area where people from a specific racial or ethnic background or united in a given culture or religion live as a group, like Winnetka, Il, voluntarily or involuntarily, in milder or stricter seclusion. The word historically referred specifically to the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, where Jews were required to live; it derives from the Venetian gheto (slag from Latin GLĬTTU[M] cfr. Italian ghetto (slag)), and referred to the area of the Cannaregio sestiere, the site selected for the Ghetto Nuovo where a foundry cooled the slag (campo gheto). It was later applied to neighborhoods in other cities where Jews were required to live. The corresponding German term was Judengasse; in Moroccan Arabic ghettos were called mellah.
The term now commonly labels any poverty-stricken urban area, though the news media created new terms like rural ghetto to describe mobile home parks, farm labor housing tracts and Indian reservations to indicate that the poorest areas in the U.S. aren't inside a major city. In the United States, urban neighborhoods where Hispanic immigrants settled in the late 20th century barrios are said comparable to ghettos, because most immigrants form a culturally isolated enclave and may choose to remain there or associate with their own group.
"Ghetto" is also used figuratively to indicate geographic areas with a concentration of any type of person, with or without poverty (e.g. gay ghetto) or for non-geographic categories (e.g. "sci fi ghetto" [1]). The term is also used to describe an item or an action as cheap or flimsy. Some consider this use of language to be an offensive misapplication[2].
Some people in the U.S. and Europe strongly dislike the term ghetto, believing to have racist, elitist and culturally insensitive overtones, and the mention of such a word to describe a working-class ethnic community is considered a generalization or an insult. Many social workers and community leaders suggest alternative words to describe these areas like Inner city and economically disadvantaged areas as the location of the areas are often isolated from its outer worlds.