5 Culture

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

  • Recognize the role that ethnic enclaves play in immigrant communities
  • Identify how ghettoization happens and how it impacts a community’s power and opportunities
  • Define the different groups that use a city and how their needs are taken into account
  • Understand how the symbolic economy reshapes urban culture and life
  • Discuss the concept of urban authenticity
  • Explain the relationship between culture and gentrification

This chapter examines the role that culture plays in shaping urban life. First, we will explore the mechanisms that lead to racial and ethnic segregation and examine how ethnic enclaves and ghetto neighborhoods affect residents’ opportunities and influence their identities. Next, we will turn to the concept of multiculturalism, and then we will explore how the city is shaped by the various groups that use it. At the end of the chapter, we will consider the ways in which culture impacts urban economies and fuels gentrification.

Ethnic Enclave Neighborhoods

Flip through a guidebook to a large city nearly anywhere in the world, and you will find listings of neighborhoods that are associated with a particular ethnic group or culture. Cities are made up of diverse communities, but those communities are not necessarily evenly dispersed throughout the urban neighborhoods and suburban towns that make up a metropolitan area. Some ethnic communities concentrate themselves in a particular area of the city in order to maintain their cultural ties and provide support to one another, while other groups may be forced into a particular neighborhood because of discrimination and exclusionary practices perpetrated by the dominant racial or ethnic group that exerts power within their society.

Neighborhoods where members who share the same culture are clustered are called ethnic enclaves.[1] An example of an ethnic enclave is the Danforth neighborhood in Toronto, which is known as Greektown. During the 1960s and 1970s, a large wave of Greek immigrants settled in Toronto.[2] Although they initially moved into affordable neighborhoods throughout the city, a concentration of Greek immigrants laid down roots in the Danforth neighborhood, an area that was home to a large Italian and other immigrant populations. Greek restaurants and shops opened along the commercial area, and in the 1970s the neighborhood was nicknamed Little Athens. About 30,000 people of Greek descent, about half of the Greek population in Toronto, lived in the Danforth community. By the end of the 1970s, Greek residents began moving out of the neighborhood, but the number of Greek-owned businesses along the commercial strip multiplied. In the 1980s, despite the continued out-migration of Greek households from the area, local merchants formed a business improvement district, renamed the neighborhood “Greektown,” and began promoting the area’s ethnic history and businesses.

The story of Greektown illustrates many of the defining characteristics of an ethnic enclave. Ethnic enclaves are home to concentrations of people who share a culture or ethnicity. New immigrants often face limited housing choices due to their economic status and/or a lack of facility with the language or ways of doing business in their new city. They might settle in a community where they already have some social ties or where they feel comfortable and can access foods, services, and institutions that are familiar or find places to participate in cultural or religious activities. While ethnic enclaves are home to a concentration of people who share the same cultural background, not everyone from that ethnicity lives in that area, and the neighborhood may not be exclusively dominated by only one ethnic group.[3] While Greeks made up a significant portion of the Danforth community, they were never the sole occupants of that neighborhood. This is one of the characteristics of ethnic enclaves that differentiates these neighborhoods from ghetto communities, which we will focus on later in this chapter. In ghetto communities, a majority of members of an ethnic group are segregated into an area or neighborhood where they are isolated, stigmatized and lack adequate opportunities or infrastructure. [4]

Ethnic enclave communities evolve over time. When a group first immigrates to the city, the enclave neighborhood provides social support and, sometimes, an avenue for economic mobility. Cuban immigrants who settled in the Little Havana neighborhood in Miami in the early 1970s had greater economic opportunities than Mexican immigrants who arrived during the same years.[5] Immigrants from Mexico were more dispersed. Unlike their Cuban counterparts, they worked on the open labor market and were segmented into jobs that were low-paid, where their bosses were white and native born, and they had little room for advancement. Cuban immigrants often went to work for other Cubans who owned businesses in Little Havana. While their earnings were similarly low, they had more opportunities to advance in their jobs and to eventually start their own businesses. While businesses within an ethnic enclave can provide economic support to new immigrants, more recent Cuban emigres who settled outside of Miami and work in the open labor market have higher earnings than their counterparts residing in Little Havana.[6] Some of these differences may be explained by the recent immigrants’ class background and their education and English proficiency levels.

Koreatown, Los Angeles: Portrait of an Ethnic Enclave

At one point, Los Angeles was home to the largest Korean community outside of the Korean peninsula. Prior to changes in U.S. immigration policy in 1965, there were few Korean immigrants in the United States. Those who were able to emigrate settled in Hawaii or California. In the early 1900s, the small Korean population in Los Angeles established a church and community center near downtown. Although the Korean population lived all around the metropolitan area, the neighborhood where these institutions were became the center of the community’s cultural and social life.

As more Koreans arrived, the center of the community moved north of the original neighborhood to a mixed-race area near Olympic Boulevard, where there was a cluster of banks and the Olympic Market grocery store. In the early 1970s, local business owners formed an association, financed Korean language street signs, and started the annual Korean Street Festival, which continues today. By 1976, there were more than 1,000 Korean small businesses in the neighborhood and 70,000 Korean-American residents.

Like most ethnic enclaves, Koreatown was not exclusively Korean, nor did the majority of Koreans in Los Angeles live there. Today, it is a majority Latino neighborhood, but about 30% of residents are Korean. Although many second- and third-generation Korean Americans have moved to other neighborhoods, the Koreatown continues to serve as a commercial, social, and cultural center for the community.

Eui-Young Yu. “”Koreatown” Los Angeles Emergence of a New Inner-City Ethnic Community,” Bulletin of the Population and Development Studies Center 14 (1985): 29-44.

Survey LA: Los Angeles Historic Resources Survey, Korean Americans in Los Angeles, August, 2018, https://planning.lacity.org/odocument/ef26fda2-f0d7-488c-9766-5a3491d0a6f7/SurveyLA_KoreanAmericanContextandResources_Aug2018.pdf.

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, provides another example of how an enclave economy can provide economic opportunity, but in this case, it came at the expense of some of the co-ethnic residents in the neighborhood. [7] Greenpoint became a destination for Polish immigrants in the 1980s and ‘90s. New Polish migrants were able to find affordable housing in the neighborhood through informal social networks and Polish real estate companies. The neighborhood networks also helped connect new migrants to jobs, especially in the construction trades, with a large group finding work in asbestos removal. A community credit union provided banking services, and as new migrants accumulated savings, some invested their money in Greenpoint real estate, becoming landlords themselves. In the 2000s as real estate prices rose, Polish landlords began leasing their units for a higher price to non-Polish tenants. The same network of Polish real estate agents that helped connect new immigrants to affordable apartments began working with landlords to convince them to rent to non-Poles and acting as an intermediary in many of these transactions. While local landlords and real estate agents made more money from renting to people from outside the community, new Polish migrants could no longer afford to live in Greenpoint and started settling instead in communities in Queens and New Jersey. Soon Greenpoint institutions, like the local credit union, followed.

The experience of Polish migrants who were priced out of Greenpoint illustrates another characteristic of ethnic enclaves. These neighborhoods are often temporary communities.[8] As subsequent generations assimilate and intermarry with people from other backgrounds, the enclave is no longer an attractive place to settle. Many enclaves house successive waves of new immigrant groups from different parts of the world. For example, the Lower East Side of New York was hone to German, Jewish, Italian, Chinese, and Puerto Rican migrants at various and often overlapping points in its history.

The succession of immigrants out of enclave neighborhoods and into other areas doesn’t necessarily result in the erasure of the ethnic identity from the community. Greektown maintains its identity despite housing relatively few people of Greek descent. Little Italy is a neighborhood centered around Mulberry Street on the Lower East Side of New York City that continues to attract tourists who patronize the Italian-owned restaurants and businesses and attend the annual San Genaro street festival. [9] While Italian-owned businesses dominate part of Mulberry Street, very few people of Italian descent reside in the neighborhood anymore. Like Greektown, ethnic-owned businesses have survived, but the community’s identity has become a marketing tool, rather than a true cultural representation of its current population.

In Little Italy, not only have people of Italian ancestry moved out to the suburbs, but they also no longer work in most of the neighborhood’s businesses, including the Italian-owned establishments. Albanian immigrants from Kosovo and Albania are employed in large numbers as waiters in Little Italy establishments, while the kitchens are staffed by immigrants from Latin American countries.[10] Many of the waiters pass as Italians by assuming an Italian-sounding name at work and learning a few words of the language to intersperse into their dialogue with customers. The illusion of Italian identity is maintained in the neighborhood as a new wave of immigrants find an employment niche in its restaurants.

Not all ethnic enclaves go through the same transitions that Little Italy and Greektown did. According to spatial assimilation theory, as successive generations of immigrants become more assimilated in the United States, they move out of urban ethnic enclaves and into suburban communities.[11] But this is not necessarily the case for every ethnic group. For example, Italian-Americans continue to live in ethnic enclave neighborhoods in the city, inner suburbs and, to a lesser extent, the outer suburbs in the New York metropolitan region at higher rates than Irish or German Americans do. Those Italian Americans living in urban or suburban ethnic enclaves are more likely to speak Italian at home than are their counterparts living in non-enclave neighborhoods. These enclave neighborhoods continue to serve as a cultural resource for first-, second-, and third-generation immigrant communities.

In the 21st century, metropolitan areas have changed, and a new type of enclave neighborhood serves the purpose that older, inner city enclaves did during prior immigration waves. The ethnoburb is a suburban ethnic enclave that is home to new immigrant populations.[12] During the 19th and 20th centuries, new immigrants settled in urban neighborhoods, but this is no longer always the case. Ethnoburbs are multiethnic communities that contain concentrations of a particular immigrant group. These communities often have higher income levels than urban enclaves do, and many have existing clusters of residents who share the background of the new immigrant community. In the Los Angeles area, Chinese-Americans moved out of the city’s ethnic enclaves and into some of the suburban communities in the San Gabriel Valley. A new wave of Chinese immigrants began to settle directly in these suburban areas, rather than in the urban Chinese enclaves. These ethnoburbs are not exclusively Chinese and Chinese-American. There are residents from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds living there, including immigrants from Southeast Asia.

This new direct-to-the-suburbs migration pattern is representative of the global economic changes that have occurred. New immigrants are now more likely to work in the service industry rather than in inner city manufacturing plants. Many ethnoburb businesses have direct ties to businesses from the immigrants’ nation of origin.  While overall income levels in ethnoburbs may be higher than urban enclave communities, there are pockets of poverty and immigrant groups from various countries may be stratified into lower paying occupations and poorer housing. These communities may also be marred by xenophobia from native born, white populations.

Ghetto Communities

While the ethnic enclave is a voluntary and heterogeneous neighborhood that can provide economic opportunities for its residents, ghettos are communities where residents who share the same racial or ethnic background are forced to live because of exclusionary policies or practices.[13] Ghetto neighborhoods are stigmatized and are characterized by a lack of opportunity and power. Ghettoization, or the process of separating a particular racial, ethnic, or religious community into a specific space, mutually reinforces bigoted ideas about a population and their spatial segregation. The bigoted ideologies within the majority racial, ethnic, or religious community that promote separation use the resulting poor living conditions in ghetto neighborhoods as a justification for maintaining segregation.

The word ghetto derives from the Venetian term geto, which means foundry.[14] In 1516 after centuries of exclusion and discrimination, the Venetian government decreed that all Jewish residents would be forced to live on a small island that once housed a copper foundry. The Vecchio Ghetto was walled and gated, and residents were allowed out during the day, but confined and locked in during the night. The process of Jewish ghettoization in Italy coincided with the rise of local state authorities where bureaucratic governments used spatial confinement to exert territorial control over a population with different religious beliefs.[15] The development of the initial ghetto in Venice served the needs of the church and the emerging state. Ghettoization policies were in keeping with Catholic Church’s systematic religious persecution of Jews, but they also allowed Jewish Venetians to play a limited role in the local economy, which was desired by the state.[16] The establishment of the Venetian ghetto was continuously resisted by the local Jewish community. The decree that created the ghetto allowed Jewish residency in the city in the confined quarter for five years. Venetian Jews lived under constant threat that the decree would not be renewed and that they would be expelled from the city. In the mid-1500s, the Pope decreed that Jewish ghettos would be established throughout the Italian peninsula.

The more contemporary and well-known mass ghettoization of Jews in Europe occurred under the Nazis. Ghettoization was first proposed by the Nazis in 1939.[17] Ghettos were instituted in German-occupied territories and some encompassed significant parts of an existing Jewish neighborhoods, while others consisted of a series of houses scattered around the city. Under the Nazis, ghettos were similar to concentration camps where residents were tightly monitored, subject to cruel and inhumane conditions including starvation, lack of medical care, and forced labor, and were basically imprisoned until they were killed or sent to death camps. In the face of these horrifying conditions, residents still managed to resist the terms of their confinement, employing a range of strategies from appeasement and negotiation to armed uprisings.

Ghettoization in Rome Past and Present: The Creation of “Outsiders Within”

Rome segregated its Jewish citizens into a ghetto longer than any other Italian city. Jews were ghettoized in Rome for more than three centuries from 1555 until 1870. The Jewish ghetto was established during a time when the Catholic dominance of the city was under threat from the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church sought to establish its religious dominance by scapegoating Jewish residents in a campaign to rid Rome of its religious minorities. The ghetto remained a powerful political tool for various church and political leaders who could tighten or loosen control of the space. Meanwhile, the Jews who were confined within its walls and deprived of resources developed a strong collective identity and launched efforts to resist their segregation.

In contemporary Rome, the city’s recent policies toward its Roma population resemble its earlier history of Jewish ghettoization. The Roma began moving to the city in the 1950s and 1960s and established small communities of caravans and self-built homes on the outskirts of town where many rural Italian migrants had settled. In the 1980s, the Roman government recognized that the Roma deserved protections and subsequently labeled them a “nomad culture” and provided some services to their self-built communities. Most of the Roma who live in Rome are not nomads. Many are Italian citizens. Yet, the government mandated in 2009 that Roma living in self-built communities had to move to state-established villages.

The forced relocation of Roma to official villages eerily echoes the history of the Roman Jews. In the Roma villages, residents must have ID badges and there are fences, guards, and surveillance cameras. The Roma are required to send their children to school and to work. Like earlier ghettos, this forced separation creates a population of “outsiders within” the city that is used as political tool by powerful elements within the majority population. However, as sociologist Loïc Wacquant recognized, the paradox of ghettoization is that the forced separation and segregation also helps sow the “seeds of its own destruction” by creating conditions that enable resistance movements to organize and thrive.

Isabella Clough Marinaro, “The Rise of Italy’s Neo-Ghettos.” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 3 (2015): 368-87.

While the use of ghettos to facilitate genocide was unique to the Nazi regime, mandatory racial, ethnic, or religious residential segregation continued to persist. In the United States, the African American population has been systematically ghettoized at various points in history. After Reconstruction, the post-Civil War military occupation of the South that briefly guaranteed civil and voting rights for Blacks ended in 1877, white Southern elites and politicians instituted a series of Jim Crow laws that mandated segregation and deprived Black Southerners of their basic political and human rights.[18] Prior to the enactment of Jim Crow, it was not unusual to see mixed Black and white blocks and neighborhoods in Southern cities. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Southern towns passed laws that banned residents from selling their home to Blacks if they lived on a majority white block and vice versa.[19] By the mid to late 20th century, Southern cities were, in general, less residentially segregated than those in the North and Midwest, but Jim Crow laws ensured the subjugation and social isolation of Black Southerners regardless of where they lived.[20]

Beginning around 1915 and continuing through the 1960s and ‘70s, millions of Blacks moved out of the South and into Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities.[21] This internal mass movement became known as The Great Migration. It was driven by a desire to flee the oppressive Jim Crow regimes of the South. Restrictions on immigration and two World Wars created worker shortages in cities in the North, Midwest, and West. Black men and women filled those jobs, moving in large numbers to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York, and in later years to Los Angeles and other West Coast cities. Prior to the Great Migration, these cities had relatively small Black populations that were often clustered in particular areas, but were not restricted to living in one part of town.

As more Blacks began to move into Northern and Midwestern cities, they were greeted by periodic episodes of mass racial violence and terrorism.[22] These riots drove many Black migrants to move out of white neighborhoods where they felt more vulnerable to attacks. Beginning in 1910, white property interests and developers began to use more institutional strategies to promote racial segregation. Restrictive covenants were signed, neighborhood-wide agreements that had to be approved by at least 75% of residents that explicitly prohibited individual homeowners from selling their homes to someone who was Black or of another race or ethnicity. Restrictive covenants were declared illegal in 1948 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Terrorism in East St. Louis: White mob violence in the 1917 race riot

From July 1, 1917, to July 3, 1917, Black residents in East St. Louis, Illinois, were attacked by a white mob. More than 300 homes and businesses were burned and the official death toll was thirty nine, although police estimates put it closer to 100.

Racial tensions flared during the winter of 1917. In 1910, East St. Louis, a small industrial city located across the river from St. Louis, had a Black population of 6,000. By 1917, the population had doubled. When white aluminum workers went on strike, the company hired a mix of Black and white strikebreakers, but the strikers targeted Black replacement workers and residents. In July, white men shot into Black homes from a Ford. Armed Black residents gathered to protect their neighborhood, and fired at a Ford car full of white men, who turned out to be police.

This incident sparked three days of rioting. White rioters burned down Black homes and business and attacked people as they fled the fires. They shot, hanged, and beat people. Families fled across the river to St. Louis, some escaping in homemade rafts. The following school year, Black enrollment fell by half, because many families were afraid to return. Twenty one people were eventually tried and convicted of crimes associated with the riot and a Congressional investigation was launched, but a true reckoning of the events of 1917 has yet to occur. Many murders went unpunished, no compensation was paid for the immense loss of property, and an accurate death toll has not been determined.

The East St. Louis race riots are an extreme example of the type of terrorism that was used to enforce segregation and racial oppression. While racial residential patterns in Northern, Midwestern and West Coast cities were established through real estate and banking policies and practices, they were maintained, in part, through acts of violence against those who dared to challenge the status quo.

Tim O’Neil, “Race Hatred, Workforce Tensions Explode in East St. Louis in 1917,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, July 2, 2021, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/look-back-race-hatred-workforce-tensions-explode-in-east-st/article_9bfa1b5d-c627-5dc7-b1da-6d58993f3ecb.html.

Allison Keys, “The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead, Devastating a Community on the Rise,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 30, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/east-st-louis-race-riot-left-dozens-dead-devastating-community-on-the-rise-180963885/.

By that time, more subtle and obscure policies had been implemented that helped enforce racially segregated residential patterns. In 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression when many were in jeopardy of losing their homes to foreclosure, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was established, and it redesigned housing finance market by introducing long-term, fixed-rate mortgages.[23] The HOLC created federal standards for how homes were to be appraised and how lending risk was determined. Because it was issuing a loan that would last for decades, the HOLC had to evaluate whether or not a home

would hold its value if the borrower defaulted on the loan and a bank had to assume ownership. A five stage, color-coded system was developed to assess lending risks in various neighborhoods and wards in cities across the country. Areas were ranked according to the average age of the housing, with new homes valued higher than older ones, and by the perceived stability of the neighborhood, which was based upon its racial, ethnic, and socio-economic demographics and its physical condition. The HOLC ascribed to the commonly held belief at the time that neighborhoods went through life cycles. Life cycle theorists asserted that newly built neighborhoods would slowly decline as housing aged and increasingly lower-income people moved in. Eventually, new immigrants or African Americans would occupy the area indicating that the area had reached its so-called final life stage Adherents to this idea assumed that higher-income, native born whites would no longer find such an area desirable, and, therefore, property values would decline precipitously.

The HOLC did not invent this theory, nor was it the first organization to use it to appraise housing; however, it systematized these ideas and spread them nationwide.[24] The result was the redlining of inner-city and African American neighborhoods. Red refers to the color that was assigned to the lowest ranked neighborhoods on HOLC maps, which were considered too risky to lend to. Redlining was not segregation, but it reinforced segregation by depriving African American homeowners of access to mortgage lending. Redlining also devalued the homes that Blacks owned and created the persistent association in real estate brokers’, bankers’, and white homeowners’ minds that an influx of Black homeowners would lead to declining property values.

As more African Americans moved north and the ghetto communities grew overcrowded, people began to move into adjacent neighborhoods. A process known as blockbusting emerged in Chicago and other cities.[25] Real estate agents would rent or sell a few homes in an adjacent white neighborhood to Black families and spark a panic among their white neighbors. The ensuing panic would prompt whites to sell their homes at an artificially low price to enterprising real estate agents who would turn around and sell them at an inflated cost to Black middle class families looking to live in a more integrated setting. These practices and widespread racist attitudes virtually ensured that neighborhoods would remain tenuously integrated for short periods of time until they flipped entirely.

In contrast to economic opportunities that ethnic enclaves provide for some of their residents, living in a ghetto neighborhood is associated with a lack of wealth and economic power. A home located in a ghetto community is often valued lower than one of equal size and quality located in a white neighborhood. In addition to lower property values, Black homeowners also lacked access to traditional mortgage lending. As a result, many were forced into predatory forms of lending like contract buying, where a property owner sells a home at an inflated price in a rent-to-own scheme that could result in a loss of the property if the purchasing tenant fails to comply with the strict terms of the contract. Predatory forms of lending are associated with higher costs, high rates of foreclosure, and fraudulent lending terms. It is not just housing that costs more; residents of ghetto neighborhoods also pay higher prices for many other goods and services including food and clothing. This phenomenon is known as the ghetto or poverty tax.[26]

In addition to economic deprivation, ghetto residents also lack power. In the late 1960s, civil rights activists began to see parallels between their own political situation and struggles of anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. Many began to conceptualize ghettoization as a form of internal colonization.[27] Like a colonized nation, ghettoized communities had their situation imposed on them from an outside group. That group then administrated the institutions within their neighborhood without the input or consent of residents, those institutions then reflected the dominant groups’ own values and cultural judgments, and racism played a key role in justifying the situation. The Black Power/Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s fought for community control over neighborhood institutions like schools, social services, and the police.

Some of the key legal gains that civil rights groups made were state and federal Fair Housing Acts and fair lending laws, like the Community Reinvestment Act. These laws helped curb redlining and paved the way for racial integration. Levels of Black/white segregation have steadily declined nationwide since the 1970s and ‘80s.[28] However, incidences of housing and lending discrimination continue to persist. In addition, the median white household has 12 times the wealth as the median Black household in the U.S., due in part to the legacy of segregation and ghettoization.[29] This lack of wealth limits families’ abilities to freely select the neighborhood they want to live in.

Measuring Black/White Segregation in U.S. Cities

The following table shows the Black/White dissimilarity index for 10 U.S. cities over time. Dissimilarity measures how evenly two populations are distributed across neighborhoods. A score of zero indicates perfect integration, while a score of one hundred means complete segregation. The higher the score, the greater the amount of segregation between the two groups.

1980 1990 2000 2010
Chicago IL 90.6 87.4 85.2 82.5
New York, NY 82.8 83.5 83.2 81.4
Atlanta GA 79.6 81.3 81.6 74.1
Los Angeles CA 85 78.4 71.5 66.9
Portland OR 69.7 63.6 51.8 38.6

 

Dissimilarity measures only show the relationship between two racial or ethnic groups and are therefore limited. Exposure indices show how likely one group is to be surrounded by others from the same racial/ethnic group in their neighborhood. Exposure indices show the percentage, on average, that a neighborhood is made up of those from the same group. For example, an exposure index of 48 means that a white person lives in a neighborhood that is on average 48% white. This table shows the white exposure index for the cities listed above:

 

1980 1990 2000 2010
Portland OR 88.4 85.4 77.8 74.4
Atlanta GA 76.5 75.6 72.7 67.5
New York, NY 78.2 72.7 65.4 62.4
Chicago IL 77.8 71.2 62 60.2
Los Angeles CA 72.4 64.8 57.2 54.9

Diversity and Disparities Project, Brown University, accessed July 7, 2021, https://s4.ad.brown.edu/projects/diversity/index.htm.

 

The process of ghettoization involves spatially confining or separating out a particular group within a population to further the social, economic and political stigmatization and racialization of that community. While this process in Venice during the 1500s looked different than it did in Detroit in the 1950s, there are some commonalities: the process was involuntary and the spatial separation was tied to the group’s subjugation.[30] In all of these situations, there was always resistance, the ghetto was often quite permeable, and those who instituted or experienced segregation understood the historical connections to earlier ghettos. Examples of ghettos continue to exist around the world. From black townships in South Africa to the immigrant banlieues outside of Paris to the separation of Roma communities into “gypsy urban areas” in various European cities, new and recurring iterations of ghettoization continue to be an ominous presence in urban life.[31]

Multicultural cities

Cities are heterogeneous communities that have always drawn people from different backgrounds. Cities might reflect the multicultural nature of the nations they are part of or may attract migrants from other parts of the country or from around the globe. In our globalized world, people are more mobile than ever, and as a result, our cities are more multicultural. While segregation by race and ethnicity continue to persist, residents in multicultural cities often come in contact with people from different backgrounds. Even if an urbanite lives in an ethnic enclave, they will likely travel beyond their neighborhood’s boundaries for work, school, or other activities. In addition, many ethnic enclaves are home to more than one cultural group, so people will intermingle with others in the public spaces of the neighborhood.

The term multiculturalism can refer to many different things. It can describe the demographics of a place, refer to a specific policy, or define a set of principles that guide decision-making. In its most robust form, a multicultural city will recognize, ensure the rights of, and provide resources to all of the racial and ethnic groups that call it home.[32] Each group will have the opportunity, the physical space, and the autonomy to continue to practice their culture and traditions. This model is very different from the assimilationist or ‘melting pot” pressures that immigrants in the 20th century U.S. cities faced. In an assimilationist society, full rights and recognition are not granted until an individual adopts and conforms to the dominant culture’s traditions.

While many 21st century cities have embraced some elements of multiculturalism, dominant cultural groups, regardless of whether they represent the majority of a city’s residents, continue to play an outsized role in shaping urban spaces. In London, Paris, and New York, residents who are not white and native-born get pushed to the geographic edges, and subsequently, the political, economic, and social margins of the city. During the Great Migration, African Americans were segregated into Harlem, a neighborhood in upper Manhattan. While deprived of economic and political opportunity, subject to poor housing, a lack of services, and discriminatory policing, Harlem fostered cultural, intellectual, and social movements. Today’s new migrants to New York from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia are dispersed throughout the metropolitan area from the aging suburban communities on Long Island to nearby satellite cities, like Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey. Their geographic location leaves then isolated from the center of urban life, and the lack of public spaces in the suburban communities where people settle makes it harder for new immigrants to organize, create, and influence the culture or politics of the city at large. When a community is dispersed and does not have a place of their own, it can be more difficult to gain political or cultural recognition.[33]

Occupying a central city neighborhood for a long time doesn’t always guarantee a community access to opportunity, representation, or autonomy. In Redfern, which is located near central Sydney, Australia, there is an Aboriginal housing project known as the Block, which was established during the indigenous civil rights movement in the 1970s.[34] The Block was often stigmatized as a crime and addiction-ridden community, but in recent years, real estate investment has transformed the surrounding Redfern neighborhood, and the Block has been slated for redevelopment. The rhetoric used to attract investment to the community and the styles of housing that have been developed reinforce the colonial and white identity of the area, while downplaying its indigenous roots. The Victorian buildings in the area were viewed as a good investment because they had historic value. The historical values of these Victorian structures that represent the white and colonial histories of Sydney were seen as worthy of preservation, while the indigenous housing project that represented both the culture and the political struggles of the Aboriginal people was viewed as a blight on the community. The new developments in Redfern also reflected only its white cultural heritage. Loft-style apartments that evoked images of New York were built and marketed as part of the redevelopment push, once again emphasizing a white aesthetic, rather than the multicultural reality of inner Redfern.

While there are many developments that reflect the dominant cultures and classes within a city, communities that have been traditionally marginalized and excluded from decision-making have fought to have a role in shaping the spaces of the city. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a city that was built on land that was home to the Cherokee nation.[35] During the Trail of Tears forced relocation, Chattanooga served as an internment camp for Cherokee people. Enslaved African Americans also played a significant role in the developing the city. Despite these contributions, Native Americans and African Americans’ stories were often missing from the city’s official monuments.

The riverfront areas of downtown Chattanooga were recently redeveloped, and part of that revitalization included monuments that noted the multicultural history of the city[36]. Recognition of the Cherokee and African American communities’ stories didn’t necessarily translate into increased decision-making power or economic resources, and the impacts of the riverfront redevelopment threatened to displace African American communities adjacent to the downtown area. However, Chattanooga also has a long history of grassroots neighborhood involvement where residents joined across racial, religious, ethnic, and geographic lines to help shape the future of their city. There are numerous community-led efforts underway to curb displacement and create more affordable housing. The increased awareness of the multicultural histories of Chattanooga can help city officials become more receptive to the demands of these community-based development efforts.

Who uses the city?

Cities are polyglot communities that have been shaped by the contributions of residents who come from a variety of racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds. In a globalized society, cities have become even more complex and are now being reshaped to accommodate more than just their permanent inhabitants. Guido Martinotti identifies four populations that have a connection to, an interest in, or an impact on city life.[37] The first are the city’s inhabitants, or its permanent residents. Next are commuters who work in the city, but live outside of it. The third group is urban users who live and work outside of the city, but they access it for its services, like shopping, entertainment, or dining out. Urban users may be visitors who stay for a few hours or tourists who stay for days or weeks. Finally, metropolitan businesspeople access the commercial networks of a city. This includes convention goers, consultants, and professionals who visit with clients, colleagues, or potential business partners.

The city is increasingly oriented toward the short-term users of the city.[38] Although these temporary populations are not able to participate in the political decision-making, their economic influence shapes many land-use and development decisions. Metropolitan businesspeople bring economic benefits to the city, so many municipalities will invest public money into convention centers, hotels or airports to attract and serve this economically influential group. In a globalized economy, cities often compete for businesses and investment dollars. While the permanent residents of a city might not use the convention center their tax dollars pay for, many elected officials believe that investing in business-oriented infrastructure will eventually pay off. However, permanent residents might resent having to pay for infrastructure that does not meet their needs, especially if urban services are underfunded as a result of that investment.

According to John Urry, there are four ways in which the various urban users consume elements of the city.[39] First, cities have become centers of consumption as urban economies have shifted to providing services, rather than producing goods. Second, the image of a city is consumed by various users and designed to appeal to different groups of people. Third, well-known destinations and sites in a city can become overused and literally consumed by throngs of visitors. Finally, one’s identity can become associated with particular aspects of a place.

Barcelona, like many popular tourist destinations, has seen its share of conflicts between visitors and inhabitants. After a well-publicized incident where nude, male tourists ran through the streets and photographed themselves, residents began to organize against the negative impacts of tourism.[40] Despite the fact that the city’s economy is tourism-dependent, residents were fed up with the ways in which tourist infrastructure negatively impacts permanent residents. Residents in the central parts of the city launched a campaign against the all-night noise that emanated from the bars and clubs that are clustered in their neighborhood. They hung signs from their balconies declaring their right to sleep, and a few have even thrown eggs at all-night partiers.[41]

Although Barcelona has become a popular tourist destination, the spaces of the city that tourists enjoy are not solely designed for them or consumed by them.[42] The city initially began revitalizing its buildings and public spaces after the fall of Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator. Investment in the streets and public spaces helped reinvigorate a civic and cultural life that had been repressed by the dictatorship. Hosting the Olympic Games brought global attention to Barcelona. Part of its attraction was the city’s unique culture. Therefore, some of the popular tourist spots are still frequented by locals, and consuming those spaces alongside locals has become part of tourist experience, which is tied to experiencing the unique culture of Catalonia. Inevitably, these shared spaces may have different uses for different groups leading to conflicts over noise and nightlife.

Another popular global tourist destination that is the site of conflict between visitors and residents is Venice, Italy. Venice has only 50,000 permanent residents, but receives more than 20 million visitors each year. [43] Many visitors arrive on cruise ships and flood the city streets, canals and famous squares. Most residents no longer venture into the central city, which has become crowded with a constant stream of visitors, and Venetians have been pushed out into neighborhoods on the edge of town. The absence of permanent residents in the city center has ironically produced a Venice that is devoid of Venetians. The city has become what French theorist Jean Baudrillard termed a “simulacrum.”[44] A simulacrum is an imitation of a real item or experience that is devoid of its true essence. Venice is an extreme example of what happens when the needs of one of the populations that use a city overwhelms another.

Welcome to Reykjavik Where the Tourists Outnumber the Locals

Tourism is booming in Iceland. The northern island nation is known for its stunning natural landscape. In 2019, this nation of just 330,000 saw 2.3 million visitors. Tourism now brings in a larger share of revenue than fishing, one of the nation’s biggest industries.

The tourist boom is a relatively recent phenomenon in Iceland. It was fueled by the steep currency devaluation that resulted from the 2008 economic crash, which made it a cheap place to visit. Iceland Air began promoting layover vacations, which helped fuel the tourist boom. Internet tourist companies have made it easy to book a trip, and social media posts have popularized some of Iceland’s natural wonders, making it the latest global tourist fad.

But tourism brings challenges. The government limited short-term rentals in Reykjavik because housing was becoming unaffordable to the locals. If the value of currency rises, it could make tourism more expensive. If the tourist boom goes bust, jobs could be lost.

Tourists consume a place, and tourist companies market that place as their product. This raises questions of authenticity. The Blue Pool hot springs is one of the most popular social media images of Iceland. It has become overrun with tourists. Strangely enough, this pristine-looking mineral springs is actually a wastewater pool from a geothermal plant.

Not only do tourists consume inauthentic versions of a place, but they also produce places. Reykjavik has seen a restaurant, bar and coffee shop boom, much of it catering to visitors. While Icelanders may mourn the loss of their once sleepy city, many also appreciate the cultural as well as the economic benefits of the boom. Iceland has a homogeneous population, so the influx of global travelers is welcomed by many. Even if those visitors are an inauthentic representation of their native countries and cultures.

Chris Baraniuk, “The Country that Tourism has Taken by Surprise,” BBC, February 21, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170222-the-country-that-tourism-has-taken-by-surprise.

Kyle Chayka, “My Own Private Iceland,” Vox, October 21, 2019

The tourist experience doesn’t simply involve a visitor’s consumption of a historic site or monument. It is a complex interplay of objects and meaning that is constructed by both tourists and locals alike.[45] Visitors interact with places or objects that are imbued with meaning that is assigned by the tourist’s own perceptions, experiences, and emotions. Part of the tourist experience is consuming the culture of a place, which means locals play a role in presenting their everyday lives to people outside of their community. Places frequented by tourists can be thought of as a stage where the culture of a place is performed by locals who may present a version of themselves that is quite different from how they live offstage. Venice’s central city can be thought of as the staged version of Venetian life, while the farther-flung neighborhoods not frequented by most tourists are the sites of everyday Venetian culture. The front stage/backstage binary doesn’t fully capture the diversity of tourists’ experiences. Some visitors seek out places and experiences that are off the beaten path and are perceived to be more authentic representations of local life. In addition, locals may welcome visitors into the more intimate spaces of their lives. For example, study abroad programs that involve homestays or vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods might provide a more backstage perspective on local culture and life.

The cultural economy and cultural belonging

As cities’ economies have shifted from manufacturing to service-based industries, culture has played an increasingly important role in the urban life. References to cultural industries usually evoke images of art museums and opera houses, but the cultural or symbolic economy refers to service-based industries that market an experience or image, such as tourism, entertainment, restaurants, and fashion. [46] Sharon Zukin argues that the symbolic economy does not behave like a typical economic sector; instead, the proliferation of these types of services transform places, our images of those places, and how people use or are denied access to those places. There are three key ways in which the symbolic economy reshapes cities and produces specific types of investment and development. The images that are used to market cities and their neighborhoods influence the types of development that occur, the development and design of specific buildings and neighborhoods can, in turn, change how investors think about a particular block or area, and investments in more large-scale, traditional cultural institutions like museums can spark private development.

In the early 2000s, the city of Berlin launched a marketing campaign that highlighted its multi-cultural, alternative and creative identity. [47] The abundance of cheap, abandoned spaces throughout the city had long attracted marginalized groups who adapted them to meet their communities’ needs. Autonomous social movements created free living spaces, counter-cultural art and music venues, community gardens, and alternative social services. In addition to the lively subcultural scene, the city has attracted immigrants from around the world. However, Berlin has a tumultuous history. It was the capital of Nazi Germany, and for decades the wall that divided East Berlin from West was the frontline of the Cold War.

During the 2000s, the city marketed its vibrant subcultural spaces and multicultural neighborhoods to attract tourists and investment. It also acknowledged the sinister elements of its past by creating a downtown “memory district” that includes the memorials that honor the victims of the Holocaust and museums that wrestle with elements of the city’s Nazi past.[48] While these new representations of the city may have been more inclusive, they risk threatening the survival of the same marginalized communities they celebrate. As tourists flock to immigrant neighborhoods and entrepreneurs develop abandoned buildings, real estate prices rise and counter-cultural squatters, low-income families, and local businesses get priced out.

Being priced out has become a ubiquitous part of urban life as cities around the world face gentrification pressures. The process of gentrification can change a neighborhood’s cultural identity. As neighborhoods gentrify, real estate values rise, rents increase, and lower-income people and businesses become displaced and replaced by those who can afford to purchase a more expensive home or lease a pricey storefront. Gentrification also implies racial turnover, since Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhoods have been systematically undervalued in U.S. cities, and residents have been denied opportunities to own homes or businesses, which make them more vulnerable to getting priced out during real estate market swings.

Gentrification happens in stages. In the initial stage, artists, musicians, and other non-neighborhood residents looking for cheap housing move into the community. During this phase, many in-movers view the cultural or economic makeup of the gentrifying community as an asset. [49] However, as real estate values accelerate and increasingly wealthier groups purchase homes and open businesses in gentrifying areas, cultural diversity becomes a consumer amenity, rather than a social or political value. For example, the Southtown neighborhoods near downtown San Antonio were predominantly Latino communities that became gentrified. In the early stages, these neighborhoods attracted white residents who were drawn to the cheap historic housing. These initial gentrifiers remodeled their homes themselves, which contributed to the community’s offbeat and alternative vibe. The funky homes coupled with the rich tradition of Latino mural art that depicted local civil rights struggles eventually attracted visitors and tourists. As new shops emerged, including galleries that showcased local Latino artists, cultural diversity became commodified. Those who visited the neighborhood experienced its diversity though their consumption patterns, rather than by interacting cross-culturally with their neighbors as they went about their daily lives or working together on pressing issues. In later stages of gentrification, a publicly funded arts complex and arts festivals were established. These investments not only attract more tourists and visitors to the community, but they also help generate further development, which leads to more displacement. Cultural diversity becomes a once-a-month or once-a-year event that can be experienced for a few hours as part of the larger cosmopolitan fabric of the city completely stripped of its political and historical meaning.

A concept closely tied to the commodification of cultural diversity is authenticity. Sharon Zukin writes that our ideas about what an authentic urban neighborhood is are rooted in activists and media representations of ethnic enclaves in the late 1950s and early 1960s.[50] The idealized urban neighborhood is close-knit, full of long-term residents and local businesses. It’s an urban village with a vibrant street life. This image of authenticity can be used to inspire redevelopment, which displaces the low-income communities whose neighborhoods inspired this idealized image in the first place.

This happened in Harlem, where the neighborhood was marketed as undergoing a “new Harlem Renaissance,” which attracted both Black and white middle and upper class gentrifiers. The Harlem Renaissance refers to the neighborhood’s early 20th century rich literary and artistic history. The images of the neighborhood used to sell real estate highlighted these Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, but neglected to showcase the poverty, substandard housing and other indignities that were also part of the community’s segregated history. Zukin notes that authenticity can also be used to prevent displacement. In Red Hook, Brooklyn, food writers rallied to support Latino vendors who sold food in the neighborhood’s parks and were threatened with eviction. Food critics had highlighted the quality and authenticity of their products, which raised the profile of the vendors and helped prevent their displacement.

Authenticity plays a key role in the process of gentrification. Part of the allure that draws the often young, middle class gentrifiers to inner-city neighborhoods is their nostalgic yearning to connect with the more hardscrabble past of these communities.[51] Alienated by a service and knowledge-based economy, some urban residents seek out connections to the industrial roots of the city. Many gentrified spaces are a mixture of old and new. The industrial pasts of these neighborhoods is preserved in the architecture as it becomes repurposed and redeveloped. For example, old factories or mills become upscale apartments, shops, or lofts. Their industrial exteriors are preserved as the interiors are modernized for residential, office, or commercial use.

The historic preservation of elements of a neighborhood’s past provide a form of “staged authenticity.”[52] From the aged brick of a former factory to the vibrant murals of a former ethnic enclave or ghetto, the elements of the old that remain in gentrified areas lend an aura of authenticity to visitors and tourists even though a company or community that formerly occupied that space may have closed, moved or been displaced somewhere else.

The perception of authenticity is a judgment that’s made by outsiders.[53] Residents of an area do not think of their neighborhood as an authentic or inauthentic representation of their community. It is tourists who associate a specific building, park, square, or neighborhood with an element of its past. Visitors might look for objects or products that signify that a place is authentic. But tourists are not the only users of a city that make judgments about the authenticity of a place.

The term hipster has been used to describe young urbanites who seek to differentiate themselves from mainstream culture though the consumer choices they make and their taste for more obscure trends within popular culture.[54] Hipster urbanites may seek out places across the city that are deemed authentic, because they offer distinct products or services. Rather than the “staged authentic” elements of a place, hipsters search for the backstage places that are not marketed to outsiders. As a restaurant or independent shop becomes popularized it may be deemed inauthentic as more visitors and outsiders begin to frequent it. In addition to specific shops or places, hipsters are often viewed as consuming entire neighborhoods through the gentrification process. While gentrification entails residential turnover and displacement, it also involves the commercial sector. When hipsters move into a neighborhood, shops, bars, cafes, and restaurants open that cater to their distinct tastes, which differ from their lower-income neighbors. These newcomers have more spending power and capital than their neighbors do, which can result in the rapid gentrification of the commercial spaces of the neighborhood.

Summary

Although cities are heterogeneous places, some neighborhoods may be culturally homogenous. Ethnic enclaves are areas where immigrant groups have settled and created businesses and institutions that provide cultural and social support. Enclave communities may evolve as immigrants become more assimilated and residentially dispersed. Unlike ethnic enclaves, ghettoization is the involuntary separation of a racial, ethnic or religious group that results in oppression and subjugation. African Americans were ghettoized in cities across the U.S. This spatial segregation led to unequal opportunities within many sectors of life, including housing, education, criminal justice, health, and wealth-building. Ghettoization also creates a strong collective identity and unintentionally facilitates resistance struggles.

Multiculturalism recognizes and celebrates cultural differences. Rather than expecting people to assimilate to the dominant culture, a multicultural society finds commonality in sharing places, values, and institutions, rather than a particular way of life. However, cities are not just influenced by the people who live there. Commuters, visitors, tourists, and businesspeople also shape the design and development of cities.

Cities are spaces of consumption. Tourism can overwhelm a city, causing conflicts between locals and visitors. The symbolic economy produces images of the city that influence the urban development. The quest for authenticity can be a tool of gentrification or a means of resisting displacement.

Test your Urban Literacy:

Think about how the concepts in this chapter apply to your own city
  1. Compare and contrast ethnic enclaves with ghetto neighborhoods. Identify a neighborhood in your city that served either as an ethnic enclave or ghettoized area at some point in its history. Describe what that neighborhood is like today.
  2. Explain the relationship between residential segregation and economic and political subjugation.
  3. What is multiculturalism? Would you consider your city to be a multicultural city? Why or why not?
  4. What are Martinotti’s four user groups that access the city? How does your city accommodate these different categories of people? Identify places or activities in your city that are associated with each of these user groups.
  5. If you were to welcome visitors to your city, where would you take them to show them the authentic city?
  6. Define the symbolic economy. Provide at least two examples of how the symbolic economy has impacted development in your city.

Learn to read the city around you:

Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter by completing a hands-on activity in your own city
  1. Create an exhibit that shows the key points in the history of an ethnic enclave: Identify a neighborhood in your city that has been associated with a particular ethnic group or with multiple ethnic groups. Research the history of that community and the role it played in the lives of its residents. Create an exhibit that shows how the neighborhood changed over time and highlights some of the key events, people, and institutions that shaped the community.
  2. Develop a tour guide to both the front and backstage of an aspect of your city: Organize a day long tour of some aspect of your city. You can focus on a particular neighborhood or subculture, or organize your tour around a specific theme, like public transit or parks. One half of your tour should highlight the frontstage of your section of the city or the typical tourist or visitor attractions. The other half should focus on the city’s backstage or where the locals frequent. Create an itinerary of places you will visit and develop a pamphlet, self-guided tour map, or a short video of your front/backstage tour.
  3. Conduct an opportunity analysis of two neighborhood: Choose two neighborhoods in your city that are home to different racial or ethnic groups. Find as much data as you can about different social indicators, like income levels, educational attainment, housing values, health status, transportation, air quality, and so on. Present your findings in tables or graphic form. Include a written analysis that considers the potential role that place plays in fostering inequality.
  4. Curate a street art photo essay: Take photographs of graffiti, wheat pastes, stickers, murals, or other types of street art. Curate a photo essay that has a theme or narrative arc and contains at least 10 photographs. Let the photographs tell most of the story, although each visual should be accompanied by text. Try to limit the amount of text to no more than 1-2 paragraphs per image. Your essay should have a title and a clear structure to it, with a beginning, middle and end. You may include a few written introductory or concluding paragraphs that are not accompanied by images to help tell the story.
  5. Analyze local ads that are aimed at short-term city users: Collect advertisements from local travel associations, convention centers, hotels, shopping districts, or stores that are aimed at short-term visitors or tourists in your city. Analyze the images and language that is used to describe your city. How is the city represented in these ads? Consider how that representation impacts the various users of the city and how it might affect development. Write an analytical essay that summarizes your findings.
  6. Compile a linguistic dictionary for your city: Create a dictionary of words that are unique to your locale. You can include words that are regionally distinct, those that are used to describe local places, phenomena, foods, and so on. You should also include local slang. Combine your entries with those of other students in the class to create a comprehensive dictionary for your city.
  7. Research a culturally significant building: Identify a building in your city that has cultural significance to a particular community. Do some research to find out the history of this building and to identify the role it has played within the community and the wider city. Share what you find with your classmates.
  8. Assemble a top 10 list of local artists: Create a top 10 list of books, poems, artwork, songs, albums, sculptures, or movies by local artists. You may concentrate on one particular arts genre (i.e. film) or you may create a list that covers multiple genres. Your list should be written for an audience that is unfamiliar with your city. The list should not simply include your favorite songs by local artists, but rather, it should provide the audience with a comprehensive understanding of the culture of your city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Peter Marcuse, “Enclaves: Yes, Ghettos No, Segregation and the State,” in Desegregating the City: Ghettos, Enclaves and Inequality, ed. David Varady (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 15-30. ↵
  2. David Wencer, “Historicist: Greektown on the Danforth,” The Torontist, accessed16 October, 2016, https://torontoist.com/2016/10/historicist-greektown-on-the-danforth/. ↵
  3. Ceri Peach, “The Ghetto and the Ethnic Enclave,” in Desegregating the City: Ghettos, Enclaves and Inequality, ed. David Varady (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 31-48. ↵
  4. Peach, “The Ghetto and Enclave”  ↵
  5. Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach, “Immigrant Earnings: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the US,” The International Migration Review 14, 3, (Autumn, 1980): 315-341. ↵
  6. Carla Davis, “Beyond Miami: The Ethnic Enclave and Personal Income in Various Cuban Communities in the United States, International Migration Review 38, 2 (Summer, 2004): 450-469. ↵
  7. Filip Stabrowski, “Social Relations of Landed Property: Gentrification of a Polish Enclave in Brooklyn,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 77, 1 (January, 2018): 29-57. ↵
  8. Peach, “The Ghetto and Enclave”  ↵
  9. Elisabeth Becker, “Little of Italy?” Assumed Ethnicity in a New York City Neighbourhood,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38:1 (2015): 109-124. ↵
  10. Ibid. ↵
  11. Richard Alba, John Logan and Kyle Crowder, “White Ethnic Neighborhoods and Assimilation: The Greater New York Region, 1980-1990,” Social Forces 75, 3 (March 1997): 883-912. ↵
  12. Wei Li, Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009) ↵
  13. Peach, “The Ghetto and Enclave”  ↵
  14. Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, The History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016). ↵
  15. Stefanie Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006) ↵
  16. Benjamin Ravid, “Ghetto: Etymology, Definition, Reality,” in The Ghetto in Global History 1500-present, eds. Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter (New York: Routledge, 2018) 23-39. ↵
  17. Anike Walke, “There was no work; we only worked for Germans. Ghettos and ghetto labor in German occupied Soviet territories.” in The Ghetto in Global History 1500-present, eds.Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, (New York: Routledge, 2018) 93-109. ↵
  18. Alana Semuels, “Segregation had to be invented: During the late nineteenth century blacks and whites in the South lived closer than they do today,” The Atlantic, February 17, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/segregation-invented/517158/. ↵
  19. Werner Troesken, “The Limits of Jim Crow: Race and the Provision of Water and Sewerage Services in American Cities, 1880-1925,” The Journal of Economic History, 62, 3 (2002): 734-772. ↵
  20. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). ↵
  21. “The Great Migration,” Black Past, accessed August 6, 2019,  https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/great-migration-1915-1960/ ↵
  22. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid ↵
  23. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) ↵
  24. Ibid. ↵
  25. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid ↵
  26. Howard Jacob Karger, “The ‘Poverty Tax’ and America’s Low-Income Households,” Families in Society: Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 88, 3 (July, 2007): 413-17. ↵
  27. Robert Blauner, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt,” Social Problems, 16, 4 (Spring 1969): 393-408. ↵
  28. John Iceland and Gregory Sharp, “White Residential Segregation in US Metropolitan Areas: Conceptual Issues, Patterns and Trends from the US Census 1980-2010,” accessed on August 8, 2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3811941/. ↵
  29. Janelle Jones, “The Racial Wealth Gap,” accessed on August 9, 2019, https://www.epi.org/blog/the-racial-wealth-gap-how-african-americans-have-been-shortchanged-out-of-the-materials-to-build-wealth/. ↵
  30. Wendy Z Goldman and William Trotter, “Conclusion: Common Themes and New Directions.” in The Ghetto in Global History 1500-present, eds.Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter (New York: Routledge, 2018),  93-109. ↵
  31. Giovanni Picker, Racial Cities: Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe. (London: Routledge, 2017). ↵
  32. David H. Kaplan, Navigating Ethnicity: Segregation, Placemaking, and Difference. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). ↵
  33. Gareth Millington, 'Race', culture and the right to the city: Centres, peripheries and margins. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). ↵
  34. Wendy Shaw, Cities of whiteness (Antipode book series) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). ↵
  35. Courtney Elizabeth Knapp, Constructing the dynamo of Dixie: Race, urban planning, and cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). ↵
  36. Ibid. ↵
  37. Guido Martinotti, The New Social Morphology of Cities, UNESCO/MOST conference paper, presented February, 1994. ↵
  38. Ibid. ↵
  39. John Urry, Consuming places (International library of sociology). (London ; New York: Routledge, 1995) ↵
  40. Jonathan Rolleau, “Every (nocturnal) tourist leaves a trace: Urban tourism, nighttime landscape and public places in Ciutat Vella, Barcelona,” Imaginations Journal, 7, 2 (2017) 58-71. ↵
  41. Monica Degen, “Barcelona’s Games: The Olympics, Urban Design, and Global Tourism,” in Tourism Mobilities places to play, places in play, eds. Mimi Sheller and John Urry, (London ; New York: Routledge, 2004) 131-142. ↵
  42. Ibid. ↵
  43. Jason Horowitz, “Venice, Being invaded by Tourists, Risks Becoming the ‘Disneyland by the Sea.’” New York Times, August 2, 2017.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/europe/venice-italy-tourist-invasion.html. ↵
  44. The University of Chicago, Theories of Media Glossary, “simulation, simulacrum” entries, accessed on January 10, 2017, http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/simulationsimulacrum.htm. ↵
  45. Jane Lovell and Chris Bull, Authentic and Inauthentic Places in Tourism : From Heritage Sites to Theme Parks (First ed., Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility). (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017) ↵
  46. Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). ↵
  47. Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post 1989. (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) ↵
  48. Ibid, p. 250. ↵
  49. Miguel De Oliver, “Gentrification as the appropriation of therapeutic ‘diversity’: A model and case study of the multicultural amenity of contemporary urban renewal.” Urban Studies, 53, 6 (2016) 1299-1316. ↵
  50. Sharon Zukin, “Changing Landscapes of Power-Opulence and the Urge for Authenticity”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33,2 (2009) 543-53. ↵
  51. Lovell  & Bull, Authentic and Inauthentic ↵
  52. Dean MacCannell, “Staged authenticity: Arrangements of social space in tourist settings,” The American Journal of Sociology, 79, 3 (November, 1973) 589–603 ↵
  53. Lovell and Bull, Authentic and Inauthentic ↵
  54. Ico Maly,  and Piia Varis,  “The 21st-century hipster: On micro-populations in times of superdiversity,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 19, 6 (2016) 637-653. ↵

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Urban Literacy: Learning to Read the City Around You Copyright © 2022 by Leanne Serbulo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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