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This research focuses on how a Latino immigrant community used its various forms of capital (social, political, financial, and cultural) to revitalize the neighborhood. From an institutionalist perspective, I have studied how city agencies (planning agencies and local political institutions) interacted with Latino communities in implementing redevelopment plans. This research contributes to broader theoretical debates regarding redevelopment and neighborhood change, which are current and critical issues within the field of city planning. It also contributes to our understanding of community roles and of the participation of community agents. The research stresses organizational change within neighborhoods. And, most importantly, it sheds new light on how agents in neighborhoods adapt and, in some cases, eventually co-evolve.
The research method used took an institutional approach, as I conducted a revelatory case study. I conducted thirty-two in-depth, open-ended, semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in endogenous and exogenous institutions shaping the neighborhood, including representatives of CBOs, local businesses, residents, informal workers, city politicians, city-planning staff members, and police, seeking to understand and explain the mechanisms the immigrant community used to make redevelopment work for its members. I built upon existing and seminal research in areas of ethnic diversity in neighborhoods, especially research related to the concepts of ethnopoles and global cities. Research related to immigrant capital, with an emphasis on social capital, was critical for situating my search in a broader field of knowledge within urban sociology. And, finally, the emerging field of complexity theory (and, more specifically, complex adaptive systems [CAS]) provided the necessary theoretical foundation to comprehend the relationships between and among various agents in the neighborhood.
My findings reveal that various forms of capital (social, political, financial, and cultural) present in immigrant neighborhoods may not only increase the neighborhoods' attractiveness as targets for redevelopment but may also help them sustain their immigrants' milieux despite such challenges. To sustain their community in the face of large-scale, top-down redevelopment, endogenous institutions and agents in MacArthur