Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and ...

looks upon neighborhoods, provides an evaluation of them, sees the potential profit of this space, and then defines some as blighted.

Blight is also a social construction controlled indirectly by powerful economic interests. Once a neighborhood is defined as blighted, the city's institutions gain the legitimate power to begin the process of social transformation of the neighborhood. Current redevelopment strategies and past urban renewal and progressive era revitalization policies represent the government's efforts to change institutional mechanisms within neighborhoods in order to encourage relatively quick and drastic physical and social changes in those places. The social changes often include pushing out the undesirable ethnic groups (Massey and Denton 1993).

2.3. Place and the Immigrants' Milieu

Redevelopment reshapes places. “ ‘Place’ is more than a physical locality or a collection of assets to be positioned…it refers to the congelation of meanings and experiences which accumulate around locales through the daily life experience of people living their lives and firms conducting their activities” (Healey et al. 2003). Places, in many ways, are defined by their institutional capacity and institutional thickness, as these interact with agents through social structures. Places also provide agents with opportunities to shape the structural forces confining them, through the places' institutional capacities. The term “institutional capacity” encompasses a plethora of civic associations, a high level of interaction among social groups, coalitions that cross individual interests, and a strong sense of common purpose. “Institutional thickness” is where households and firms are embedded within “place” (Healey et al. 2003). Institutional capacity-building processes, therefore, stem from place and can be analyzed in terms of the knowledge resources, relational resources, and mobilization capabilities that agents draw upon and generate to maintain increased influence on and within their locality.

There are few places in marginalized spaces that possess the wealth of institutional capacity and thickness found in some immigrant neighborhoods. Institutional capacity-building processes are very much alive