| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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(Gans 1968; Hartman 1973; Bennett 1997; Gotham 2001). Those studies usually rely on grand structuralist narratives that focus on the political and economic relationships within cities (Castells 1983; Mollenkopf 1983; N. Fainstein and S. Fainstein 1987; Logan and Molotch 1987; Smith 1996). Another school of literature focuses on agency, mainly to show the resistance that low-income groups have managed to organize against large redevelopment projects (Cole 1987; Lin 2000; Mele 2000). Such resistance leads either to stopping the large projects or to disrupting the communities (Castells 1983; Gratz 1989; Stone 1989; Cuff 2000; Altshuler and Luberoff 2003).
MacArthur Park may be unique in not following the patterns outlined earlier, and that difference—that anomaly—makes this case study potentially important. How is it that this low-income immigrant neighborhood was able to absorb this large-scale revitalization project and actually make it work to the benefit of the neighborhood? This book takes a revelatory case study approach to tell the story of how this changing Mesoamerican neighborhood in Los Angeles adapted to the city's redevelopment pressures. I argue that a process of co-evolutionary adaptation occurred between the Mesoamerican endogenous institutions and the city's revitalization institutions. Using a complex adaptive systems conceptual framework to understand changes in the neighborhood and in the institutions affecting it, the case study describes how agents and institutions both endogenous and exogenous to the neighborhood evolved as they adapted to each other. The process of neighborhood change has not been framed this way previously. Researchers have missed much of the complexity and power of the political and economic dynamics in immigrant neighborhoods, as well as the potential that such dynamics hold for revitalizing cities.
1.3. The Setting (Interpretive View)
Having grown up in MacArthur Park and having studied the impacts of new subway stations on neighborhoods in Japan and Chile, I thought that the neighborhood would be disrupted and probably displaced after