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political, and cultural capital (“the immigrants' milieu”), which both attracts the “gaze” (Sartre, “Le regard,” as explained in the text) of redevelopment and offers potential resources for the neighborhoods' survival. This contestation has greatly influenced the field of city planning, and it has persisted throughout three time periods: during the mid-nineteenth century as planning emerged as a profession, during city planning's heyday in the 1960s urban renewal projects, and today as cities revitalize their CBDs in the face of globalization.
Chapter 3 describes the conceptual framework and provides an overview of the methods of the study. Complexity theory argues that social phenomena occur in a nonlinear, dynamic, and evolutionary manner, with small changes sometimes leading to large and unpredictable outcomes. A complex adaptive systems approach explains how populations of agents adapt to their changing environments. Mechanisms of variation, interaction, and selection lead to higher levels of adaptation by agents. The neighborhood is represented as a global ethnopole, “gazed” upon by elite downtown business interests seeking to capitalize on redeveloping the area. The endogenous institutions respond to pressures from the city's exogenous institutions, and agents interacting within a complex system develop, through mechanisms of variation and selection, the possibility of co-adaptation and, ultimately, co-evolution.
To investigate MacArthur Park's unique situation, an in-depth revelatory case study method was used, focusing on neighborhood change through the agents involved in the main neighborhood institutions (both endogenous and exogenous) affecting and affected by that change. The main study question was the following:
The most important sources of data were the in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with thirty-two key stakeholders involved in the