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redevelopment planning and project and in the community responses to it. Interviewees included politicians, planners, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) staff, police, other city and county officials, community development organizers, businesspeople, and others. That source of data was complemented by a demographic analysis of the neighborhood, a content analysis of the city's planning documents, and a media analysis. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and then coded using qualitative data analysis software. Themes that emerged through use of the software helped in analyzing the redevelopment process and in organizing and writing the detailed case study.
Chapter 4 tells MacArthur Park's revitalization story, as a narrative of the most important changes in the past twenty-five years. It focuses specifically on the city institutions' series of eight plans for revitalizing the neighborhood and on how those plans evolved and adapted in response to pressures both from the community and from Los Angeles' political structure. The chapter tells the story chronologically and intentionally excludes formal analysis, showing that this narrative case story of revitalizing a low-income neighborhood is one in which an immigrant neighborhood has taken advantage of a grand redevelopment effort. Several processes were involved. Latino politicians took over the council district and pressured other city institutions to pay more attention to the area. Networked CBOs pressured local politicians and engaged residents in revitalization efforts. The new resources brought to the neighborhood by the Community Redevelopment Agency helped bring further attention and still more resources to the area. And, most importantly, the revitalization process drew upon—and, to a great extent, was based upon—the social, political, financial, and cultural capital that had developed in MacArthur Park as the global ethnopole of New Mesoamerica in Los Angeles. The case study narrative serves as the main empirical foundation of the study.
Chapter 5 focuses on how and why city agencies were willing and able to increase regulation of the informal activities in MacArthur Park. A city's usual response to dealing with informal activities (especially in areas that are designated for large-scale redevelopment) is to suppress and destroy those informal activities. Something different was done in