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

Tracing this lineage of contestation between immigrant neighborhoods and the CBD or political elite promises to shed new light on both the urban development literature and the understanding of city planning's relationship to immigrant neighborhoods. The contestation between these two forces has greatly influenced the field of city planning and has occurred in three time periods: the late nineteenth century, as planning emerged as a profession, the 1960s, during city planning's heyday of urban renewal projects, and today, as cities revitalize their CBDs in the face of globalization. This chapter analyzes the relationship between the efforts of the central business elite to capitalize on regenerative low-income immigrant neighborhoods and the neighborhoods' struggles for survival and adaptation to these pressures.

I examine these three time periods and ask why the “gaze” of redevelopment has been so attracted by and prevalent in the reshaping of immigrant neighborhoods. I argue that these neighborhoods possess an “immigrants' milieu,” which attracts the redevelopment “gaze,” thereby creating this contestation and struggle between formal city-planning and neighborhood institutions. Throughout this struggle, the social and political contexts of cities have changed, and, thus, the reasons (and the purported reasons) for intervening in the immigrants' milieu have also changed. Although external intervention has historically been detrimental to low-income areas, the immigrants' milieu also provides resources that help the neighborhood to adapt and to co-evolve with the city's institutions. This is most evident in today's globalized era. The immigrants' milieu encompasses transnational linkages and resources that help it maintain its space, even in the face of large-scale revitalization efforts by global cities.

2.2. Blight and the Gaze of Redevelopment

Redevelopment uses institutional mechanisms to intervene in markets within city spaces experiencing disinvestment. This is done to encourage financial investment, facilitate physical upgrades to infrastructure and buildings, and improve the overall economic and social conditions