| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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looking for citizenship, the local store owners who looked distrustingly at you when you shopped. But, what I most disliked was the feeling that I did not belong there—that the place was really a no man's land controlled by someone else. Not a real community or neighborhood, just a chaotic place where people went to buy illegal stuff or acted recklessly because they knew they could get away with it—a place without rules and out of control.
I left MacArthur Park for five years, from 1995 to 2000, and, when I returned, the city had constructed a subway station in the middle of the neighborhood. That sparked my interest because I had studied some of the impacts of the construction of a subway station in Kyoto, Japan, and another one in Santiago, Chile. I had conducted preliminary studies of how those stations had changed and were changing their surrounding communities. I was fascinated by subway stations, as they had or represented such strong impacts upon communities and “places,” and I could see how neighborhoods could change so quickly and drastically. When I returned to MacArthur Park in the year 2000, the subway station was six years old, and I could see the neighborhood starting to change. I had expected that the subway station would lead to gentrification because I thought that the neighborhood was really not much of a neighborhood and that the large infrastructural project would just wipe out the surrounding businesses and lead to higher rents, etc.—the usual story of displacement during or in the wake of large-scale revitalization efforts.
When I returned to the area again in 2004, I was extremely surprised to find that the Central-American neighborhood was still there but was very different from the one I had known. Armed with new theoretical, methodological, and professional city-planning skills, and having studied other communities and neighborhoods, I could see a different place. This was not the MacArthur Park neighborhood I knew as a kid. It was physically cleaner. Gang members and drug dealers were no longer visibly present in the park. The police were walking around or riding their bikes and seemed to be at ease. Even the paddle boats on the park's lake were back after a long absence. There were still a lot of street vendors, but they were using decorated and clean street carts. Talking to those