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opportunities for emerging immigrant populations while, at the same time, creating new opportunities for city governance to engage such populations and to benefit from their incorporation into the city's structure.
This study demonstrates that redevelopment in large global cities with increasing immigrant populations needs to provide for cultural continuity and adaptation. Both city agents and neighborhood agents need to understand the importance of adaptation and the potential economic, social, political, cultural, and institutional benefits of co-evolution. The relationships involved are complex, and this study used a theoretical framework from complex adaptive systems to analyze the co-evolution that took place in MacArthur Park among various agents. I believe that the framework developed through this study can be applied in other communities where the immigrants' milieu is changing neighborhoods.
Ultimately, this story is one that has repeated itself throughout the history of the U.S. immigrants adapt, and they shape their neighborhoods, creating what at times are seen as unwanted marginal spaces. Immigrants, and society's reactions to them and their spaces, have played a fundamental role in shaping the field of city planning. As a field, city planning has its roots in the progressive era (1880s–1920s), when the city's elite were trying to figure out what to do about the overcongestion of the neighborhoods in which eastern European immigrants had settled on the U.S. east coast. Today, globalization and transnational networks open up new possibilities for co-evolution between immigrants and city governance.
Being an immigrant myself and having migrated to MacArthur Park during the mid-1980s places me in a position to see things that others might not notice. My personal connection to the area has helped me understand the changes that occurred in the neighborhood during the past twenty years. I decided to study the area after a large infrastructure project was developed there (the construction of a subway station), which I believed would lead to gentrification and the displacement of the immigrant community. The multimillion-dollar infrastructure project, linked to a large-scale revitalization program, had all of the premonitory signs of that usual and, therefore, expected outcome: displacement