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Preface
MacArthur Park's revitalization represents a unique outcome of a large-scale revitalization project. Its story tells of how and why this top-down project actually helped an existing low-income community, a rare event in the history of revitalization policy in the United States. City planning has been blamed for much destruction of America's inner-city neighborhoods. The era of urban renewal, city planning's heyday, in the 1950s provides abundant, well documented examples of the destruction of low-income minority communities due, in large part, to efforts by planning institutions to change both the social and physical makeup of cities.
How did the redevelopment of MacArthur Park actually benefit the Mesoamerican immigrant community? Although the top-down redevelopment and infrastructure project was not initially conceived with benefits to the local immigrant population in mind, the immigrant community, itself, was able to take advantage of the large-scale project and make the redevelopment work for the community. This book tells that story, based on an investigation of the underlying mechanisms that led to the project's actual outcomes, and presents a new theoretical framework that,