Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Ethnic and racial communities occupy symbolic and geographic spaces in which conflicting racial images are created and imbued with political, economic, and moral meaning by a wide range of interests, including those of developers, the media, city officials, and members of ethnic communities. To examine this issue, I compare two cases in the economic redevelopment of downtown San Diego. In one case, the Chinese Mission building, originally built in 1927 was saved and turned into a museum and cultural center. In the other, the Douglas Hotel, constructed in 1924 and the center of entertainment for African Americans until the post-WWII era, was demolished by the city to make way for a multi-use commercial and residential complex. In the history of urban areas in the U.S., images of ethnic communities have had real, material consequences as local governments have strategically employed these images to justify development plans. For example, city officials have declared neighborhoods as "blighted," "slums," and "dens of depravity" to justify displacing residents and businesses through urban redevelopment projects, or, as vital economic enclaves and sites of "exotic" activities to cultivate them as tourist attractions. I examine this process in my comparison of the two sites.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The purpose of this research is to examine the social significance of work by studying those who question it. Bohemians, be they artists, political activists, radicals, students, slackers, or even refugees from the upper class, question the social mandate that paid work be one’s primary activity. In doing so bohemians question the fundamental demands of modern society.

Bohemians contend with the job machine and residential capital. Living on the margins, they work minimally and pay cheap rent in the slums they have turned into bohemian enclaves. Uninterested in the material rewards of the mainstream economy, they seek neither career nor a steady income. Nevertheless, bohemians need the low cost areas capitalist inequality produces. Ironically, the cultural cache bohemians bring to an area often promotes gentrification. Today, few bohemians can sustain their casual employment.
Most scholars frame bohemianism as a cultural phenomenon. Implementing a novel framework that locates bohemianism within the question of labor, this research addresses the conditions under which bohemianism in downtown New York has emerged, existed, and declined since the 1950s. An analysis of gentrification and changes in the modern art market inform findings from interviews, historical scholarship, memoirs and narratives of downtown bohemians. The ultimate aim of this research is to explore the significance of labor, by examining resistance to the demands of the market. Given the recent decline of the social welfare programs and the domestic economy itself, the questioning of labor is critical.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines and interprets the contrived cycle of disinvestment and reinvestment in Bronzeville—the original settlement area of Blacks in Chicago. The historical, political, economic, and social policy of confinement and segregation in Chicago created a high concentration of public housing in Bronzeville. Data reveal that the disinvestment process in Bronzeville correlates with the concentration of public housing. As the cost of local, state, and federal practices to maintain and concentrate public housing in Bronzeville increased, a new public policy of housing demolition to create mixed income housing development, coupled with the decline of Chicago’s manufacturing base and subsequent rise in the information and consumption-based economy, sparked reinvestment. Our data show how the rent gap is linked to the process of disinvestment and reinvestment by contrived and planned strategies to ill-develop and redevelop Bronzeville. Under the rhetoric and language of being concerned for the well-being of the urban poor, the primary goal of downtown Chicago and other public and private interests is to reclaim urban space for the creation of a middle and White upper-class elite consumer base in Bronzeville, as well as a space of cultural consumption for tourists. This process entails interlocking linkages between local, state, and federal resources tied to private developers, banks, savings and loan companies, and local media to construct a local growth machine to ultimately weed out the urban poor and minorities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines sociospatial aspects of urban change, focusing on the case of a downtown redevelopment stadium project. In many U.S. central cities, wider political economic processes have led to the formation of urban regimes driven by the interests of private-sector agents. The case of Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, Arizona demonstrates how political economic conditions were sources of an uneven bargaining context during the process of project negotiations. Because of this unevenness, interests of regime profiteers were favored at the expense of all others. Organized resistance during each phase of stadium building, concentration of increasing revenues in the hands of fewer business operators, and differential neighborhood responses reflect uneven consequences. These uneven consequences were desired outcomes of regime strategies for expansion through exclusionary productions of space. This paper expands the application of urban regime theory to examine sociospatial unevenness in the sources, processes and consequences of regime activities.