A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South

The naming of streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) is an importantarena for African Americans as they rewrite the landscape of southern identity and commemoration. While less ornate and ostentatious than museums and monuments, MLK streets are powerful and highly contested cultural geographies because of their potential to connect disparate communities and incorporate a vision of the past into the spatial practices of everyday life. They reveal the importance of location, particularly intra-urban location, to public memorialization. Naming streets for King is a significant part of the nonmetropolitan South as well as larger cities and dependent upon the relative size of a city's African-American population. When estimating the intra-urban character of MLK streets within several southern states, findings suggest that they are located in census areas that are generally poorer and with more African Americans than citywide averages. Analysis reveals a geographic unevenness in the frequency of businesses having an address identified with King. When compared with the stereotypical American thoroughfare of “Main” Street, the address composition of MLK streets appears to be more residential in nature, although there is significant state by state variation.     

School Names as Cultural Arenas: The Naming of U.S. Public Schools after Martin Luther King,Jr.

The commemoration of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) is a growing movement in many American cities and towns. School naming is an important yet underanalyzed part of this project. A recent struggle in Riverside, California over naming a high school for MLK is used as a springboard for: (1) conceptualizing school names as cultural arenas for debating student and community identity and (2) conducting a general study of the types of U.S. public schools named for King. As illustrated in California, school naming can be interpreted by one social group as a means of integrating and inspiring students historically and viewed by another group as a means of drawing boundaries around students in terms of race and local heritage. According to 1997-1998 data, 110 public schools bear King's name. They are located most often in the central cities of large and mid-size urban areas. King's name is most frequently found on schools that teach early and middle grades. Schools named for Martin Luther King do not necessarily denote a "Black" school in terms of the racial characteristics of students, although they do not fully integrate Whites with African Americans or Whites with minorities in general. Naming schools for King is part of a larger refashioning of the urban cultural landscape as racial and ethnic groups increasingly seek public recognition of their historical achievements.     

Failing to Grow "Their" Own Justice? The Co-Production of Racial/Gendered Labor and Milwaukee's Urban Forest

Little attention is paid to the ways that labor market inequalities within urban institutions enforce governance regimes that (re)produce urban environmental unevenness. Milwaukee's Bureau of Forestry is one such institution that has historically been dependent on state-sanctioned labor market inequalities to perpetuate an explicitly White/male regime of environmental governance and production. Historically, the Bureau's management employed and promoted very few African Americans and women within its arboricultural workforce, based on its racist and gendered categories of laboring individuals. Furthermore, and for identical reasons, these workers—and by extension their communities—face distributional injustices as they are not allowed to channel their labors into the production of equitable and/or alternative forms of urban forests more suitable to their own social reproduction. This paper investigates the changing relations between Milwaukee's Bureau of Forestry and its African American and female employees as they attempt to legally (re)articulate their laboring identities and capabilities within a disempowering institution. We use in-depth interviews and archival materials to show that the Bureau of Forestry has consequently been forced to publicly confront its racist/patriarchal legacy in light of two recent high-profile lawsuits and an ambassadors program. We conclude by discussing how changes that allow some African Americans and women to work in Milwaukee's urban forest have affected the Bureau of Forestry and potentially the forest itself.     

Street names and the scaling of memory: the politics of commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American community

Streets named for Martin Luther King, Jr are common yet controversial features in cities across the United States. This paper analyses the politics of naming these streets as a 'scaling of memory'– a socially contested process of determining the geographic extent to which the civil rights leader should be memorialized. Debates over the scaling of King's memory revolve around the size of the named street, the street's level of prominence within a hierarchy of roads, and the degree to which the street transcends the spatial confines of the black community. A street-naming struggle in Eatonton, Georgia (USA) exposes how the scaling of memory can become a point of division and contest within the black community as activists seek to fulfil different political goals. Analysing these intra-racial contests allows for a fuller appreciation of the historical consciousness and geographic agency of African Americans rather than seeing them as a single, monolithic group.     

GEOGRAPHIC CONTEXT AND CONCENTRATED URBAN POVERTY WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

Responding to previous analyses that assume that places are passive recipients of the various macro-level social phenomena associated with concentrated urban poverty, I hypothesize that concentrated urban poverty takes on different forms in different places as a result of how macro-level social phenomena are mediated by locally specific structures. To investigate how concentrated urban poverty takes on different forms in different places, I first decompose the poverty rates of all high-poverty urban neighborhoods in the United States into their race-specific rate and composition effects, and classify high-poverty neighborhoods based on these decomposition values. The results of the analysis demonstrate that poverty in a majority of the high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States is undoubtedly affected by geographically specific processes. For example, within one set of high-poverty neighborhoods, poverty is associated with both the lack of economic opportunity and high rates of class-based residential segregation within mixed-race immigrant ethnic/immigrant enclaves in large gateway cities. A second set of high-poverty neighborhoods, located in the metropolitan areas of the southern United States, has high rates of poverty because of the residential segregation and geographic concentration of poverty-prone African Americans. And lastly, among a third set of tracts, poverty experiences in African American ghettos are linked to declining economic and social opportunities and class-based residential segregation within large manufacturing cities. A set of recommendations for additional research includes addressing how one-size-fits-all anti-poverty public policies should be modified for the specific needs of each type of high-poverty neighborhood. [Key words: context, poverty, segregation, employment, race, ethnicity.]     

Race,Space, and Struggles for Mobility: Transportation Impacts on African Americans in Oakland and the East Bay

Abstract

A long history of overt discrimination left an enduring racialized imprint upon the geography of the East Bay. While the benefits of a metropolitan decentralization of jobs, housing, and public investment fell to Whites, discrimination in employment and housing trapped African Americans in urban neighborhoods burdened by infrastructure encroachment and divestment. By circa 1970, overt discrimination succumbed to new, racially neutral, legal, and administrative forms, including regional planning processes. Using an environmental racism framework, we show that these new forms reproduced the existing racialized geography by means of new inequalities in representation and transportation service provision. These new regional transportation policies, like those challenged by a 2005 civil rights lawsuit, favored the mobility needs of more affluent suburbanites over those of African American East Bay bus riders. These policies, layered onto an existing racialized geography, reinforced existing inequalities by failing to address racial barriers to opportunity in the built environment. [Key words: transportation, race, segregation, Oakland]     

STATE PARKS AND JIM CROW IN THE DECADE BEFORE BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION

African Americans had access to only a small number of state parks in the Jim Crow South. Between the end of World War II and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, however, state park officials oversaw a relative expansion in the construction of facilities available to southern blacks. Emphasizing developments leading up to that landmark court ruling, I note that this trend did not indicate waning support for segregation among whites. Rather, this relative expansion was part of a strategy to protect Jim Crow by demonstrating that the “separate‐but‐equal” principle was being successfully achieved by southern park agencies. This intensified construction was largely a reaction to increasingly successful legal action in federal courts by the naacp generally; and officials in the state agencies hoped—unsuccessfully—to avoid challenges to state park segregation. After the Brown decision, several border states integrated their park systems, but most agencies displayed the reactionary defiance that characterized most white Southerners as the civil rights movement grew.     

Ethnic concentration and entrepreneurship: the case of African Americans in three US metropolitan areas

Using 2006–2010 American Community Survey data and a multilevel research design, this study examines how the spatial concentration of African Americans within local labor markets is associated with the probability of self-employment and job earnings from business ownership. We find a negative relationship between the spatial concentration of African Americans and their business ownership in Miami, but not in Atlanta. In Detroit, a higher percentage of US-born African Americans in the local labor market is actually associated with a higher probability of business ownership. The relationship between the percentage of African Americans and job earnings also differs across the three study areas. These results suggest that the relationship between racial/ethnic concentration and African American entrepreneurship is highly contingent on the economic conditions and demographic composition of local labor markets.     

CONSTRUCTING AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN SPACE IN ATLANTA,GEORGIA*

Recognizing the connections between the construction of urban space and racial identity, this article explores an urban redevelopment scheme launched in 2004 by Big Bethel ame Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Known as the “Renaissance Walk,” Big Bethel's project is a $45 million dollar redevelopment plan to turn an adjacent city block into a mixed‐use development. By looking at the racialization of place from the perspective of those who live, work, and organize along Auburn Avenue, one of the most historically significant African American business corridors in the United States, I contend that Big Bethel's redevelopment project is emblematic of contemporary black counterpublic spaces and links the redevelopment project undertaken by Big Bethel with African American identity positions.     

Measuring the Digital Divide in the United States: Race,Income, and Personal Computer Ownership

This article demonstrates how the Lorenz Curve and the Gini coefficient can be used to measure inequalities in home personal computer (PC) ownership in the United States at the national, regional, and state levels. Our empirical investigation, based on supplemental data from the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census, indicates that income inequalities are substantially smaller within white households owning a PC than African American households, at all geographic scales. While income inequalities among PC owners (households) have decreased between 1994 and 2001 in all regions and states, the magnitude of this inequality has declined more rapidly among whites compared to African Americans.     

The street as urban icon? Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard

In this article, I analyze Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard as an example of an urban symbol and suggest that while main streets, avenues and boulevards are usually perceived as integral parts of the urban symbolic ecology, they are rarely considered as exclusive urban icons in their own right. Although prestige of “privileged” streets influences reputations of cities and constitutes an important part of their imaginary, their complicated physical structure and multifunctional character conflict with their iconic status. The physical nature of streets resists configuration and articulation as exclusive, durable urban icons because symbols are generally conspicuous physical objects that can be directly interpreted and rendered as iconic.     

CREATING NARRATIVES OF PLACE AND IDENTITY IN “LITTLE SWEDEN,U.S.A.”*

ABSTRACT. In Lindsborg, Kansas—“Little Sweden, U.S.A.”—the streets are lined with shops offering “An Adventure in Swedish Tradition,” and residents put on numerous festivals throughout the year highlighting Swedish folk customs. Such ethnic tourist towns have become increasingly widespread in the United States over the past thirty years. Tourists tend to perceive these places as towns where folk culture has been passed down unchanged for generations, while academics tend to dismiss residents' ethnicity as crass commercialism. Neither view is correct. Ethnicity and tradition are not static but constantly invented and reinvented. Modern folk ethnicity, among European Americans in particular, is simply the most recent incarnation of this process, one that attempts to recover ties to a specific, small‐scale landscape and history. This article explores the changing nature of the narratives of ethnicity and place‐based identity that the residents of Lindsborg have used to create a place for themselves in American society.     

Man and his Exvironnent in Germany

Abstract

The American city is almost universally described as being made up of a series of zones decreasing in age and density outward from the center. The most popular model for generalizing about the structure and organization of the American city remains the concentric zone model in which the nature of each ring is more specifically denned. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some reasons for the “popularly perceived zonation” of the American city as opposed to, say, the European city, through a study of cultural attitudes toward the architectural environment. More specifically, the urban housetype and attitudes toward the urban housetype are used to illustrate the concentric zone model and to shed some light on such “zonal” concepts as the “inner city” and “suburban ring.” In addition, the increasingly negative attitude of Americans toward central cities is explored and related to some major urban problems and American landscape tastes. It is hoped that students will be encouraged to discuss aspects of the “alternate future” presented for the American urban landscape.     

山地城市街道意象及景观特色塑造

街道是人们对城市景观最直接最经常的感受来源，是人们认识城市的重要场所。山地城市因其特殊的地理地貌环境，其街道的景观形象对整个城市形象具有更大的影响力。从山地城市道路形态特征意象、视觉特征意象及城市街道景观的三个构成要素，探讨了山地城市街道意象及其景观特色，以及如何构筑具有山地特色的城市空间。     

基于生态位理论的重庆市物流企业优势区位及影响因素研究

基于重庆市5 937家物流企业,采用物流企业生态位模型和计数模型,从多尺度甄别物流企业优势区位及影响因素。结果表明：① 在区县尺度上,生态位宽度处于高中低水平的区县分别有8、8、22个,围绕主城区和万州区呈现“一主一副”的空间结构;② 在街道尺度上,物流企业密度处于前3层的29个街道中仅有1个街道的物流企业态处于前3层,物流企业密度处于后3层的413个街道中有29个街道的物流企业态处于前3层,态值与密度空间分布总体不协调,高密度低态值问题突出;③ 商品交易市场交易额和是否有物流节点布局与物流企业数量高度正相关,不受规模影响;对物流企业规模加权后,工业产值被是否有港口布局因素取代。     

Gendering Job Competition: Immigration and African American Employment in Chicago, 1990-2000

This investigation of demographic changes between 1990 and 2000 within African American employment concentrations in Chicago finds that the effects of immigration on African American employment differ by gender. Black women increasingly shared their niche industries with immigrant women without being displaced, a pattern of coexistence that indicates the primacy of gender in sorting women into employment. By contrast, similar patterns were absent between African American and immigrant men, and several niche industries reflected competition. Yet economic restructuring more significantly affected African American male and female employment than immigration. Among women, these same trends also affected immigrants. Both groups were adversely affected by the growth of low-wage employment in female-dominated, care-work jobs—their primary industries of overlap. These findings underscore the significance of gender in problematizing ethnic/racial divisions of labor and the need to consider economic consequences that cross these divisions as well as derive from them within urban economies.     

Ubuntu nests and the emergence of an African metropolis

Cities are not homogenous sociocultural entities. The city of Nairobi exhibits the phenomena of ‘cities within cities’ and ‘African city forms’. Social and economic forms of African, western and Asian cities compete for space within Nairobi. This paper refers to the African city form as the ‘African metropolis’, which exhibits the African logic, norms and values in its architecture and human social relations. The African metropolis is made up of slums, urbanized villages, self‐developed urban fringes and indigenous markets. In urban literature, these spaces are referred to as informal or unplanned settlements. As drivers of this African form of urbanism, traders and artisans use the African logic, norms and values in the construction of the African metropolis. The traders and artisans contribute to the African metropolis, by hiring labour and investing surplus earnings, and are bonded into Ubuntu communities of family, friendship and ethnicity. The paper is based on data gathered through a questionnaire survey of traders and artisans. It contributes to urban theory, by showing how less dominant and subtle forces contribute to city‐forming processes. I propose the concept of cultural villages as a strategy for blending African logic, norms and values with those of global urban planning.     

基于高斯两步移动搜索法的沈阳市绿地可达性评价

基于高斯两步移动搜索法,进行沈阳市绿地可达性分析。在揭示研究区内绿地可达性空间格局的同时,探索这一新方法的实际应用价值。结果显示：① 沈阳市绿地可达性整体上具有北高南低、东高西低的空间分布特征,4 个高值区与3 个低值区可清晰识别;高值区域主要分布在核心城区的近外围,低值区域主要分布于核心城区与城市的西部及南部远郊。② 沈阳市绿地可达性空间格局十分不平衡,具有较强的空间极化特征,70%以上的街道绿地可达性低于全市平均水平,只有少数街道呈现较高的可达性,人口与绿地的空间不匹配是造成不平衡的主要因素。③ 根据可达性评价结果,提出了实施空间优化策略,促进绿地服务均等化的相关建议。该方法能够较好地揭示城市绿地系统与人口相互作用的规律,未来还应进一步与客观实际结合,使之更加具体化和实用化。     

RACE,IMMIGRANTS, AND RESIDENCE: A NEW RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF WASHINGTON,D.C.*

ABSTRACT. This study examines the residential patterns of immigrant newcomers within a relatively new immigrant destination, Washington, D.C. Particular attention is given to how these patterns are shaped by the newcomers' race and ethnicity. Our analysis is based primarily upon data on immigrant flows from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for the 1990–1998 period. Evidence from our study suggests a racial and ethnic hierarchy to the residential location of Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Latin Americans, providing some support for the pattern expected in the place‐stratification model. When their residential patterns are compared with those of non‐Hispanic blacks, we find that African newcomers are more likely to settle among blacks than are other regional‐origin groups. However, Africans are also found to reside in multiethnic zip codes where large numbers of newcomers are concentrated. The findings suggest that race is an important but not exclusive factor in explaining the residential choices of recent immigrants.     

American Trappist Monasteries and the Changing Spiritual Landscape

Spiritual landscapes arise from a dynamic relationship of spiritual beliefs, ritual practices, and embodied encounters in place. They can contain multiple spiritual and non‐spiritual elements that change over time. This paper offers an appreciation of the diverse, overlapping, and ambivalent meanings emerging from Trappist monasteries in the United States. With origins tracing back to eleventh‐century France, Trappist monasteries are Roman Catholic intentional communities belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Attempts to establish monasteries in the American scene began around the turn of the nineteenth century. Contemplation, a receptive state of interior spiritual silence, represents one significant component of Trappist spirituality. Like other aspects of the spiritual landscape, contemplation has been reprioritized as Trappist monks and nuns confront situations like political conflict, changes in monastic leadership, and economic problems. These places continue to address challenges and possibilities for reinvention as they become open to shifting social contexts.