Immigration,local policy,and national identity in the suburban United States

Since 2000, the American suburb has emerged as a principal destination for new immigrants to the United States, both documented and undocumented. Whereas some suburban communities have responded to perceived undocumented immigrants with hostility in the form of exclusionary local immigration policies, others have introduced policies designed to welcome immigrants independent of federal legal status. In this article, I employ a qualitative comparative case study analysis of four local immigration policies in the Chicago and Washington DC metropolitan areas to explain how suburbs justify their policy positions. I find that these suburban communities relied on conceptions of American identity and the ‘American Dream’ in support of their policies, but leveraged these tropes in vastly different ways depending on the broader strategic purposes of the policies. These divergent suburban immigration policies both challenge traditional notions of suburban political and cultural homogeneity and reveal how such heterogeneity has produced a distinct unevenness in contemporary local policy responses to undocumented immigration within metropolitan regions.     

FEDERAL INITIATIVES PROMOTING THE DISPERSAL OF LOW-INCOME HOUSING IN SUBURBS

Because low-income housing is predominantly concentrated in central cities and the older suburbs of metropolitan areas, the poor have little opportunity to disperse into higher-status suburbs. The federal initiative to ease the barriers to low-income suburbanization commenced with the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Subsequent legislation—particularly the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974—and associated litigation have significantly extended the reach of this effort to disperse low-income housing opportunities. The same forces that promote exclusionary practices in suburbs, however, also tend to moderate the federal initiative.     

Playing Both "Inside" and "Outside Games"? Evidence From Expert Interviews in Mature Suburbs in Ohio

In recent years, concern has arisen about decline in mature suburbs, and has been addressed primarily by research that has concentrated on quantitative analyses. Only a few works have used qualitative data to explore policies and tools in mature suburbs. We use expert interviews and Rusk's (1999) "inside game/outside game" framework to explore decline and the status of advocacy among select mature suburbs in three study communities in Ohio. We find a lack of awareness of the "inside game." We attribute this to funding streams that continue to favor suburbs and do not require explicit, repeated appropriations from Washington. On the other hand, we find attention being paid to the "outside game." We conclude that mature suburbs seem to be playing both "inside" and "outside" games, depending on the policy domain and the particular funding stream they require.     

PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGERY OF THE AMERICAN CITY, 1840–1860

Because low-income housing is predominantly concentrated in central cities and the older suburbs of metropolitan areas, the poor have little opportunity to disperse into higher-status suburbs. The federal initiative to ease the barriers to low-income suburbanization commenced with the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Subsequent legislation—particularly the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974—and associated litigation have significantly extended the reach of this effort to disperse low-income housing opportunities. The same forces that promote exclusionary practices in suburbs, however, also tend to moderate the federal initiative.     

跨国机构与地方共同作用下的城市全球化——德国波恩的案例研究

城市是一个动态发展系统,外生和内生的行动者通过互动促进城市发展。跨国机构作为重要的外生行动者,在一些城市的全球化发展过程中产生了重要的作用。案例城市波恩正是在联邦、州和地方政府的权力和政策安排下,创造了跨国行动者嵌入的制度环境和背景,以联合国机构为主的众多跨国机构通过与政府、企业和居民,以及非人类行动者在建立国际合作的共同诉求下积极转译,产生互动效应,为城市建构了稳固而“无缝”的行动者网络。行动者的不同目的和行为方式在塑造网络的同时,也重新建构了城市空间,空间成为检验网络构建是否成熟的一种重要的表现方式。波恩的城市空间实现了从外交政治功能向国际合作功能的转型;形成以联合国机构为轴心,其他机构点状辐射的轴辐式空间集聚;同时,由于资源、信息和所处地位的不同,波恩不同行动者在网络节点之间产生不均等的权力空间。行动者不断的排斥、冲突、协商和融合的过程,促进了城市空间功能不断完善,也致使以跨国机构为核心的行动者网络逐步成熟。通过引入行动者网络理论（ANT）,本研究把跨国机构作为重要行动者与城市全球化发展相结合,更深入地解析了城市全球化过程中多重行动者的互动过程。     

URBAN CHANGE,CIRCUITS OF CAPITAL,AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT*

The circuits of capital/uneven development model is widely used in geography, urban planning, and the social sciences. Its principal weakness is its marginalizing of local influences in explaining the intensity and patterning of metropolitan investment. A deeper consideration of local culture, politics, and biographies is needed to sensitize the model to the particularities of place. Local creative actors set in motion place-specific forms of change whose logic is tied to structured circumstances.     

Mexican and Central American immigrant communities in the boom and bust housing markets of the 2000s

Classic immigrant enclaves, largely voluntary and temporary, have historically served as a strong platform for integration in United States metropolitan areas. However, trends in the early 2000s, including new destinations and skyrocketing housing costs, may have reshaped the landscape, particularly for numerically dominant immigrant groups with very low socioeconomic status. In this article, I use data for 56 metropolitan areas and 31,563 census tracts from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2009 American Community Survey to examine the relationship between the change in concentration of Mexican and Central American immigrants and the characteristics of neighborhoods in 2000. The analyses suggest that, across metropolitan areas, these immigrant communities consolidated in neighborhoods with low home values, adequate but overcrowded housing, relatively small shares of their own immigrant group, and large shares of other Hispanics. Demographic dynamics may have weakened immigrant support networks, leaving Mexican and Central American immigrants vulnerable, particularly in a subset of metropolitan areas where this population grew most substantially outside the central cities.     

INTRAMETROPOLITAN LOCATIONS OF KOREAN BUSINESSES: THE CASE OF CHICAGO

Intrametropolitan locations of Korean businesses in the Chicago area are examined in terms of the ethnicity of their major customers: ethnic customers, inner-city minority customers, and White middle-class customers. The study reveals that Korean-owned stores providing important ethnic goods or services are spatially concentrated in Koreatown along Lawrence and Lincoln Avenues and in the northwestern suburbs. Korean businesses that serve inner-city minority customers are located mainly in southside Chicago, providing important necessities such as clothing, shoes, beauty supplies, and general merchandise. Uniquely, Korean entrepreneurs overwhelmingly dominate the dry cleaning business, which serves the White middle-class population and is thus scattered around the entire metropolitan area. Korean entrepreneurs' unusual market diversity comes from their effective utilization of ethnic resources and their unique linkage with the export-oriented home-country economy in the 1970s and 1980s. As a whole, their entrepreneurship has demonstrated the dynamic and complex nature of immigrant businesses in major American cities.     

The Suburbanization of Food Insecurity: An Analysis of Projected Trends in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area

Although general patterns of food insecurity in the United States are known, few studies have attempted to estimate small area food security or account for ongoing socioeconomic changes. Here we address these issues by producing small area estimates of food insecurity in the Atlanta metropolitan area using two methodologies: fixed effects modeling and demographic metabolism. In both cases, we use county-level data from the Current Population Survey to determine the association between food insecurity and demographic predictors. These associations are then applied to tract-level data from the 2009 to 2013 American Community Survey and projected data for 2020 to create small area estimates of food insecurity. We find broad consensus between our two methods. For both time periods, food insecurity is highest in southern sections of the city of Atlanta and its neighboring suburbs. Projections to 2020, however, show that food insecurity rates are projected to increase in outer-ring suburbs east and west of the city while decreasing in the urban core. These results highlight the need to further adapt antihunger efforts for often sprawling suburban communities, where poverty rates are increasing but spatial mismatch combined with poor transit access might hinder access to food assistance.     

A Typology of U.S. Shrinking Cities

The literature on shrinking cities has significantly grown in recent years. Little work, however, has been done toward the development of a shrinking city typology, which could help inform solutions and strategies to address problems associated with population loss. With a focus on central cities, this article identifies 367 shrinking cities within the United States and categorizes them using a geographic information system to identify seven types of shrinking cities in the United States: (1) large shrinking central cities, (2) inner-ring suburbs of shrinking central cities, (3) outer-ring suburbs of shrinking central cities, (4) inner-ring suburbs of growing central cities, (5) outer-ring suburbs of growing central cities, (6) small shrinking central cities in small Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and (7) small shrinking cities in small Micropolitan Statistical Areas. The empirically generated clusters, combined with associated social and demographic information, identify separate but sometimes interrelated shrinking city types and provide a new perspective for addressing the problems faced by U.S. shrinking cities. Key Words: population decline, shrinking cities, typology, urban population.     

Moving policy: global and local characters circulating bus rapid transit through South African cities

In this paper, I explore the variety of actors who circulate international best practice around the world. I trace the introduction and adoption of bus rapid transit (BRT) projects and policies across six South African cities through international and municipal policy actors, to expose the role of individuals moving policy within the messy and tangled process of policy circulation. The analysis demonstrates the particularly important role of local actors in localizing global practice. While cities may learn of circulated forms of knowledge through innovative and dynamic individuals, policy is adopted only through local actors with governmental support. This premise adds a critical dimension to the policy mobilities field by demonstrating that adopting localities are instrumental in cultivating a receptive ground for the application of circulated policy. Global best practice does not simply float around waiting to be selected, but rather local policymakers are actively seeking and transforming innovations such as BRT.     

ACCUMULATION,LEGITIMATION, AND THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC SERVICES IN THE AMERICAN METROPOLIS

The provision of public services by the local state involves the full range of politics, structural forces, and actors at work in the world system. Materialist theory provides a means by which these disparate elements can be integrated as the state performs its two primary functions: maintaining conditions favorable for the accumulation of capital and ensuring the legitimacy of the economic and political systems. National and local governments attempt to provide conditions in specific places that will foster growth; the politics of production characterize these efforts. On the local level the state also provides a forum in which the demands of less organized and powerful interests can be heard, as it attempts to maintain the loyalty of the public; the politics of consumption characterize this activity. An empirical analysis of local government expenditures for public services in the United States indicates the role that public services play in the performance of these two functions of the capitalist state.     

Metropolitics in Motion: The Dynamics of Transportation and State Reterritorialization in the Chicago and Toronto City-Regions

Abstract

The global economic crisis exposed the instability of financialized urban governance at precisely the moment when governing coalitions have launched ambitious, expensive plans to reimagine urban transportation infrastructure, driven by the imperatives of restoring accumulation amid intensifying economic and regional competition. In Chicago and Toronto, processes of urban restructuring and state reterritorialization disclose contradictory tendencies in the city-regions’ modes of urbanization. Tracing the contingent path-dependencies of transportation crises highlights tensions between, and within, preexisting metropolitan dynamics and an ascendant neoliberal city-regionalism. The mobilization of collective regional agency appears necessary to overcome the inertia of divisive metropolitan politics, yet the specific political–economic contexts of the case city-regions significantly condition the structural capacity of actors producing, and the potential articulation of, emergent city-regional governance.     

The Variegated Landscape of Local Immigration Policies in the United States

Hundreds of municipalities and counties across the United States have proposed or implemented immigration policies at the local level, ranging from "sanctuary" policies to those designed to exclude undocumented immigrants. Data collected on these policies are presented, and statistically analyzed at the municipal level to interrogate existing hypotheses about factors driving these policy decisions. Municipalities experiencing rapid growth of their foreign-born population and with a high percentage of owner-occupied housing are more likely to introduce exclusionary policies, whereas municipalities with better educated populations are more likely to adopt inclusionary policies. The location of municipalities in the U.S. South and outside central cities is also associated with exclusionary policies. Textual analysis of policy documents for selected municipalities provides insight into why similarly located places adopt contrasting policies. Local ordinances reflect contrasting local imaginaries of race, nation, and place.     

Suburban Food Security: Walkability and Nutritional Access in Metropolitan Detroit

This article explored the relationship between the local food environment and walkability in the socioeconomically diverse, inner-ring suburbs of metropolitan Detroit. The availability and cost differentials of food were surveyed using a modified version of the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey for Stores (NEMS–S), and a geographic information system–based method was designed to map walkability relative to licensed food retail establishments. Results showed that minority communities lack access to fresh produce and nutritionally adequate foods, which is compounded by limited mobility. By incorporating local-based economic incentives, low-income communities can better align neighborhood goals of obtaining nutritionally adequate food (and other services) with economic opportunity.     

Green Watershed in Yunnan: a multi-scalar analysis of environmental non-governmental organisation (eNGO) relationships in China

Responding to China's major environmental challenges, researchers are increasingly exploring dynamics between international non-governmental organisations, the nation-state, and local communities. Much less understood are domestic environmental non-governmental organisations (eNGOs) and their interactions with actors across scales. This paper responds by exploring domestic eNGOs and interactions with institutional actors, including international donors, and with levels of Chinese government. The practices of eNGOs in China are influenced by interactions at various scales. Rather than being directly influenced by international partners and simply constrained by state regulations, Chinese eNGOs are embedded in more complex power relations. These interrelationships are exemplified in the operations of Green Watershed, a domestic eNGO working in Yunnan Province. Green Watershed has extensive interactions with international donors and various levels of government as a result of its national campaign and long-term local projects. Relationships between eNGOs’ international donors and the Chinese government are significant in influencing eNGO practice. NGO–government relations in China are inconsistent and constantly changing owing to the diverse interests and priorities of the various levels of government. The impacts of the local practice of Chinese eNGOs are deeply informed by their relationships both at and beyond the local level. Complex interrelationships make it difficult to achieve bottom-up, participatory resource management in China.     

THE FEDERAL RESPONSE TO HOMELESSNESS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AMERICAN CITIES

The beginning of a dramatic rise in homelessness in American cities coincided with the election of a Republican administration under the leadership of Ronald Reagan. This paper examines the response of the Reagan Administration to the crisis of homelessness. The ideology of the Administration, its broad social-expenditure priorities, and its programs for health, housing, income maintenance, and human services which affect the homeless are investigated. The paper argues that the federal government, guided by conservative and individualist ideology, has (1 ) sought broad social-spending reductions and macroeconomic policies that have increased the risk of homelessness and (2) made minimal efforts toward directly ameliorating the situation of the homeless. The implications for American cities and their homeless populations include growth in the numbers of homeless, local fiscal stress, the expulsion of the homeless from skid-row districts, dispersion of the homeless from downtown zones, suburban exclusionary backlash, reinstitutionalization, and urban violence.     

Immigrant groups and the local environment: socio-spatial differentiation in Czech metropolitan areas

The spatial distribution of immigrant groups is a more relevant topic now than ever before. While the study of this topic has a long tradition in the “traditional” immigration countries, it is rare in the very different context of Central and Eastern Europe, especially at the level of metropolitan areas. This study aims to address this gap by providing an analysis of the spatial distribution of various immigrant groups (defined by country of citizenship) in 17 Czech metropolitan areas, and its determinants. First, we characterize the specific situation of the Czech immigration system. Then we use cluster analysis to create a typology of neighbourhoods and compare the distribution of immigrant groups in each type of neighbourhood. Finally, we use regression analysis to examine which characteristics of the local environment are connected to concentrations of different immigrant groups. We show that the presence of foreigners remains associated with core urban areas. Some predominantly Western citizens act as gentrifiers, being associated with spacious pre-war apartments in prestigious inner-city areas, but there are also signs of suburbanization among more well-off immigrants to Czech metropolitan areas. We identify little evidence of ghettoization of immigrants into socially excluded areas.     

Evolution of Population Densities: Five Canadian Cities, 1971-20011

This article presents new methods for comparative analysis of patterns of gross population density, and employs them in five Canadian metropolitan areas. By comparing changes in levels and patterns in the 1971-2001 period, assessments are made of the macro-level impacts of policies relating to densification and re-densification, and of how such impacts vary by city size. Three comparative techniques are employed. The first uses location quotients to map densities for census tracts in urbanized areas. A second approach defines central and peripheral density clusters, and analyzes their mapped patterns. The third method employs local indices of spatial autocorrelation (LISA) to detect locally significant "hotspots," particularly suburban outliers of higher density. Results suggest that in the suburbs homogenously low-density areas are in decline, while both high-density and heterogeneous areas are increasingly evident.     

城市的垂直流动：广州再领域化中的人地关系重构

流动性重塑了人地关系,地的再领域化过程可以视为一种跨阶层的垂直流动。20世纪80年代起,中国开始了撤县设区的行政区划调整,重塑了原有的城市行政结构体系。撤县设区是典型的城市的垂直流动过程。在这过程中,县城本地居民的身份政治,以及他们与县城、新城之间的关系亦随之改变。以广州为例,通过研究撤县设区中本地居民与领域空间的关系重构,进而探讨流动性背景下的人地关系变化。研究发现：对于本地居民而言,其身份政治在再领域化的过程中,从旧领域的多数群体转变为新领域的少数群体。这种转变导致本地居民排他策略的形成,并由此形成了新领域中的一个抵抗空间,重构了本地居民、旧领域和新领域之间的人地关系。研究城市的再领域化过程是对地理学探讨流动性的有效补充,有利于从地的视角更深入理解流动性的影响及意义。