Sociology

"This work reported on a small portion of my continuing sociological research on city neighborhoods. The subjects which are dealt with here are quite delicate and my long-term involvement in the community is both an advantage as well as a disadvantage for understanding and describing it. Although at first glance this may appear to be a case study of a single neighborhood, as in William Whyte's Street Corner Society, the abstractions and concepts either generated or employed in this piece are by no means limited to the particular site for this research. The same phenomena have been observed and documented by myself and others not only in American cities but cross-nationally as well. Sociological phenomena are seldom, however, expressed exactly the same way in any two locations.

The major theoretical theme of the book is the complex relationship between cultural symbols and societal structures which are embodied in the concrete entities of society--people, buildings, streets, maps and all forms of human settlements. One particular aspect of this general relationship is the interaction between self-images and the social meanings of the neighborhood communities in which people live. It is one of those many social phenomena "taken for granted" as part of everyday life and seldom analyzed, but nevertheless influential in the social construction of local community realities.

Although many social scientists have written about the relationship between the self and others, few have focused on the self-territorial community relation. George Herbert Mead had indirectly considered this relation of self and community in a discussion of William James and the question of consciousness. James had given an example of a person entering a house. The house has a history and the person who enters becomes part of its history. The house, simultaneously, becomes part of the person's history.1 What I have done in this work is to attempt to synthesize the many ideas of self and community from several disciplines and perspectives to form what I hope is a contribution to understanding this important dimension of human social life. "

American cities are today more diverse than at any time in history. The continuing flow of new immigrants has settled in urban and suburban areas that have undergone visible change in population and neighborhoods. While Chicago long served as the convenient and well-studied model for urban sociology, for many Los Angeles has become the focal point for study of the postmodern heteropolis. It is interesting that for sociologists New York City, especially its outer boroughs such as Brooklyn and Queens, has largely remained outside the intense gaze of urban study. As the nation's largest city New York has long had a mosaic of social worlds comparable to that of Chicago, and displays an ethnic diversity comparable to that of Los Angeles. Because New York City presents us with a less easily recognizable mosaic and a more free form scattering of ethnic social spaces, it is seldom thought of as a pre- or post-modern "model" for other metropolitan areas. The eight articles presented in this volume represent both older and established ethnic and racial communities as well as new and emerging groups in New York City. These include Italian communities, African American, as well as newer Jewish, Caribbean, and Asian groups.

Contents
Introduction. (J. Krase, R. Hutchison). Visualizing Ethnic Vernacular Landscapes. (J. Krase). Immigrant Global Neighborhoods in New York City. (T. Hum). The Muslim Chronopolis and Diasporic Temporality. (M.S. Laguerre). 'The game behind the game': Spatial Politics and Spike Lee's_He Got Game_. (J. Geiger). Being Racialized Ethnics: Second Generation West Indian Immigrants in NYC. (S-A. P. Butterfield). Titi Yeya's Memories: A Matriarch of the Puerto Rican Migration. (D.A. Badillo). The Decline of the Public Sphere: A Semiotic Analysis of the Rhetoric of Race in New York City. (T. Shortell). Emergent African Immigrant Philanthropy in New York City. (M.O. Okome). Relations Between the Jewish and Caribbean American Communities in New York City: Perceptions, Conflict and Cooperation. (H. Henke, J.A.G. Irish). The Caribbean Nation-State in Brooklyn Politics: An Examination of The Una Clarke Major Owens Congressional Race. (E. Brown). Little Italy: Resisting the Asian Invasion, 1965-1995. (P.F. Napoli). Changing Racial Conceptualizations: Greek Americans in NYC. (A. Karpathakis, V. Roudometof).

We live in an urban world.  For the first time in history a majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas.  In the next several decades the world population will increase from some five billon to seven billon persons – and most of that increase will take place in urban areas in the less developed nations.  In the previous volume we explored ethnic landscapes in New York City as a counterpoint to recent studies of ethnic communities in Los Angeles and Miami. However, the emergence of new ethnic landscapes is not limited to the United States. 

The papers presented here deal with the general topic of immigrant communities in metropolitan regions across the globe – but they do so from many different perspectives and by employing various methodologies.  They include theoretical studies of immigration, globalization, and diaspora as well as case studies of immigration and ethnic communities within particular countries and individual cities.  The methodologies employed include survey research, secondary analysis of survey data, participant observation, fieldwork and ethnography, and photo documentary.  Once again the diversity of the field and subject matter – indeed the global reach of our subject and discipline – produces significant results in a volume that is expansive in method, theory, and example.

Full information about the book is available
online: http://books.emeraldinsight.com/display.asp?K=9780762313211 

Ethnic Landscapes in an Urban World is the Volume 8 in Elsevier’s Research and Urban Sociology Series. The series addresses the major subject areas of urban sociology, ethnic and minority groups within the city, social network of urban residents, location of retail and industrial activities within the metropolitan complex, decline of the central cities and emergence of suburban lifestyles, and the core question of community integration itself.

Contents

Ethnic Landscapes in a Global World
Introduction (R. Hutchison and J. Krase)
The Earth’s Inhabitants Scattered (S. Weil)
Diasporic Globalization (M. Laguerre)
Multicultural City (V. Marotta)
Migration and New Urban Ethnic Minorities (N. Magnani)
Immigrant Global Neighborhoods (J. Krase and T. Hum
Caribbean Immigrants in Toronto (J. Teelucksingh)
Segregation and Attachment to Place (G. Mesch)
Amayra Migrants (J. Crowder)
Koreans in Japan (D. Rands)
Expatriate Ethnoscapes (W. Leggett)
Social Inequality in Bulgaria (S. Histova)

This essay looks at Little Italies, but they are only one genre of a collec¬tion of taken-for-granted socially constructed exotic urban places that have found their way into our ethno-territorial vocabulary. At the turn of the twentieth century, American cities contained settlements, mostly of European immigrants, for example, in the form of Pole Towns and Jew Towns, with a smattering of Chinatowns. Today, at the turn of the twenty first century as part of the complex ethnic landscape one is more likely to discover those of newcomers from Asia and the Southern Hemisphere such as Koreatowns, Little Bombays, perhaps a Little Lagos, and a wide assortment of Barrios.
Students and practitioners in urban sociology are simultaneously blessed and cursed with competing theories and methods for describing the post-modern, post-industrial metropolitan urban scene. But throughout all the theoretical, methodological, and ideological questions characterizing the field, the central organizing construct for urban studies has remained, in one form or another, “space”. Therefore, explaining how these real and imagined spaces are used, contested, and transformed by different social groups remains the crucial task.
In this essay, the empirical and theoretical case of Italian American urban neighborhoods or “Little Italies" has been chosen because as an archetype it has been the focus of a broad spectrum of historical description and theoretical discussions, not unlike the way the “ghetto” frames the Jewish and Black experience. At the conclusion of this discourse I will illustrate the utility of a visual approach to the questions raised in this essay by presenting a series of photographs of Italian and Italian American spaces.

In American social discourse, the term "ethnic" ordinarily
describes the millions of poor and working-class immigrants who poured into the U.S. between 1880 and 1920, and their more or less assimilated descendants. Most of these groups, such as Eastern European Jews, Slavs, and southern Italians, established themselves  in already built up urban places where they lacked the power to radically alter their environments. As they became assimilated, or "Americanized," they adopted the environmental values of the dominant society. Therefore only limited "traces" or mere "architectural vestiges" of the original home territorial values can be found in their resulting landscapes and places. In some cases it may be more important to understand the way these groups use the environments which they come to occupy  than the
ways they alter or create new ones.

Este artículo ilustrado reflexiona sobre los cambios e intercambios étnicos que se han sucedido en Nueva York y Roma –la pequeña y la gran Italia-, tomando como eje de discusión la noción de autenticidad. La hipótesis central se relaciona con cómo los sentidos de los barrios se alteran continuamente por hasta el más pequeño de sus habitantes. Intenta demostrar cómo los barrios italianos norteamericanos en los Estados Unidos, específicamente en Nueva York, son similares a los barrios italianos en Italia, específicamente en Roma, en tanto ambos son lugares que han sido modificados radicalmente por la invasión de nuevos y diferentes grupos étnicos. Las lógicas espaciales y la lógica semiótica de diásporaprocesos transnacionales es presentada aquí en la forma de imágenes; específicamente, en la de los cambios acontecidos en espacios comcericales vernaculares. Teóricamente, por último, esta investigación se asienta en dos enfoques: por un lado, en el concepto ya clásico de ecología como invasión y sucesión planteado por Park y Burgess; mientras que por el otro, en la Semiótica del Espacio y en las propuestas metodológicas de la Sociología Visual.

Gentrification is generally described as the process by which higher status residents displace those of lower status ones in neighborhoods which, by definition, are contested. Originally considered as a uniquely English and then a related urban American phenomenon of the middle class moving into poor and working class urban areas, today gentrification is recognized in virtually every corner of the global. This essay considers the interesting cases of gentrification in the Polish American neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn and in Krakow, Poland. The author has observed transnational ethnic connections and photographed indications of the process of gentrification in the two different venues and at two different times. It is argued that although the direct causes of gentrification in the different locations are historically different, there is something about (je ne sais quoi) gentrification as a symbolic or semiotic activity that can best be grasped via the use of image-based research and consideration of contrasted streetscapes as spatial semiotic examples of Pierre Bourdieu' s Taste of Necessity and the Taste of Luxury. These ideas will be illuminated by a selection of photographs taken by the author in both locations.

Ever since Robert Ezra Park and Ernest Burgess published their classic research on Chicago which described “how” residential neighborhoods follow a distinct ecological pattern, generations of urban practitioners and theoreticians have been arguing about “why” they are spatially distributed. This essay is designed to demonstrate the utility of Visual Sociology and the study of Vernacular Landscapes to document and analyze how the built environment reflects the changing cultural identities of neighborhood residents. It is strongly suggested that a visual approach can also help build a bridge between various theoretical and applied disciplines that focus on the form and function of the metropolis. While discussing some of these often-competing models, the text is illustrated by a selection of photographs taken in Brooklyn, New York whose neighborhoods over the past century have been a virtual Roman fountain of ethnic transitions. Although many of the oldest and newest residents of Brooklyn such as Chinese,  Italians, Jews, and Poles would be familiar to Park and Burgess, others such as Bangladeshis, Egyptians, and Koreans would not. Ideas about Old and New cities from the “classical” to the “post-modern;” from Park and Burgess to Harvey and Lefebvre are also synthesized via the insights of J.B. Jackson.

This paper looks at Little Italies and Chinatowns around the world to demonstrate the utility of a visual approach to ethnic spectacles and by extension to other socio-spatial expressions. Many post-modern urban theorists would suggest that contemporary global cities are so fragmented and transitory that they no longer adhere to any recognizable pattern of social distribution. Cities may no longer have the zones that Burgess (1925) theorized, but there is, nonetheless, a meaningful spatial distribution of individuals and neighborhoods. Urban spaces have always been characterized by change, as newcomers enter and established residents move around and/or migrate to the suburbs. What is different about contemporary urban locations is their different kinds of segregation and different logics of location.
Although structural factors, such as local and global economic variables, play a role in the spatial distribution of ethnic neighborhoods, one important element is often overlooked. It is not enough to examine only material indicators of economic, political or symbolic power. Nor is it sufficient simply to look at the usual social practices associated with urban life, or how urban denizens interact with major social institutions, as important as they might be, in order to see the signs of ethnic identity. Ethnic identity is communicated by the very presence of members sharing the cultural facts
that comprise identity, such as common place of origin (of self or ancestors) and language. People are able to mark their neighborhood space by their presence, evidenced by the often unremarkable -- or, perhaps, merely unremarked -- details of their day to day lives.

In the summer of 2006 TAMKEEN (The Center for Arab American Empowerment) informally discussed with Jerome Krase the idea of conducting a Community Needs Assessment of New York City’s Arab American community. This concern for current and more comprehensive information was due to the fact that there was at that time very little detailed data specifically on this population which was readily accessible. As a consequence, and with his consultation, in the fall of 2006 TAMKEEN applied for and then obtained a “Technical Assistance Grant” from the New York Women’s Foundation to commission a “needs assessment survey of Arabic-speaking immigrant communities in New York City.” The study of the Arab American community, defined by Ancestry, nativity, and language usage, was designed to provide the necessary information to inform and guide TAMKEEN in its future programming. It was also intended to help improve TAMKEEN’s ability to better collaborate and coordinate services for New York City’s Arab Americans. At the same time, it was also decided to conduct this assessment survey in order to identify the gaps in existing services in the Arab immigrant communities of New York City with a special focus on the needs of women. This special attention to gender was suggested as it is generally assumed that many Arab American women lived rather segregated lives that were confined generally to their own neighborhoods. This strategic emphasis on women was based on the supported argument that the integration of Arab women into mainstream American society was the most likely method that would help to ensure the integration of the entire Arab American family. TAMKEEN also felt that the study was needed in order to establish priorities for future grant requests and programming as well as a more solid foundation of information for developing a master plan for comprehensive services, in coordination with other Arab American community-based organizations (CBOs).

A presentation based on a selection of photographs and other images of Islamic subjects taken by Professor Krase in the United States, Africa, Europe and China.  As part of his studies of the ethnic vernacular landscape it tries to evoke a visual/virtual discussion on the power of the minds’ eye to see Islam and Moslems as they are, or are not.

This book shows how a machine political, local Democratic organization in Brooklyn failed to make the transition necessary to survive in modern urban political life. Political organizations do not live in a sociological vacuum. They must struggle for survival in a highly competitive human environment. The story of the Madison Club tells how the ethnic, religious, racial and generational transitions affect decisions, group cohesion and the success of political organizations at all levels.

This essay compares and contrasts the "vernacular landscapes" of Polish and Italian American neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York. It attempts to show how the visual appearances of these settlements are related to the
common histories, and individual experiences of the people who occupy them. In many ways, human migrants are like bees who "carry designs for living from their original home environments and adapt them to the resources and opportunities in the new locale. Unlike bees, however, who
carry their blueprints in their genes, the community plans for people are carried in their minds. Human designs are much more easily modified because they are learned inside a myriad of other, related symbolic environments. Ideally, immigrants will replicate the highly valued places and spaces from
which they came."

This paper addresses a number of interrelated issues that have emanated from a series of recent tragic “incidents” that have seriously affected the reality, as well as the image, of Italian Americans. The incidents in question were racially motivated assaults and homicides involving Italian Americans or taking place in neighborhoods described as Italian American. These events have received national as well as international media attention. As a result, the three New York neighborhoods; Gravesend’s Avenue X, Howard Beach, and Bensonhurst have been added to the American urban lexicon of infamous places. In these places three black men; Willie Turks (1982), Michael Griffith (1987) and Yusuf Hawkins (1989), were murdered.
A central issue addressed here, and seldom discussed elsewhere, is the role played by Italian-American professionals, and those others who study the Italian community, in helping to present to the general public an accurate picture of the various and diverse segments of the Italian-American population. This must be done without reservation and without apology even when the situation, such as instances of intergroup violence, is distasteful. Equally important to Italians in America is the issue of ethnic defamation. Defamation, however, cannot be effectively dealt with by mere denial; it must be countered with accurate information.