Search results

In the process of gentrifying or redeveloping inner city neighborhoods, race figures prominently not only with regard to demographic changes but also in how places are represented by key stakeholders, such as city leaders, developers, and residents themselves. How is race used to justify certain kinds of neighborhood change and not others? How do residents respond to representations of their neighborhood and even themselves? This process of racialization--the strategic employment of racial discourses to define, legitimize, and resist social and spatial changes related to gentrification--serves as an adaptive and strategic means for city leaders, developers, and community-based organizations to control, plan, implement, and contest efforts to reshape impoverished neighborhoods. By examining the vast ways community change is represented, we can detect and analyze the significance of race and racial narratives to the contested process of gentrification. In the ongoing redevelopment of the Regent Park community of Toronto, Canada, the deployment of racial tropes and narratives, such as diversity and "social mix," organize and make legible gentrification and its consequences of displacement for communities of poor minority residents. To understand the historical context of the redevelopment of Regent Park and demonstrate how racialization may influence the trajectory of neighborhood change, we conducted a socio-historical meta-synthesis whereby a wide range of existing qualitative works and documents became our data. We amalgamated articles, reports, laws, and planning documents to create a historical timeline and to complete an integrative review of the data.

State preemption of local government discretion is examined through the lenses of county cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and "immigration federalism." Through a mixed-method approach, we examine why counties collaborate with ICE as well as how and why they deviate from state preemptions on local support for immigration. Analysis of a sample restricted to Georgia and Texas, states with especially robust preemptive anti-immigrant laws, suggests that special interests—those related to immigrant-dependent industries important to county economies—have significant influence over county decisions to minimize cooperation with ICE.