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Scholars have long understood that landscapes are not simply vessels of the many meanings, values, and ideas of their users but are also shaped by them. Spaces become places when their inhabitants invest their memories, labors, and dreams in them. In doing so, people craft an ethic of care and attachment to the places of their everyday lives. Repeated over time and across generations, place meanings sediment themselves, becoming the scripts through which places are read and recognized from the outside as well as from within.
These scripts change as new groups arrive with their own ideas and patterns of work, home, and play. Time and time again in American cities, the process has repeated itself for waves of new immigrants. As groups settle in a neighborhood, they make their mark. They start language schools and cultural institutions that help bridge the gap between their new and old homelands, launch small businesses to gain a foothold in the American economy, and establish community spaces where they can share their hardships and triumphs with others like themselves. In this way, urban landscapes accumulate rich layers, comprising a bricolage of people, ideas, and meanings. They become mosaics of their storied pasts that exert a constant force in shaping their futures—prisms that can be read from different vantage points to tell multiple stories.
These processes are not just at work in the inner city. They have transformed the landscapes of communities across the United States. In suburbia, scholars have documented the community garden practices of early African American suburbanites, the fences and soccer fields that mark the barrio suburbanism of predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods outside Los Angeles, the temples and language schools of suburban Sahibs in New Jersey’s Middlesex County, and the garden apartments that served as social hotspots for seniors and young singles during the post-World War II period.19 Though often overlooked, suburbia has long served as a reflection of the diverse lifestyles of its residents.
Inherit within processes of place making is a politics of landscape change. As new groups come in and lay their ideas upon the landscape, they subtly challenge or subvert those of former groups. Their news signs and symbols assert a kind of moral authority that is often viewed as a threat by established residents, be they White, Black, poor, or middle class. These tensions raise questions of entitlement and belonging: For whom is this place being built? Who belongs here, and who does not? These are questions not just about values but also about power. Who gets to decide who stays, who goes, and who feels welcome? Visible markers of neighborhood change are contested in part because of the invisible power they hold to assert a collective sense of belonging or, alternatively, marginality. Whether dog parks, bike lanes, and coffee shops in San Francisco or ethnic shopping centers, Buddhist temples, and Chinese schools in Fremont, landscapes of difference are often the focal points of conflict over neighborhood change.20
The urban landscape in which these battles are meted out is not an even playing field. Certain groups have more power than others to transform landscapes in accordance with their values and interests and shape the ways in which these landscapes are read and valued, socially as well as economically. Scholars have long understood that urban space sustains social inequities. Seminal works by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and David Harvey provide a prism for understanding how systems of inequality are reproduced in and through the built environment of cities—our streets, sidewalks, and office buildings.21 They show that the design, structure, and organization of urban places construct social identities and relationships of power, including those based on race and ethnicity.
Race is a social construction that requires the support of social, political, and economic institutions as well as spaces that mark social hierarchies and positionalities. As Michel Laguerre argues, “In order to have ethnic minorities, one must also have minoritized space.”22 Ghettos and barrios that were historically created by explicit policies of racial discrimination remain the subjects of uneven development and reinforce stereotypes about the incapacity or unwillingness of people of color to care for their communities and do what it takes to make it in America. In contrast, White neighborhoods, schools, and homes that have benefited from decades of discriminatory practices and policies are generally viewed as valued and valuable places that represent the fruits of White Americans’ hard work and ability. The racialized American landscape is all around us. As geographer Richard Schein notes, “all American landscapes are racialized, and can and should be seen through the lens of race.”23
For Asian Americans, the racialization of urban space was evident in the segregated Chinatowns, Japantowns, and Little Vietnams, whose borders were fiercely guarded by White vigilantes, urban planners, and city councils throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet these same places came to serve as evidence of Asian Americans’ presumed inability to assimilate and their common depictions as “forever foreigners.” These neighborhoods often lacked public and private investment in housing, commercial businesses, schools, infrastructure, and social services. Yet their widespread portrayals as seedy, dark havens of criminal activity came to reflect on Asian Americans as the source of contagion, blight, and vice.24
In the mid-20th century, the racialization of Asian American space was evident in the devaluation of many ethnic enclaves during the urban renewal era that allowed city governments and private developers to raze and redevelop them for profit and the benefit of White suburbanites. Today, the racialization of space remains robust in stories told about these neighborhoods that erase the hardships and inequalities that have gone into their making while upholding them as evidence of the virtues of hard work and the success of the American multicultural experiment. At the same time, economic development schemes court tourists to neighborhoods that aestheticize and exotify Asian American culture and market it for profit.25 Discursively and materially, urban ethnic enclaves have helped to define Asianness in America.
The racialized landscape and its politics, however, does not respect city and suburban lines. Suburbia’s form has long been used to construct ideas about Whiteness and reinforce White Americans’ social and economic privilege and power.26 Postwar suburban housing, neighborhoods, streets, and shopping centers idealized the White middle-class nuclear family. Its picturesque and pastoral landscapes were modeled on the estates of the European elite and sold by developers and “community builders” as a new, exclusive version of the American Dream.27 Through practices such as racial steering, racially restrictive covenants, blockbusting, redlining, discriminatory Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration mortgage lending practices, and individual and collective acts of violence, this dream was denied to many lower-income residents, especially those of color.
As historians Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese note, however, these spatial distinctions did not merely reify existing social hierarchies but also helped to shape ideas and understandings of them in ways that perpetuated them through time: “In building suburbia, Americans built inequality to last.”28 Contemporary suburban landscapes continue to naturalize ideas about who and what are rightly considered suburban. While all too often maintained by policies and practices such as common interest developments, gated communities, and exclusionary zoning that exclude poor and minority residents, suburban spaces often obscures the work that goes into maintaining their largely invisible though highly securitized borders as well as White Americans’ privileged position within them.29
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