Art and the Aesthetics of Cultural Gentrification : The Cases of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles

The art world has been linked to gentrification. Such art is associated with a modernist aesthetics based on abstraction, individual experience, and exchange value. This chapter identifies a different kind of art based on an aesthetics of engagement in the historic immigrant neighbourhoods of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. This aesthetics is linked to ethics, collective interaction, and the participatory community development of specific places. Furthermore, gentrification is often only understood as an economic process. The concept of cultural gentrification is presented to demonstrate how transformations in the symbolic sphere can trigger a loss of belonging. Art that is borne from the specific culture of a place, however, can open up new potential in combating gentrification.

Gentryfikacja Downtown Los Angeles – szansa na rewitalizację historycznego centrum miasta, a zagrożenie dla lokalnej społeczności

Niniejszy artykuł ma na celu przybliżenie procesu gentryfikacji zachodzącego w Downtown Los Angeles. Centrum miasta stało się w ostatnich dwóch dekadach polem starcia interesów kilku grup społecznych oraz tematem ożywionej debaty publicznej. Najstarsze kwartały Los Angeles od początku zamieszkiwała wieloetniczna i wielokulturowa populacja, a na przełomie XIX i XX wieku w okolicach stacji kolejowej dołączyła do niej liczna grupa bezdomnych. Intensyfikacja działań prywatnych firm deweloperskich przy jednoczesnym braku konsekwentnego planowania ze strony administracji pogłębia już istniejące w aglomeracji deficyty dostępnych cenowo mieszkań dla najuboższych jej mieszkańców. Jak wskazują dane, azjatyckie dzielnice etniczne (Little Tokyo i Chinatown) skutecznie opierają się temu procesowi, który szczególnie destrukcyjny charakter przyjął w okolicach Skid Row oraz kwartałach zajmowanych przez Latino Angelenos i Afroamerykanów. Magistrat współpracuje z inwestorami głównie w obszarze inwestycji ratujących zabytkowe budynki historycznego centrum, na których renowację nie posiada funduszy. Wykazuje mniejsze zaangażowanie w kwestii zabezpieczenia warunków bytowych osób nisko sytuowanych w dzielnicach tanich hoteli i budynków pofabrycznych. W efekcie mamy do czynienia z odpływem pierwotnej populacji i zastępowaniem jej przez zamożnych inwestorów oraz najemców. Zostaje też utracony dotychczasowy charakter całych kwartałów. Artykuł ma charakter opisowy, opiera się na danych pochodzących ze źródeł stanowych i federacji, monografii i artykułów naukowych oraz artykułów lokalnej prasy.

Special Places, Sacred Spaces: Two Traditional Buddhist Temples in Nihonmachi Los Angeles

This article explores two significant Buddhist temples in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, the Nishi Hongwanji, and the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Churches. The study’s methodology is inspired by Yi-Fu Tuan’s humanistic geography, whose work explores the relationship between environment and human subjective experience. As the majority of 20th-century Japanese immigrants were Buddhists, a closer look at the temples helps explicate the dynamic between Buddhist belief and its architectural expression. This article takes the concept of a binary as its framework. It explores Little Tokyo in terms of the sacred and profane, the inner and outer, and the vertical and the horizontal vis-à-vis two Buddhist temples. The argument here is that these dualities resolve into one holistic experience with respect to the formation of memory, history, and religious faith.

Mapping Gentrification in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles: Using Geographic Information System (GIS) Analytical Tools

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> From the time when its roots traced back all the way back in 1886, Little Tokyo has overcome numerous obstacles including the Great Depression, Japanese American internments in the Second World War, racial discrimination, transition into Bronxville, multinational redevelopment projects, and the demographic/ geographic dispersion of the Nikkei communities. Despite these numerous development, Little Tokyo remains the major historical, cultural, and civic center for Japanese Americans living in Southern California and has continued to be a historically and a culturally symbolic space for many.</p><p> This research strives to identify the trends of gentrification in the study area; Little Tokyo, through indicators or variables in 5 domains: (A) Housing, (B) Demography, (C) Income, (D) Education Level, and (E) Public Safety with the central focus on housing. To analyze the occurrence of these elements between the year 1990 and 2013, quantitative research including GIS groundworks were delivered. This research is aimed at becoming a tool to measure and potentially assist communities to make more robust development intervention and implementation by identifying the trends that emerge socio-economic problems like gentrification facing local communities around the world.</p>

The Rise of Minority Storytelling

This chapter explores filmmaking in Watts, East Los Angeles, and Little Tokyo in the aftermath of the Watts Uprising. These areas appeared on screen as complex communities, not simply as “slums” or sites of loss. Prominent filmmakers included Joe Saltzman (Black on Black [1968]), Lynne Littman (Womanhouse Is Not a Home [1972]), Robert Nakamura (Manzanar [1970–1971]), Sue Booker (Doin’ It at the Storefront [1972–1973]), and Jesús Salvador Treviño (América Tropical [1971]). The combination of grassroots activism and government legislation inflected the training and production practices of these documentarians during their time at commercial broadcasting stations, UCLA, and the public television outlet KCET.

A Japanese-American Sam Spade: The Metaphysical Detective in Death in Little Tokyo, by Dale Furutani

The aim of this essay is to discuss the legacy of the roman noir in contemporary detective fiction produced outside the hegemonic center of power, here represented by the novel Death in Little Tokyo (1996), written by Japanese-American author Dale Furutani. Starting from the concept of the metaphysical detective (Haycraft 76; Holquist 153-156), characterized by deep questioning about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality and the limits of knowledge, this article proposes a discussion about how these literary works, which at first sight represent a traditionally Anglo-American genre, constitute narratives that aim to rescue the memory, history and culture of marginalized communities. Typical of late modernity detective fiction, the metaphysical detective has none of the positivistic detective’s certainties, as he does not share in his Cartesian notion of totality, being presented instead as a successor of the hardboiled detective of the roman noir. In this article I intend to analyze the paths chosen by the author and discuss how his re-reading of the roman noir dialogues with the texts of hegemonic noire detective fiction, inscribing them in literary tradition and subverting them at the same time.