General Conclusion

The sociology of jihadism in Europe is manifold: • It is a sociology of humiliation, stigmatization, hatred, and resentment, particularly within impoverished, ethnic neighborhoods where poverty, relative frustration, and internalized indignity are rampant, amplified by a victimized imaginary. • It is also a sociology of revolt against an unjust world, first of all by lower classes, mostly of migrant origin, left behind in late capitalist societies, but also by fragile middle classes threatened by social decline and uncertainty about their future. Their imagination attributed to IS a capacity to promote their social status and restore justice that was more a matter of fantasy than reality....

Ethnicity, Neighborhoods, and Human-Capital Externalities

The socioeconomic performance of today's workers depends not only on parental skills, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the generation of their parents (or ethnic capital). This chapter investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods. The evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked, partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised. Ethnicity has an external effect, even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood, when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background.

Consumer Cities, Scenes, and Ethnic Restaurants

This chapter builds on past work to examine the distinctive ways in which ethnic restaurants help to define the contemporary scenescape in US cities. It uses the example of restaurants to illustrate how to apply and extend a scenes approach. Restaurants in general and ethnically themed restaurants are crucial components of many cities and communities’ consumer offerings. They often make the scene. After briefly reviewing some general principles of the scenes perspective, the authors discuss ethnic neighborhoods and the role of consumption venues such as restaurants in defining their identity. The authors stress multiple ways that ethnically themed amenities and local populations may overlap in various contexts, as well as how they can join with other dimensions of local scenes. These ideas are illustrated by examining multiple types of ethnic restaurants across all US zip codes, paying particular attention to the degree to which they correspond with coethnic residential populations, and how this varies by group and city. The authors also investigate the types of scenes typical of cosmopolitan areas that offer diverse ethnic cuisines.

Ethnicity and US Neighborhoods

Ethnicity is a concept employed to understand the social, cultural, and political processes whereby immigrants and their children cease to be “foreign” and yet retain practices and networks that connect them, at least imaginatively, with places of origin. From an early juncture in American history, ethnic neighborhoods were an important part of such processes. Magnets for new arrivals, city neighborhoods both emerged from and reinforced connections among people of common origins. Among the first notable immigrant neighborhoods in American cities were those composed of people from the German-speaking states of Europe. In the second half of the 19th century, American cities grew rapidly and millions of immigrants arrived to the country from a wider array of origins; neighborhoods such as the New York’s Jewish Lower East Side and San Francisco’s Chinatown supported dense and institutionally complex ethnic networks. In the middle decades of the 20th century, immigration waned as a result of legislative restriction, economic depression, and war. Many former immigrant neighborhoods emptied of residents as cities divided along racial lines and “white ethnics” dispersed to the suburbs. However, some ethnic enclaves endured, while others emerged after the resumption of mass immigration in the 1960s. By the turn of the 21st century ethnic neighborhoods were once again an important facet of American urban life, although they took new forms within the reconfigured geography and economy of a suburbanized nation.

A Multicultural Project in a National Square: The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio

Part II (Houses) is a cultural mapping of the spaces where immigrants live/d, that is, residential buildings that have been or are intrinsically linked to the migration experiences from/to Italy as well as so-called ethnic neighborhoods. The Aperture that opens this part focuses on an area of Rome, Piazza Vittorio, which has come to represent the immigrant hub of the capital. It explores the square—a quintessential Italian space—both for its role in nation building and for its several layers of immigrant occupation. Through the analysis of Agostino Ferrente’s 2006 documusical The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, which recounts the creative project of forming a multi-ethnic orchestra in this piazza, the chapter highlights an interesting example of how preoccupations over the presence of immigrants can be substituted by new visions. In an area where the very meaning of “ethnic neighborhood” can be mapped at a trans-national level (multi-multi-ethnic) given the diversity of the immigrants’ origin, Ferrente’s documusical reflects a post-national scenario of cultural co-existence within an ethical vision that interestingly offers, especially in its final climax, a “success” story.