Immigration cities have counterbalanced deindustrialization and urban decline by acting as gateways of labor, capital, commodity, and cultural exchange in the new global economy. Ethnic places are emblematic transnational spaces that both constitute and convey broader processes of economic and cultural globalization. Ethnic entrepreneurs, community activists, and artists have revalorized spaces in the zone-in-transition, places from which they were historically restricted, evicted, or displaced. These rejuvenated ethnic places serve as "polyglot honeypots" for urban managers pursuing growth machine strategies in the postindustrial symbolic economy. Contradictions and conflicts are presented by globalization as much as opportunities.
City managers and urban sociologists traditionally viewed ethnic places as undesirable areas of overcrowding and social pathology. Regarded as either transitional districts or obstacles to modernization, ethnic places were subject to slum clearance during the modernist phase of urban development. Ethnic places have acquired a new historical and sentimental salience in the "postmodem" developmental era. Preservationist activists and minority "place entrepreneurs" project ethnic culture and symbolic representations in defensive or proactive ways to stimulate neighborhood revitalization. These trends are evident in the recent urban developmental history of Houston, Texas.
Suburban Chinatowns are intriguing subjects for study and comparison. These ethnic suburbs, or ethnoburbs, have emerged to coexist or compete with the older downtown Chinatowns traditionally found in American central cities. Their growth since the 1960s challenges many traditional assumptions regarding the spatial and cultural assimilation of immigrants in U.S. society, namely that ethnicity would decline with the geographic and socioeconomic mobility of immigrants from the inner city into the suburbs. We examined recent growth trends in the Chinese ethnoburb of the San Gabriel Valley region of Greater Los Angeles, through analysis and mapping of U.S. Census data, and discovered ethnic persistence rather than spatial and cultural assimilation. We also discovered the ethnoburb is differentiated between a lower-class core and two middle-to-upper class fringe districts. Though there is some linguistic assimilation on the northwest fringe, the majority of the ethnoburban population continues to speak Chinese. Linguistic isolation is not a barrier to achieving a higher socioeconomic class position in the Chinese ethnoburb of Los Angeles.
Tensegrity structures are systems composed of elements in compression and tension in a stable self-equilibrium state that provides stability and stiffness to the structure. Tensegrity finds its root in contemporary art with Kenneth Snelson's sculptures, yet it quickly evolved into a structural paradigm employed in a wide spectrum of science and engineering applications. Tensegrity structures being lightweight, and capable of combining sensors and actuators with structural elements, they are advantageous for active applications. However, in most active applications, sensor placement is based on engineering judgement and not a systematic approach based on the analysis of tensegrity structures. This paper addresses sensor placement for structural identification and damage detection in tensegrity structures using cellular decomposition. By decomposing tensegrity structures into the minimum number of constitutive unicellular substructures (cells and stable sub-structures resulting from their interaction), the minimum number of sensors required for their self-stress identification can be defined along with a set of edge solutions for sensor placement. Moreover, under the assumptions of a known deformed geometry and loading, it is shown that the resulting sensor configurations can be extended for structural identification as well as damage detection providing a theoretical framework for active and sensory tensegrity structures based on their cellular composition.
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