Why do we always talk about immigrants with a language of “difference”? Neighborhood change and conflicts in Queens, New York

Abstract

The literature on planning in immigrant communities has been one based on the premise that immigrants are different from native-born people, and therefore planning for immigrant communities must therefore also be different. In this article, we challenge that premise through a discussion of a set of neighborhood developments and conflicts in Queens, New York, the most diverse county in the United States. We root those conflicts not in different cultural practices, but in the working of racial capitalism. The stories in Queens are stories not of conflicts of identity, they are conflicts of class; even if those class conflicts are inherently racialized. the foreignness of foreigners, the strangeness of strangers: these things are real enough. It's just that we've been encouraged, not least by well-meaning intellectuals, to exaggerate their significance by an order of magnitude-Kwame Anthony Appiah 1 Race is thus, also, the modality in which class is "lived", the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and "fought through"-Stuart Hall 2

The role of schools in the de- and revalorization of stigmatized neighborhoods: The case of Berlin-Neukölln

“…This connects to the second and third contribution this paper strived to make, which is contributing to the discussion of the role of race and ethnicity in the gentrification process more general and in the German context in more specific. In line with the arguments recently brought forward by DeFilippis and Teresa (2020) in this journal, the story of the intertwinements between stigmatized schools and gentrification told in this paper, is not one about racial or ethnic "difference." It is one about how oppressive classifications work as part of the production of class inequality.…”

Bubble clash: Identity, environment and politics in a multicultural suburb

“…Directing government resources and policy efforts to recognise and support multicultural groups is critical; this is especially so for local politics when migrants do not possess voting rights on arrival but their needs manifest spatially in everyday urban landscapes (Kim and Bozarth, 2020). However, in the current planning scholarship on multiculturalism, the 'differences' in migrant or ethnic groups' political subjectivity is often given an a priori quality (DeFilippis and Teresa, 2020). This means that their political participation as well as the needs/aspirations that motivate it can be determined along the racial, religious or cultural lines prior to discussing the specificities of a planning problem at hand.…”

“…Under this framework, however, we tend to understand identity, thus difference, as given. My engagement with multiculturalism departs from this a priori conception of ‘difference’, starting from an anti-foundationalist standpoint that we often do not fully understand how difference is manifest or what the nature of difference is (DeFilippis and Teresa, 2020). We, therefore, need practical and theoretical tools to negotiate the complexities arising from how ‘differences’ are defined and lived, to help reveal and understand the challenges they pose to planning in a specific time and place.…”

Introduction: What Does Racial Capitalism Have to Do With Cities and Communities?

“…In recent years, scholars have increasingly used Robinson’s categorization of the literature to frame their contributions and push for new policy interventions (e.g., DeFilippis and Teresa 2020; Dantzler and Reynolds 2020; Fields and Raymond 2021). Desiring to pull together this emerging scholarship and expand the bounds of the existing conversation, we issued a call for City & Community ’s Special Issue on “Urban Processes Under Racial Capitalism.” The original works included in this issue apply racial capitalism as a theoretical framework for explaining urbanization and urban life, and in doing so continue to advance our collective understanding of how racism shapes urban processes.…”