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It is difficult to find a major American city today that has not used ethnic-theme neighborhoods in a revitalization strategy. "Little Italys" play major roles in the personalities of New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, Baltimore, Maryland, Cleveland, Ohio, San Diego, California, and a number of other cities. Columbus, Ohio, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have German villages. Detroit, Michigan, and Chicago, Illinois, have Greek towns. Chinatowns are common from Philadelphia and New York in the East to San Francisco, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia, in the West. San Antonio, Texas, Los Angeles, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, celebrate a Mexican heritage. Even black neighborhoods, long seen as nothing to be proud of--the Harlem Renaissance notwithstanding--are now recognized as important places; Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, Georgia, and Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, are notable examples. More recently, Little Saigons have appeared from Washington, D.C., to Orange County, California. Nearly all of these cities view ethnic districts as cultural and economic assets. The districts are places to be promoted in the tourist literature as interesting places to eat, shop, and be entertained. They are places that enrich local culture and add to the spice of urban life. Sometimes, entire towns have been completely transformed in an effort to create--and often invent--ethnic landscapes. Solvang, California, used a Danish village architectural theme to attract investment and filled nearly every building in the center of town with Nordic shops and restaurants. Leavenworth, Washington, has used many of the same procedures to make itself totally Bavarian (Frenkel and Walton 2000). Meanwhile, Santa Fe has been plastered into a replica of Taos-style pueblos. Throughout the United States there are Amish towns and "Wild West" towns, most with some variation on the ethnic identity theme. Despite the obvious inauthenticity, most of these places have some sort of kitschy charm and are economic assets for their regions. Indeed, Dydia DeLyser suggested that place authenticity, not adherence to an accurate architectural history, is what works for people on the ground (1999). Our purpose in this article is to explore the idea that American-style ethnic-theme districts can serve to help revitalize declining central-city districts in Europe. European cities are now experiencing two trends that make them more like their U.S. counterparts. First, many of them have an increasingly large, exotic, non-European immigrant population, and, second, growing numbers of marginal, if not skid-row, central-city neighborhoods could benefit from focused revitalization efforts. We use the examples of Little Italy in San Diego, California, and an emerging Chinatown in Trieste, Italy, to compare possible procedures for using the celebration of ethnic identity in the promotion of marginal central-city districts. CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN ETHNIC DISTRICTS: THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM The positive view of the role that ethnic districts can play in American cities has not always prevailed. As most students of urban history know, it was not that long ago that ethnic diversity in the United States meant inevitable conflict and turf battles (Ward 1971). Beginning with massive Irish immigration during the 1840s, many cities practiced extreme discrimination, exclusion, and even organized violence to suppress "un-American" ethnic groups. The Irish, Russian Jews, Chinese, African Americans, and Mexicans had some of the worst experiences, but it was not uncommon for everyone from French Canadians to Poles to have their cultural identities suppressed. Even the Germans, arguably the largest group of "foreigners" to populate the American continent, were often seen as an undesirable element, especially in times of war. In Columbus, for example, a solidly German neighborhood that had its start as early as the 1820s became extremely suspect during and just after World War I. …

Since the 1970s, humanistic geography has gained adherents among geographers who emphasize the centrality of "people and their condition" (Tuan 1976, 266). Humanistic research has focused on human relationships with place, notably the development, characterization, and outcome of such relationships. Except in relation to homes (Perkins 1988), neighborhoods (Rivlin 1982), or places of worship (Kong 1992), few authors except Graham Rowles (1978, 1980, 1983a, 1983b) have investigated in detail how elderly people relate to the places with which they interact. We address this deficiency in the context of Singapore, in view of the growing proportion and number of the aged and the necessity for understanding their experiences and considering their future needs. Specifically, we use two case studies, Tiong Bahru and Chinatown, to explore how the elderly in rapidly modernizing Singapore relate to their places. Environments are especially important to aging residents, affecting their adaptation to change, the sustenance of their personal identities, and their continued participation in life, particularly given their diminishing physical ability, reduced economic means, and changing surroundings. Tiong Bahru and Chinatown represent two areas with larger-than-average concentrations of elderly residents. The census divisions Tiong Bahru and Kreta Ayer, which correspond closely to our study areas, are two of only seventeen census divisions (out of a total of eighty-one) in which the age category with the highest proportion of residents is sixty and above (Lau 1992, 22-24). Tiong Bahru can be divided into two areas [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The first comprises primarily three-to-five-story walk-up apartments, built between the 1930s and 1950s by the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), the housing authority prior to the current Housing and Development Board (HDB). The second comprises the high-rise HDB apartments in the Kim Tian estate. Physically, Tiong Bahru has not undergone many changes in the past few decades. The SIT apartments still look much the way they did when they were newly constructed. Likewise, Seng Poh Road Market / Food Center has been in existence since 1950, although the stalls were already operating in an unauthorized open-air market in the immediate prewar years (SIT n.d.). Only in the past five years have some changes been apparent: a Mass Rapid Transit station is now in operation on Tiong Bahru Road, and two developments on either side of the same road (one residential and one commercial retail, office, and entertainment) were recently completed. Even so, these changes have not drastically altered the essentially Old World environment of the SIT heartland. In demographic terms, however, the area has changed. The distinctively aged community has resulted because, over the years, many younger people have moved out to newer HDB housing developments that offer bigger and better facilities. Chinatown, in contrast, has seen many physical changes over the years. The shophouses (two- or three-story units in which the ground floor functions as shop space and the upper floors as residential quarters) were threatened by the bulldozer in the early 1980s; some were in fact demolished [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. However, with a change in thinking toward a proconservationist stance, the Urban Redevelopment Authority has begun government conservation works and has initiated such works in the private sector since the late 1980s. Many of the elderly residents who lived in squalid conditions in these shophouses have since been moved to HDB apartments elsewhere, primarily in the adjacent Sago Street-Kreta Ayer Road vicinity. Focusing on these as our study areas, we conducted in-depth interviews with residents in 1993 and 1994, tape recording them when we were permitted to and translating them from Mandarin and other Chinese dialects when we had to. Part of our analysis was based on the observations we made as we walked through Tiong Bahru and Chinatown, noting in particular where the elderly congregated and what they did in their meeting places. …

This article chronicles the circumstances that were pivotal to the establishment of a Chinese community in Mexicali, Mexico. The community is reconstructed as a place in 1925, when its population peaked. After assessing the dynamics of recent change and continuity the article concludes that Chinatown in Mexicali arose because of a particular set of intersecting local and external factors, including political, social, and economic considerations, that operated American states that front the international boundary and from countries as distant as Germany, Russia, India, China, and Japan. Some immigrants established agricultural colonies in the rural areas; others formed distinc- tive, frequently segregated enclaves in the emerging cities. Although most of these colonies and enclaves have blended into the host commu- nity, some have persisted to the present; all have left a historical imprint. At a juncture when the geopolitical and economic significance of the borderlands is attracting global attention, there is need to assess and depict accurately the important role that minority populations have played in shaping the region. The Chinese in Mexicali are a compelling case in point. Located 120 miles east of San Diego and Tijuana, adjacent to the American border community of Calexico, Mexicali is the capital of Baja California and a booming city of more than 600,000 residents (Fig. 1). In its historical core, only blocks from the main border crossing, lies one of the largest Chinatowns in Mexico. Locally called La Chinesca, the district was formed shortly after the founding of the town itself in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Chinese were imported to help in the establishment of the cotton industry. Although in Mexicali today there