Urban and Regional Planning and Design

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Author: search.filters.author.Irazabal, ClaraSubject: search.filters.subject.Los Angeles

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    Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico
    (Taylor & Francis, 2007) Irazabal, Clara; Gomez-Barris, Macarena
    Conceived and owned by Korean investors, the shopping mall Plaza Mexico in Southern California embodies a unique case of invention and commodification of traditions for locally-bound immigrants and US citizens of Mexican descent, showing the force of the contemporary processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorilisation of identities and the recreations of imagined conceptions of homeland. The Plaza is a unique architectural recreation of Mexican regional and national icons that make its patrons feel ‘as if you were in Mexico’. Plaza Mexico produces a space of diasporic, bounded tourism, whereby venture capitalists opportunistically reinvent tradition within a structural context of constrained immigrant mobility. While most of the contemporary theory of tourism, travel and place emphasise the erosion of national boundaries and the fluidity of territories, the case of Plaza Mexico brings us to appreciate this phenomenon and its opposite as well – the strengthening of national borders and their impact on the (in)mobility of millions of individuals.
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    Beyond ‘Latino New Urbanism’: advocating ethnurbanisms
    (Taylor & Francis, 2012) Irazabal, Clara
    This paper discusses the notion of Latino New Urbanism (LNU) and reflects on the significance of ethnic-based reformulations of urban practices and living preferences in Los Angeles and the potential these have for the transformation of policy making and development practices in the region and beyond. Can LNU truly avoid the pitfalls of New Urbanism and represent a new way of conceiving urbanism – one that is explicit and inclusive in its ways of recognizing and addressing ethnoracial and class diversity? Can LNU instead be intentionally or unintentionally used to mask some structural social problems that Latina/os face in the US? All of this poses questions related to the assessment of LNU in the context of tensions between structure vs. agency, diluting vs. celebrating ethnoracial differences, and oppressive vs. liberating urban design and community-building practices. Based on those considerations, I offer an alternate notion of multiple and evolving ethnurbanisms.