Latino City ─ Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots

Latinos and the City provides a critical introduction to the main theoretical debates and key thinkers in the field of urban revitalization, specifically new urbanism and creative class models

This book provides a wide-ranging critical analysis of the last two-decade’s highest profiled and debated models of urban revitalization in the United States and the fresh challenges that we encounter in applying the models in Latino urban cores. The book explores how creative class and new urbanism revitalization projects combine to form revitalization projects in a city that considered one of the United States’ most Mexican communities; Santa Ana in California. It analyze how revitalization plans re-imagine and alienate a place; explores the type of businesses that are in a downtown area during revitalization and how clusters of new businesses are encroaching and gentrifying; and describes how community-based participation approaches address the needs and aspirations of lower-income Latino urban areas undergoing revitalization. The book initiates new lines of analysis and incorporate contemporary developments in the critique of these models for Latino inner city neighborhood and downtown revitalization in the current period of socio-economic and cultural change.

Erualdo R. Gonzalez’s is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He specializes in community development, public policy, urban health, and Latina/o-Chicana/o Studies. This includes community planning methods, community participation, healthy communities, and racial and intra-ethnic politics. His emerging research agenda is childhood obesity and the built environment.