Ethnoburbia
“Suburbs are bland, right? They’re boring, monotonous, devoid of life and culture: homogeneous.
Nope. Not on the last count, at least. Suburbia is becoming increasingly diverse. More and more middle-class immigrants are skipping traditional ethnic enclaves and heading straight for the boonies, where strip malls are now filled with ethnic businesses, bubble-tea parlours dot the landscape and schools fill up with kids from any number of different backgrounds. Forget suburbia; this is ethnoburbia …”
Keeping up with the Dosanjhs: The Rise of North America’s Ethnoburbs by Christopher DeWolf (via)
See also:
Ethnoburb versus Chinatown: Two Types of Urban Ethnic Communities in Los Angeles by Wei Li
“Ethnoburbs are suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas. They are multiethnic communities, in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration, but does not necessarily comprise a majority. Ethnoburbs are created through deliberate efforts of that group within changing global/national/local contexts. They function as a settlement type that replicates some features of an enclave, and some features of a suburb lacking a specific ethnic identity. Ethnoburbs coexist along with traditional ethnic ghettos/enclaves in inner cities in contemporary American society.”
Mobile Chinatowns: the future of community in a global space of flows by Vincent Miller
“How is living and being in an ethnoburb different from living in a Chinatown? Through the use of in-depth interview data of Chinese-Canadian residents and users of the Richmond, British Columbia Chinese ethnoburb, I argue in this paper that the fundamental experiential characteristic of the Chinese ethnoburb is one of mobility, which results in a fundamentally different ethnic social space, characterised by the experience of movement and the ability to be ‘elsewhere’. In this sense, Richmond can be seen as a ’space of flows’ rather that an ‘ethnic enclave’. This is illustrated through and an examination of the mobilities of bodies, objects, and imaginations within the ’space’ of the Richmond ethnoburb.”