Population change means fewer Asians are living in Chinatowns, but more Asians now own properties within them.

For over 150 years, Chinatowns have played an important role in large US cities. But, with increasing gentrification and urban change, Chinatowns are changing. In new research focusing on Chinatowns in Boston and Philadelphia, Arthur Acolin and Domenic Vitiello find that while the number of Asian residents has fallen, the share of Asian ownership has risen. Ethnic neighborhoods have important ..

Recent Immigration to Philadelphia: Regional Change in a Re-Emerging Gateway

Analyzes 1970-2006 trends in the growth and characteristics of the city's immigrant population. Presents data by regional origin, settlement area, arrival year, citizenship status, age, gender, education, and language, and in comparison with other cities

Nature and the city : ecohistory and environmental planning in Philadelphia, 1681-2000

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-97)."Nature" and "the city," as historical and practical ideas, have a complicated relationship in the human mind. In North America, since at least the seventeenth century, enduring contradictions have existed between visions of urban ecology in ideal and crisis terms, as well as between environmentalist and economic objectives. This thesis explores these tensions, tracing the course of ecohistory and environmental planning in the city and region of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, over more than three centuries and examining current challenges and practices of ecological planning as outgrowths of that history. In establishing his colony in the late seventeenth century, William Penn articulated a vision of a lush city of natural paradise in a region where land values and civic investment would be evenly distributed between town and countryside. However, Penn's plans contrasted with colonial Philadelphia's eventually dense, squalid city of merchants and immigrants, surrounded by country estates belonging to the region's elite families. In the industrial era, similar contradictions are found between interpretations of the city and its machines as beneficent or environmentally destructive forces. Great tensions exist between the city's growth along a rectilinear grid plan and the region's underlying geology. In the twentieth century, zoning and regional plans have aimed to foster "healthy" and balanced ecologies, while rapidly expanding suburbs conceived in a pastoral image have destroyed the "nature" that they attempt to inhabit. The ghettos of the inner city's declining industrial districts, meanwhile, have been plagued by high concentrations of pollution and homes sinking into creeks. Finally, in the later twentieth century, neighborhood and regional planners have confronted the problems of suburban sprawl and decaying ghettos with visions of alternative urban ecologies that are similar to - and sometimes explicitly reference - the plans of William Penn. Challenges and practices of environmental planning in Philadelphia may thus be conceived as parts of a long-term ecohistory of contradictions between environmentalist agendas and forces of economic growth, between visions of natural harmony and crises of environmental depredation.by Domenic Vitiello.M.C.P

Migrants, Communities, and Culture

New immigrants have already changed Philadelphia\u27s cultural scene—particularly in urban neighborhoods. This brief uses three types of evidence— a small-area database of cultural participation, a survey of residents of North Philadelphia and Camden, NJ, and a survey of artists living or working in the metropolitan area—to explore migrant cultural engagement. Taken together, SIAP’s evidence on artists and cultural participants paints a portrait of migrants and foreign-born residents who are positively oriented toward cultural expression but frustrated by institutional, spatial, and socio-economic barriers. Can culture serve as a means of linking new Philadelphians to other social institutions

The Sanctuary City

In The Sanctuary City, Domenic Vitiello argues that sanctuary means much more than the limited protections offered by city governments or churches sheltering immigrants from deportation. It is a wider set of protections and humanitarian support for vulnerable newcomers. Sanctuary cities are the places where immigrants and their allies create safe spaces to rebuild lives and communities, often through the work of social movements and community organizations or civil society. Philadelphia has been an important center of sanctuary and reflects the growing diversity of American cities in recent decades. One result of this diversity is that sanctuary means different things for different immigrant, refugee, and receiving communities. Vitiello explores the migration, settlement, and local and transnational civil society of Central Americans, Southeast Asians, Liberians, Arabs, Mexicans, and their allies in the region across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together, their experiences illuminate the diversity of immigrants and refugees in the United States and what is at stake for different people, and for all of us, in our immigration debates

Engineering the metropolis: The Sellers family and industrial Philadelphia

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Philadelphia\u27s millers, mechanics, and engineers developed businesses, institutions, and infrastructure that made their city a national and global center of manufacturing, the “workshop of the world.” Some eight generations of craftspeople, engineers, and industrialists descended from Samuel Sellers—a Quaker wire weaver who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682—offer a window into the origins, growth, and decline of the industrial metropolis. They ran leading firms in the region\u27s most important manufacturing sectors—milling in the eighteenth century; textiles, steam engines, locomotives, machine tools, and steel in the nineteenth century. Through schools, technical societies, trade associations, investment pools, and a host of other public and private associations, the Sellers and their colleagues institutionalized technological innovation and the growth of industrial Philadelphia. Surveying farms and turnpikes in the colonial era, projecting canals and railroads across the Americas in the nineteenth century, and producing everything from fire engines to shipbuilding tools to the steel frames of bridges and skyscrapers, they played key roles in physically producing the metropolis and shaping its relationships with other regions of the nation and the world. The Sellers thus present both an intensive case study in corporate and family capitalism and an expansive perspective on the business, institutional, and technological networks that coordinated the development of the industrial metropolis

Engineering the metropolis: The Sellers family and industrial Philadelphia

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Philadelphia\u27s millers, mechanics, and engineers developed businesses, institutions, and infrastructure that made their city a national and global center of manufacturing, the “workshop of the world.” Some eight generations of craftspeople, engineers, and industrialists descended from Samuel Sellers—a Quaker wire weaver who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682—offer a window into the origins, growth, and decline of the industrial metropolis. They ran leading firms in the region\u27s most important manufacturing sectors—milling in the eighteenth century; textiles, steam engines, locomotives, machine tools, and steel in the nineteenth century. Through schools, technical societies, trade associations, investment pools, and a host of other public and private associations, the Sellers and their colleagues institutionalized technological innovation and the growth of industrial Philadelphia. Surveying farms and turnpikes in the colonial era, projecting canals and railroads across the Americas in the nineteenth century, and producing everything from fire engines to shipbuilding tools to the steel frames of bridges and skyscrapers, they played key roles in physically producing the metropolis and shaping its relationships with other regions of the nation and the world. The Sellers thus present both an intensive case study in corporate and family capitalism and an expansive perspective on the business, institutional, and technological networks that coordinated the development of the industrial metropolis

From Farm to Nuisance

Municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits played a central part in defining city planning's role in urban ecosystems, economies, and public health. This article examines the regulation of animal agriculture since the eighteenth century in four cities: Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Across the nineteenth century, municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits set the tone for the planning profession, aligning it with the field of public health in creating a hygienic city. In the efforts to untangle animal agriculture from waste management, public space, and urban food supply, urban authorities employed some of the first land-use regulations in the United States, shaping new planning powers. Ordinances banning slaughterhouses, piggeries, and dairies culminated with zoning as planning became a profession. These regulations ultimately allowed planners to transform cities and their food environments by dismantling a system in which animals and their caretakers among the urban poor had played integral parts in food production, processing, and municipal waste management. Unpacking the objectives, debates, and impacts of these early regulations reveals enduring tensions and challenges as planners today seek to reweave animal agriculture into cities