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Gentrification and Diversity

Rebranding Milan's Chinatown

  • Book
  • © 2023

Overview

Authors:
  1. Lidia Katia C. Manzo

    1. Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

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  • Explores the material, societal, and symbolic processes at play
  • States that longitudinal analysis help the reader to understand the unfolding of neighborhood change across the time
  • Includes methodological section on how to conduct urban research effectively

Part of the book series: The Urban Book Series (UBS)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxiii
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  2. Introduction

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages 1-14

  3. Milan Chinatown: The Defamation of Place in the Making of Territorial Stigma

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages 15-34

  4. Hybridity and Chineseness in the Global City

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages 35-48

  5. Diversity in Neighborhood Change: Conflict and Resistance

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages 49-73

  6. Gentrification in Multiethnic Neighborhoods

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages 75-95

  7. The “Style” of Milan (New) Chinatown

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages 97-107

  8. Engaging with Multiple Voices: Video Ethnography and Urban Critical Research

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages 109-132

  9. Correction to: The “Style” of Milan (New) Chinatown

    • Lidia Katia C. Manzo
    Pages C1-C1

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 133-135
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Keywords

About this book

This book examines lived experiences of making, inhabiting and appropriating space, in relation to the upscale commercial gentrification of the Milan Chinatown. It inquires about the significance of diverse neighborhoods as emerging multicultural spaces? Are we talking about neighborhood entrepreneurs providing services and entertainment to create local urban culture, or are we talking about political/economic forces in the commodification of ethnic and cultural diversity? Starting from these questions, this book uses innovative visual ethnography and critical urban research to understand the relationship between community-based entrepreneurs, local politics, residents’ sense of belonging, and patterns of city branding strategies in Milan, the fashion capital of Italy.

This book is intended for researchers and students in the fields of sociology, anthropology, urban studies, geography, and urban planning. Additionally, it is appropriate for practitioners in the fields ofurban planning, housing policies, and community development.

Reviews

“Manzo’s Gentrification and Diversity urges readers to look at the fashion capital of Milan through the lens of ethnic diversity, class and urban transformation. Based on a decade of ethnographic work in Milan’s changing Chinatown, the book takes the reader on a journey of aesthetics, capital speculation and urban contestations to show how the Chinese traders and entrepreneurs who would have been displaced by gentrification in fact strategically navigate the racialized restrictions to reclaim their place. Gentrification and Diversity is an exemplar of how Chinatowns around the world are being reinvented locally and globally today amidst continued debates over how Chinese identity and culture should be represented in such spaces.” (Prof. Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore)

“The author problematizes the notion of diversity in the southern European context, which is a much-needed addition to the existing scholarship on gentrification in traditional ethnic enclaves. The power dynamics and clashes of interests depicted in this book provide us significant and timely insights on how the social construct of a sanitized, aestheticized ethnic space for consumption was built upon a centuries' old anti-Asian milieu and refreshed by the fear of a rising China. Furthermore, Manzo skilfully illustrates how Chineseness as a cultural discourse is strategically mobilized in narratives of urban inclusion and exclusion.” (Prof. Fang Xu, Continuing Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA, The USA)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Lidia Katia C. Manzo

About the author

Lidia Katia C. Manzo is Assistant Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations at the University of Milan. She has been recently awarded with the Marie Sklodowska Curie European Individual Fellowship 2020–2023 to develop the project CITY-OF-CARE at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the same University. She is interested in the application of ethnography and participatory methods in critical urban cultural studies to reinforce our knowledge of how discrimination, segregation, and hegemony work spatially.

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