Immigrants and Urban Planning

By Sigurd Grava, AICP

How do immigrant issues relate to urban planning? If planning is defined as all the concerns that relate to living and working in a city — encompassing the full spectrum of social/economic/political relationships — then the question is quickly answered. As almost all the other presentations at this conference have shown, planners are indeed involved in these fields, and they work together with social and political scientists, economists, and urban managers to address the special needs and consequences presented by the influx of new populations in the city.

But there is one other area of urbanism that is conceded to be more exclusively the province of planning than all the others, and that is spatial or physical planning — the specific concern with the built environment. This is what most planners do by themselves; this is arguably our primary responsibility. This is also an issue that nobody has talked about so far at this conference. How are we planning the built environment with immigrants in mind? Are we doing this at all? What have we done in organizing and equipping neighborhoods to recognize the expectations and requirements of new and coherent populations, particularly in the City of New York which has received so many of them?

The answer to that is easy: nothing. Or, as we say in New York — nada or gurnisht. We let them in, then they are on their own.

This is bothersome. We are very aware of the entry of groups that are attempting to establish homes in our cities, but have different life styles. We have always recognized their contribution to our economy and the richness of our communities. As a society, we sometimes encourage their arrival, sometimes we constrict it. But they do come, ever since the New World has been settled from the outside, and they focus on well known points of entry, New York City being most prominent among them. Occasionally — such as at this conference — we celebrate their presence.

In New York there are districts that have accommodated one wave of immigrants after another: Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Hispanics, Asians. They have replaced each other in succession, and they have taken the same built environment and adopted it to their own needs. How have these immigrants used the physical space that came into their possession? Each of these ethnic groups has had different family compositions, different social structures, different eating habits, different patterns of gathering, different religious practices and rites, different recreational preferences. All of these activities have to be housed in buildings and spaces, yet nothing was built for them. They had to take what they could get and make the best of it. Extended families and clans have lived in standard two-bedroom apartments, hundreds of stores have been converted into churches, bocce and cricket — not to mention soccer — have been played in New York playgrounds, social clubs are found in countless back rooms, an unknown number of workshops have been established in upper floors of tenement buildings. Major and repeated adaptations have been made to the inherited physical inventory to make it suitable for new purposes.

A contemporary Asian sign on an obvious 19th century American building is an admirable example of improvisation and making do with what is available, but it is also testimony to the fact that significant adjustments have had to be made to make the fit. This has been accomplished repeatedly, sometimes brilliantly, but frictions and dislocations have been present. We can laud — as we frequently do — the unsurpassed ability of humans among all other species to survive in strange and hostile environments, and to transform them according to their needs.

Before we proceed further, we should acknowledge a fundamental urban characteristic: the temporary nature of much of land use and urban occupancy. This is painful to do because there is a basic urge to regard permanency as a principal virtue, whether we talk about cities, their elements, or the building that we construct. There are components that should be long-lasting, but that surely does not apply, first, to factories and office buildings that demand replacement as technology and work patterns change. A fixed (or rigid) built inventory creates serious difficulties for service establishments and institutions as they have to accommodate new demands; it may even be a constraint in the living environment where needs are subject to change as well. This is a particular issue with conversion of neighborhoods for new immigrant groups. The built environment becomes obsolete if the new occupants have different needs and expectations.

Let us remind ourselves that there are temporary living arrangements in any city. Hotels are obvious examples, except that the stays are so short that we are not allowed to change the interior arrangements. Apartment hotels are the next step, but of much larger significance are single room occupancy establishments. The latter have acquired a bad odor in New York because of the many abuses encountered, but — nevertheless — it is a building type that has a very large and useful role to play in the urban environment. Almost all of us, at one time or another, have or could have taken advantage of them — when one starts a new job, moves to a new city, is in family transition, or embark on a new life for that matter. That is what an immigrant does.

There are also camps and resorts which are useful at one time or another, and we accept these temporary arrangements as very normal and desirable, and we "break in" the accommodations at least to some extent. Can this concept of transition be extended to neighborhoods?

Working class neighborhoods in old cities have frequently been receiving areas of new immigrants. Many of them were built quickly and poorly. This is a problem because the next generations inherit buildings that wear out rapidly and start to fall apart. Yet, they do not collapse entirely either; the new residents simply have to cope with inferior, sometimes ruinous, stock. Conversions are difficult. If, however, the original inventory has been built solidly, there are problems as well — it is that much more difficult to make modifications to a strong, fixed environment.

It is well documented that "regular" American families are very mobile and change their residences more frequently than in any other country. Immigrants are no different, except that they may be even more nomadic since they have to make repeated adjustments until they are truly settled. The subject for review here, however, is specifically immigrant neighborhoods or ethnic enclaves. They have the interesting characteristic that their residents may be short time transients, using the place as the first foothold to become acquainted with the new situation before they move somewhere else, or they may stay for an entire lifespan. Their children and certainly their grandchildren will not remain in the neighborhood, however. Thus, unless a stream of immigrants with the same ethnicity replenishes the demographic stock, the ethnic enclave will eventually disappear (but the buildings will remain). There is transience in the built environment that may be measured in decades or even generations, but changes will take place unavoidably and naturally.

We have seen this countless times in New York, and therefore it is fair to assume that transience and change in these neighborhoods is a permanent condition. This may not be the case in all cities in America, but it is certainly true in New York, stretching back over centuries. Little Italy once housed thousands of Italian families. Their descendants have almost all moved to other parts of the city or the suburbs. However, a well established service district remains with groceries, restaurants, and retail stores, which attract consumers from far and wide who are not solely of Italian extraction. This place is a significant component within the rich mosaic of New York City, but physically and in terms of urban amenities it is a mess. All the same can be said about Chinatown, only more so. The important difference, however, is that Chinatown is continuously being repopulated by new immigrants coming from Asia, even if all of them are not Chinese. Chinatown has a much longer tenure than most ethnic enclaves, but it has not been there forever either — it is a recognized entity as of the 1880s, replacing the Irish, as it is pushing into the territory of Little Italy today. Palisades Park in New Jersey has been transformed within a few years into an almost exclusively Korean shopping and restaurant center.

As The New York Times reports:

In the first half of the 1990's, new census figures show, enormous numbers of people left New York City for other parts of the United States, and were replaced mostly by people from abroad, trends that experts say continue to further vast changes in the culture and the economy of the region. (March 9, 1996, p. 1)

What the reporters do not add is that the city's neighborhoods will be subject to further pressures and that they will continue to change.

If the policy of the larger society is quick and complete assimilation of any immigrant group, then this discussion is besides the point — let the new residents lose their distinguishing characteristics as rapidly as possible and let them be absorbed in the "regular" city. Under the melting pot theory, by implication, this was the prevailing attitude for a long time, even if it was not explicitly defined in urban planning practice and residential area design. We now know that the melting pot was, at most, a stew that never really congealed into a completely homogenized mass. Nor do we believe today that full assimilation is appropriate or productive. Thus, the process has to follow its own slow course, and we can expect that there will continue to be evolving and changing ethnic enclaves, at least in the principal cities of entry.

What is to be done then? What type of planning actions are to be taken? How do we plan for population groups that are not here yet? We do not even know who they might be, they will certainly not have the same characteristics as ourselves.

Approaching the issue from a purely conceptual point of view, a theoretical scenario could be drafted that would utilize modular housing units, simple frame structures for various enterprises, unencumbered open spaces, and the cores of some "permanent" buildings. A grid of utility lines and other linear services associated with a simple system of surface circulation channels would provide the support infrastructure.

The immediate and rational reaction to the above scenario can only be to call it insane — planning gone off the deep end. Indeed it is not workable because we are not ready to accept transience as a valid principle, because the construction industry is not equipped for it, and — above all — because there are no institutions or instrumentalities that could cope with and manage such a program. We cannot, nor do we wish to, direct specific immigrant groups into specific areas. An institutionalized Durchgangslager (refugee processing camp) is not an attractive concept. We cannot accept this utopian scenario because we do not know at the moment how to do it, and therefore we might as well put it aside. (Yet the immigrants would be able to deal with such an adaptable inventory if they were faced by it.)

The purpose of this review is not to develop a "realistic" program toward the planning of immigrant neighborhoods or ethnic enclaves in New York City, only to rise some issues and probe some concepts. There must be some reasonable approach between the two extremes — do nothing and structure utopias. If such a task were to be addressed — then the following areas of inquiry might be fruitful:

• Adjust the woefully obsolete current zoning ordinance of the city to accommodate as far as possible the needs outlined above.
• Reform the building code at the same time to make temporary structures more acceptable.
• Establish a program through which new resident groups are surveyed as to their facility and service needs; provide planning assistance, encourage them to do things themselves.
• Scrap most attempts to build for eternity, but provide deliberately maximum flexibility in buildings and urban districts so that adjustments can be made readily.

We have reasons to be very concerned about the deterioration of many districts in our central cities. Since these are exactly the most likely first destination points of immigrants, it would make much sense to harness their large amounts of energy and guide them purposefully into tasks that they would do anyway — rebuild the neighborhoods that they occupy.

The last suggestion emerging from this discussion would be for APA, the national organization of urban planners, to institute a research activity addressing this important but so far neglected dimension of American cities.

Sigurd Grava arrived in New York City as an immigrant in 1950 on a Liberty ship. He worked his way through college, building the suburbs of Long Island in one of the traditional immigrant occupations. He later became a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, and Technical Director of Planning at Parsons Brinckerhoff, an international planning and engineering firm.