From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: New Asian Communities in Pacific Rim Countries

From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb focuses on the migration, settlement, and adaptation of Chinese and other Asian immigrants and their impacts on the transformation of metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These stories of the interactivity of Asian “people and place” in four nation-states are framed within the larger context of spatial and social patterns, migration, acculturation/assimilation, and racialization theories, and emerging landscapes in the inner cities and suburbs of metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, and Auckland. The book's primary arguments center on revisioning traditional “assimilationist” models of the Chicago School with the context of today's evolving metropolis. Other key elements include immigrant and refugee policies, new theories of ethnic settlement, and urban and suburban immigrant landscape forms.

Nine chapters document the experiences of Asian immigrants and refugees–rich and poor, old and new. Their communities vary from no identifiable residential cluster (Vietnamese in Northern Virginia) to multiple residential and business clusters in both inner city and suburbs (Koreans in Los Angeles, Chinese in Toronto) to the largest suburban Chinese residential and business concentration (the San Gabriel Valley of suburban Los Angeles) and the “high-tech Mecca” of the U.S., if not the world (Silicon Valley), whose growth has been inseparable from workers, professionals, and entrepreneurs of Asian descents who are often local residents as well.

Rich in detail and broad in scope, From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb is the first book to focus exclusively on the Asian immigrant communities in multiethnic suburbs. It effectively demonstrates the complexity of contemporary Asian immigrant and refugee groups and the strength of their communities across the Pacific Rim. It will be welcomed by a wide range of readers with interests in Asian American studies, urban geography, the Chinese diaspora, immigration, and transnationalism.

Contributors: Richard Bedford, Kevin Dunn, David W. Edgington, Michael A. Goldberg, Elsie Ho, Thomas A. Hutton, Hans Dieter Laux, Wei Li, Lucia Lo, John R. Logan, Edward J. W. Park, Suzannah Roberts, Christopher J. Smith, Günter Thieme, Joseph S. Wood.

• Wei Li, Editor