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Place-making or place-claiming? Creating a ‘Latino Quarter’ in Oakland, California

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Abstract

Proposals for higher-density development in established neighbourhoods are frequently opposed by local community members who argue that the existing ‘character’ of a place would be damaged or destroyed. This article considers the use of these community-based understandings of character as a tool for actively shaping processes of urban change. The article relates a case study of the Californian district of Fruitvale, where recent processes of redevelopment were driven by community perceptions of a ‘Latino character’. The article finds that this existing Latino character was used to great effect as a design tool in Fruitvale, but in a way that can be seen as essentialist and socially divisive; a Latino character here was deployed at the expense of alternative conceptions of Fruitvale as ‘multicultural’. Reflecting on the case through theories of place and social difference, the article raises questions about the politics of character, and the uses and abuses of the term in urban planning and design practice.

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Notes

  1. The terms ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ are used interchangeably by the US Census Bureau to refer to US residents of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin (US Census Bureau, 2011). In the US Census, people who identify their origin as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race. In this article, the term ‘Latino’ is used instead of ‘Hispanic’, because Latino was the term most commonly used in social discourse about Fruitvale and the term that Fruitvale's community members most often used in interviews, including, to describe themselves. According to US Census data, the majority of Latino residents in Fruitvale are of Mexican origin.

  2. The research formed part of an Australian Research Council Project entitled ‘The Character of Urban Intensification’ (LP0669652), which was funded from 2006–2010.

  3. Emphasis was on speaking to practitioners about how concepts of character had shaped the process of change in Fruitvale, but several local residents were also interviewed and an open-invite focus group session was held in the local public library. However, it proved difficult to attract local residents to participate in the research, particularly people not of Latino or Hispanic origin. One interviewee was African-American and one was of Asian origin, the remainder of the practitioners and residents interviewed were white (including many that identified themselves as Latino). While it is accepted that 15 interviewees is a small sample size, participants were key players involved in, or affected by, the planning and design process and were targeted as such. In addition, the views expressed at interviews were tested against the data generated through the mapping and content analysis in Fruitvale, as well as the findings from other case studies in the wider project, increasing the reliability of the research findings.

  4. See Orozco et al (2008, 2011) for more detail on the Unity Council. One point worth noting here, however, is that although generally known as the ‘Unity Council’, the CDC's official name is the ‘Spanish Speaking Unity Council’ (Unity Council, n.d. b).

  5. The redevelopment of the parking lot as Fruitvale Village was quite complex. Through the planning process, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed that formalised the relationship between the key stakeholders: the Unity Council, the City of Oakland and BART. The redevelopment then involved a land swap, with the transfer of the site for the proposed parking lot from BART to the Unity Council and the transfer of another site to the south of the BART line in the opposite direction. In 1996, a not-for-profit subsidiary of the Unity Council, known as the Fruitvale Development Corporation, was established to serve as the developer of the Fruitvale Village. The FDC was a separate legal entity to the Unity Council, but staff were shared. The FDC, as a subsidiary of the Unity Council, will simply be referred to as the Unity Council in this article. See Orozco et al (2008, 2011) for more detail on the development process, the Unity Council and the Fruitvale Development Corporation.

  6. 20 per cent of these dwellings are non-market homes for local residents earning less than 80 per cent of the district's median income.

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Acknowledgements

This research formed part of the Australian Research Council Linkage project, ‘The Character of Urban Intensification’ (LP0669652), which was funded from 2006 to 2010. The author would like to thank Emma Rowden, Ian Woodcock, T. J. Davison, Crystal Legacy and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

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  1. City Futures Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW 2052, Australia

    Gethin Thomas Davison

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Davison, G. Place-making or place-claiming? Creating a ‘Latino Quarter’ in Oakland, California. Urban Des Int 18, 200–216 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2012.37

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