Urban City Stereotypes

1905 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Poverty and food shortage

Stereotypes of urban cities commonly reflect the portrayal of minorities which they are seen as poor and criminals in comparison to the middle and upper Caucasian class. Such stereotypes are an effect of environmental racism. However, to divert from the spread of negative and racist stereotypes, the local government must reflect a better city. In this paper, I am going to explain the benefits of new regionalism in relation to urban cities and minorities. Having influence from Manuel Pastor and Myron Orfield, minorities need attention from their local government to better their lives. I will argue for the practice of sustainable farming for urban cities as a positive reinforcement for urban growth. Sustainable farming provides an opportunity for urban minorities for self-government and self-business. Lastly, I discuss the themes that occur in Don Peck's article How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America and further argue that Americans need a necessary change in the government and economy to become prosper.

Local governments should focus differences and problems in urban communities through the use of new regionalism. New regionalism is defined as the stress placed on the region as a scale for understanding and addressing urban problems (Pastor 75). Urban cities are more dependent on their local government than the state government because of their smaller jurisdiction. The local government is responsible for the city's problems because they are able to focus more on the city and its people. Moreover, it is the local government's priority to recognize the negative impacts of the city's environment and then transform the city to a more livable community (Livable Cities). Within the cities boundaries, the local government have t...

... middle of paper ...

...definite and obvious prejudice against race. Such statistics illustrates the income and class level of each race portraying the majority of white neighborhoods are middle to upper class while black neighborhoods are part of the lower class. Additionally, regional food equity is affected by transportation. Urban communities have a poor transpiration system limiting travel and means of arrival to any location (Department of Transportation Environmental Justice). Transportation and regional food equity are interdependent: without a good transportation system, inner-city dweller do not have means of getting good quality produce and food. Limitations of a city's transportation generalizes negative images of their people through conveyance of people's affordability and access. Ultimately, to have food equity, society must respond to environmental racism and urban sprawl.

Show More
Related

  • ook Review: The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

    724 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the book The Great Inversion, author Alan Ehrenhalt reveals the changes that are happing in urban and suburban areas. Alan Ehrenhalt the former editor of Governing Magazine leads us to acknowledge that there is a shift in urban and suburban areas. This revelation comes as the poorer, diverse, city dwellers opt for the cookie cutter, shanty towns at the periphery of American cities known as the suburbs. In similar fashion the suburbanites, whom are socioeconomic advantaged, are looking to migrate into the concrete jungles, of America, to live an urban lifestyle. Also, there is a comparison drawn that recognizes the similarities of cities and their newer, more affluent, residents, and those cities of Europe a century ago and their residents. In essence this book is about the demographic shifts in Urban and Suburban areas and how these changes are occurring.

    Read More

  • The Pros and Cons of Privatizing Government Services in Canada

    2232 Words  | 5 Pages

    Municipal control or an alternative delivery method? This is the question that has intrigued all levels of local government and created intense debates between taxpayers across municipalities. The services that municipalities provide are often vital to the existence of a local area. The issues of accountability, cost savings, quality of service and democracy often arise when choosing the best options to deliver services to a municipal area. In recent years the concepts of privatization, alternative service delivery and public-private partnerships are often promoted as ways cut down on overburdened annual city budgets and promote a higher quality of service to citizens. Municipalities have historically always provided basic services such as fire protection, water purification/treatment and recreational facilities. However, would private companies or another municipality be able to better deliver the same services more efficiently or at a lower cost? The city or town often provides a political grass roots approach to most local problems. Municipalities are better positioned and have a wider scope to provide services to their constituents in order to ensure quality of service that does not erode accountability and transparency, or drive the municipality deeper into debt.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Black Picket Fences By Mary Pattillo

    601 Words  | 2 Pages

    Specifically, she found that members of the Black middle class still face income and wealth disadvantages, housing segregation, limited job opportunities, racial discrimination, family disruption, and crime victimization, among other social problems, at a higher rate than their White middle-class counterparts. As a result, Pattillo (2013) concluded that Black middle-class neighborhoods often “sit as a kind of buffer between core black poverty areas and whites” (p. 4). Otherwise put, the Black middle class are situated in a position between middle-class Whites and underclass Blacks, where they are not at parity with the former, and are only slightly better than the

    Read More

  • Gentrification and White Preference in the Rhode Island Housing Market

    929 Words  | 2 Pages

    The loss of public housing and the expanse of the wealth gap throughout the state of Rhode Island has been a rising issue between the critics and supporters of gentrification, in both urban areas such as Providence and wealthy areas such as the island of Newport, among other examples. With the cities under a monopoly headed by the wealth of each neighborhood, one is left to wonder how such a system is fair to all groups. Relatively speaking, it isn’t, and the only ones who benefit from such a system are white-skinned. With the deterioration of the economic status of Rhode Island, and especially in the city of Providence, more and more educated Caucasians are leaving to seek a more fertile economic environment.

    Read More

  • A Perspective Community: The Anacostia Area

    890 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the twentieth century, governmental agencies and private developers acting together cleared out the central city to make room for the federal government. The government was able to do this through its unique economic and legislative relationship to the city, and through a heightened symbolic architectural and verbal language which supported its valorization. The symbolic language and the government's dominance in the local economy are mutually supportive. Symbolism removes ownership of the city from local residents and makes it national. It also masks the federal government's failure to prove economically beneficial to all sections of the city and to all its races and classes, as a 'trickle down' theory of dominant economies argues. Because of the government's importance in the local economy, its symbolic self-representation goes unchallenged.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Heartland And The Rural Youth

    1437 Words  | 3 Pages

    Now, a normal sized town contains fast-food joints, supermarkets, malls, and superstores, but a small town lacks that appeal. The small-town could be the most beautiful landscape known to man, but lack the necessary luxuries in life that a typical American would benefit from. Carr and Kefalas make this statement that emphasizes the town’s lack of appeal, “Indeed the most conspicuous aspects of the towns landscape may be the very things that are missing; malls, subdivisions, traffic and young people” (26). The authors clearly state that they realize that towns, such as the Heartland, are hurting because of the towns’ lack of modernization. For all intents and purposes, the town’s lack of being visually pleasing is driving away probable citizens, not only the native youth, and possible future employee’s away from a possible internship with the town. The citizens with a practice or business hurt from the towns inability to grow up and change along with the rest of the world, yet the town doesn’t realize what bringing in other businesses could potentially do for their small town. Creating more businesses such as malls, superstores and supermarkets would not only drive business up the roof, but it’ll also bring in revenue and draw the

    Read More

  • Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling The Achievement Gap By Jennifer Morton

    808 Words  | 2 Pages

    Morton explains that political, institutional, and structural factors lead to the segregation of poverty in minority communities because of their lack of access to educational and health service, reliable public transportation, and job (Morton 275). Morton recognizes that the achievement gap goes much deeper than the education realm and she believes

    Read More

  • Pros And Cons Of Gentrification And Chicago

    921 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mystique Caston Ms. Jefferson English 22 february 2016 Gentrification and Chicago Gentrification and chicago “Gentrification refers to trends in the neighborhood development that tend to attract more affluent residents, and in the instances concentrates scale commercial investment. ”(Bennet,).This means that gentrification can change how a neighborhood is ran or even how much income the community takes in depending on what businesses come in and what class of people decide to invest into that community. In this paper i will be discussing gentrification and and poverty, pros and cons of gentrification, relationships due to gentrification, conflict due to gentrification, reactions/ feelings or of small business owners about

    Read More

  • Fair Response By Erika Blackshear: Article Analysis

    1400 Words  | 3 Pages

    Looking at how food deserts and swamps are more prevalent in lower class neighborhoods we can start to see the inequality, in terms of healthy food availability, between social classes. Shouldn’t something as important as healthy food be available to everyone? One would think yes but for the underclass the idea of “healthy food” can be somewhat of a foreign concept. The principle of equality has long been closely associated with idea of fairness. In Erika Blackshear’s article, Public Values, Health Inequality, and Alternative Notions of a “Fair” Response, she examines the publics values as they relate to social inequalities in health. In the article, she states “people are owed roughly equal prospects for a good life, including prospects for

    Read More

  • Southside Flats: A Neighborhood Portrait

    1505 Words  | 4 Pages

    Levine, Mark V. 1994. “’A Third-World City in the First World’: Social Exclusion, Racial Inequality, and Susatinable Development in Baltimore,” Pp. 123-56 in The Social Sustainability of Cities edited by M. Polese and R. Stren. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Read More

  • New York City Political System Analysis

    878 Words  | 2 Pages

    Similar to a well oiled machine, a political system is concerned with processing the demands of a society to then provide the goods and services demanded while ensuring its own establishment (Berg 1). However, considering that the idea of a political system is a social construct, its form is subject to a myriad of complex and conflicting forces. The most palpable force is that of a city’s financial needs. Any locale has the burden of satisfying the demands of its constituents with limited resources. In addition to having limited resources, urban cities are also usually comprised of many diverse ethnic backgrounds with different demands and needs. Equitable distribution of limited resources to different ethnic and social backgrounds could have

    Read More

  • Donut Effect: The City Of Detroit

    257 Words  | 1 Pages

    The author applies a blend of personal experience as historical research to approach the complex and unique ‘donut effect’ the city of Detroit is facing. Safransky summarizes the hardships that the predominantly African-American population face in inner city Detroit. Citizens are forced to squat in abandoned homes where others must grow their own food in gardens because grocery stores gouge basic commodity prices. She faults current conditions back to the 1950’s, when the automotive industry began to decline. The “white flight” of white families left for the suburbs and the poorer blacks were stuck in central locations. This in turn created the ‘donut effect’, where white people amalgamated in the outer ring through the suburbs, and African-Americans

    Read More

  • Stereotypes In The Ghetto

    1757 Words  | 4 Pages

    The houses are run down, the windows are not clean. If the storm door is not propped up against the house, the screen is missing and the white frame is varying shades of brown and black. There are no flowers in the yards. The yards don 't even have grass! This is the stereotypical representation of the Ghetto. The image, usually includes half naked dirty faced children, a few stray dogs and a broken down car in the front yard. That is just the environment. The portrayal of the people who live there is even more dismal. Popular media portrays all Black people as products of the ghetto environment. They are portrayed as uneducated, unemployed, uncouth and unconcerned about their state of affairs. Happilyhanging on street corners, whiling the day away, smoking weed and drinking beer from brown paper bags. The truth is that most black or

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Gentrification: A Positive Good For Communities

    1003 Words  | 3 Pages

    In other words, it’s very similar to the “great advantage” of European powers over Native Americans and westward expansion”(Wharton). Wharton conveys that gentrification is a system built to allow the more powerful group to apathetically take the resources they desire with no immediate consequences. In contrast to the negatives of gentrification, some people view gentrification as the only effective way to “revitalize” low-income urban communities. In the article, “Gentrification: A Positive Good For Communities” Turman situates the piece around the opinion that gentrification is not as awful as the negative connotation surrounding it.

    Read More

  • Stereotypes In The Philadelphia

    705 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the play, “The Philadelphia” by David Ives took place in New York at a Restaurant. The main topic of this play was Stereotypes. The type of stereotypes in this play where not the offensive ones, it is the type where there can be a group of friends and they would laugh if it was to come up in their conversations. The three main characters where Al, Mark and the waitress. All three of these characters had a huge roll in the poem. Al was the laid back one from California, he did not realize that he was not in California till the very end. Mark was Al’s friend. Mark was the frazzled that needed guidance and assurance to where he was at. The Waitress was the one that enforced the “Philadelphia” stereotype. In order to make this a successful poem

    Read More

More about Urban City Stereotypes

Open Document