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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacob

    908 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.

    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

  • Gentrification Essay

    1240 Words  | 3 Pages

    Within public health sciences there has been a tendency to ascribe much geographical variation to compositional differences, and until recently there has been resistance towards contextual explanations. Contextual explanations of health are frequently rejected due to the fear of falling prey to the ecological fallacy. The ecological fallacy deduces that relationships observed at an aggregate level will be observed in the same direction and magnitude at the individual level. When observing the relationship between the health of African Americans and residential segregation, what may be true for large groups measured in the aggregate may not hold true on the individual level. Not all individuals are displaced as a result of gentrification and not all of those that are displaced remain in a situation where they are destitute.

    Read More

  • Being Poor Black And American Summary

    1183 Words  | 3 Pages

    In his article Being Poor, Black and American, William Julius Wilson discusses the political, economic and cultural forces that have led to concentrated poverty in neighborhoods. In his work, Wilson not only explores the social and economic inequalities rooting from social policies on neighborhoods, but also the changes on the labor market and collective culture. Similarly, on my tour to the East neighborhood, I also became aware of these political, economic and cultural factors that had affected the poor regions of Oakland. These included the infrastructure buildings like the freeways, the lack of stable jobs and the collective culture of inner city families.

    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

  • Detroit Food Sovereignty Essay

    745 Words  | 2 Pages

    Since we are focusing on the city of Detroit, the citizens of Detroit are the ones most affected, however we must take it a step further and look at what group or groups of Detroit citizens are affected. More specifically, the people who are having issues with access to healthier foods and lack a way of defining how they’re getting these foods are the people who fall in the poverty class of Detroit, which majority is made up of African Americans. This is generally the group who suffers the most in the majority of U.S cities. Some of the root causes specifically in Detroit are due to the deindustrialization and the movement to the suburbs, corruption in the Detroit government that led to bankruptcy and an overall negative view on the city. These are some of the key causes to the poverty of the city which is important to state, as poverty levels correlate with people who lack access to healthy

    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

  • Gentrification Essay

    1813 Words  | 4 Pages

    Gentrification has been blamed for the displacement of poor communities. However, in a city gentrification has other important characteristics. First, it impacts the demographic of an area in the sense that there is an increase in middle-class income population. Additionally, Randy Shaw notes in his article that demographic shift includes reduction in households’ sizes as well as decline in minorities (Shaw). Most of gentrified areas appear to have whites replacing blacks and other minority

    Read More

  • Urban Inequality

    2164 Words  | 5 Pages

    In Urban Studies two schools of academic thought answer the “urban question”: the ecological and urban political economy schools. I will argue that the political economy perspective better allows us to fully grasp the “urban question” where society and space mutually encompass each other and allow us to better explain and address urban inequality. First, I will develop a working definition of “the urban question”. Second, I will write on the ecological school’s view of the “urban” question and how their vista explains but inadequately addresses urban inequalities. Third, I will review the political economy (social-spatial dialect) landscape of the “urban question” and how their panorama explains and gives better analyses of urban inequality.

    Read More

  • Importance Of Regional Development

    1074 Words  | 3 Pages

    Regional development is essential to overcome the social evils related to the localization of industries in developed areas alone, which results in overcrowding, noise and congestion. These adversely affect the health and efficiency of inhabitants.

    Read More

  • Impacts Of Urbanization

    396 Words  | 1 Pages

    As the result of urbanization, cities have more problems to overcome such as pollution, overpopulation, drug abuse, congestion, crime, poverty, traffic jam, slum areas, and many more. There must be something to solve these problems. Government and citizens should be involved because taking care of city problems can’,t be done entirely by government. The community can be even more successful because it deals directly with problem areas.

    Read More

More about Urban City Stereotypes

Open Document