ancient cities

acialized space occupied by the African American
community, we observe two important processes:
first, a rejection of the label imposed on the community
from the outside and a redefinition of the
community as Bronzeville, and second, a further
racialization of urban space when references are
made to other areas of the city occupied by other
ethnic populations.
Chinatown
Chinatowns are found in major cities around the
globe. In the Philippines and other Southeast
Asian communities, the Chinatowns date to earlier
centuries when trade in the region was dominated
by Chinese merchants; in the United States,
they developed following the large-scale immigration
of cheap Chinese labor needed by mining
and railroad interests in the 1880s. These areas
were regarded with an element of suspicion and
fear by the local population, coupled with a curiosity
and desire to indulge in the pleasures and
vices thought to exist within this racialized
space.
San Francisco’s Chinatown has intrigued tourists
from the very beginning. One of the main
attractions toward the end of the nineteenth century
was a series of opium dens that flourished in
the warren of underground passages beneath the
houses, shops, and restaurants there. In 1877,
Miriam Florence Leslie, wife of the publisher of
Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, toured one such den
with a group of her friends and recorded her
impressions in her book, California: A Pleasure
Trip from Gotham City to the Golden Gate. The
tour guide was a local police officer.
During that period, the overcrowded Chinatowns
were seen as places of vice and cultural insularism
where “unassimilable foreigners” congregated—a
negative racialized space. In recent decades, there
has been a transformation of these neighborhoods
in many cities, and many have emerged as centers
of commercialism and tourism; some also serve as
centers of multiculturalism (espoused in Australia,
Canada, and the United Kingdom) and racial harmony
(especially in Malaysia and Singapore). The
Chinatown example demonstrates that racialized
space may have negative or positive meaning
within the metropolitan system and that the negative
racialized space of the past may emerge as a
Railroad Station
631
positive generator of growth and multiculturism in
the future.
Ray Hutchison
See also Chicago School of Urban Sociology;
Chinatowns; Multicultural Cities; Social Exclusion
Further Readings
Drake, St. Clair and Horace R. Cayton. 1945. Black
Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City.
New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Gotham, Kevin. 2002. Race, Real Estate, and Uneven
Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–
2000. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial
Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the
1980s. New York: Routledge.
Miles, Robert. 1989. Racism. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Reeves, Frank. 1984. British Racial Discourse.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Webster, Yehudi O. 1992. The Racialization of America.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Ra i l R o a d St a t i o n
Railroad stations are simultaneously urban monuments,
workplaces, processing devices that choreograph
mobility, and emotionally charged spaces of
arrival and departure. The significance of railroad
stations to cities can be considered from a number
of different perspectives. First, and from a functional
perspective, this entry considers the place of
railroad stations in relation to the urban tapestry.
Second, and from a practical perspective, it considers
the configuration of railroad stations and how
they organize movement. Third, and from a phenomenological
perspective, it considers the embodied
experience of railroad stations for users.
The Place of Railroad Stations in the City
Considering the relationship between railroad stations
and the wider urban environment, railroad
stations are embedded into complex, intersecting
networks of mobility and constitute important