An African-American child at a segregated drinking fountain on a courthouse lawn, North Carolina, US 1938

source: en.wikipedia.org

“SOCIAL DISCRIMINATION OF DIFFERENT ETHNIC IDENTITIES IN MULTICULTURAL

SOCIETIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON URBAN CULTURE”

URBAN SOCIOLOGY 2022/2023

MONIKA NASKRĘT SEM V
CULTURE AND ITS DEFINITION

1. a way of life typical of a group, particular way of

doing things

2. system of symbols, meaning and cognitive

schemata transmitted through symbolic codes

3. set of adaptive strategies for survival related to the

ecological setting and its resources

"Culture is the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate behavior." - James Spradley, Anthropologist
PRODUCTION OF SPACE

The production of space begins when indigenous

people settle in a particular landscape and begin their
existence.

Indigenous residents as well as immigrants are all

actively shaping the urban landscape.
TERRITORIAL HISTORIES BASED ON RACE AND GENDER

01 Discrimination is the act of making unjustified distinctions

between people based on the groups, classes, or other
categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong.

02 People may be discriminated on the basis of race,

gender, age, religion, disability, or sexual orientation,
as well as other categories. All of these things affect
people’s access to urban cultural landscape.

“Social life structures territory...and territory shapes social life” - Michael Dear and Jennifer Wolch
TERRITORIAL HISTORIES BASED ON RACE AND GENDER
01 Sign for "colored" waiting room at a
Greyhound bus terminal in Rome,
Georgia, 1943. Throughout the South
there were Jim Crow laws creating "de
jure" legally required segregation.
source: wikipedia
02 03

A doctor's office in Merigold, Mississippi in 1939 (Marion Post Wolcott / Library of

Congress) source: https://www.theatlantic.com/
TERRITORIAL HISTORIES BASED ON RACE AND GENDER

01 An African-American man drinking from a racially 02 German warning in German-occupied Poland 1939 –
segregated water cooler marked "Colored", in "No entrance for Poles!"
source: wikipedia
Oklahoma City c. 1939.
source: wikipedia
COGNITIVE MAPPING
Kevin Lynch asked citizens to draw maps or give directions. He
wanted to create images and combine them into a composite
portrait of a city, useful to urban designers. He took into
consideration class, gender, age, ethnicity.

The maps are evidence of inequality of access to the city.

Lynch introduces and describes five elements - nodes, paths,

districts, landmarks and edge to describe the image of the city.

.
LIVING CONDITIONS OF IMMIGRANTS

Immigrants in New York mostly inhabited tenement

houses. This type of building was characterized by
unhealthy living conditions, minimal plumbing, only one
or two exterior windows, small amount of light,
claustrophobic space and unhealthy space.
Tenements were small in size, most contained no more
than two rooms. One of the rooms was used as a
kitchen, and the other as a bedroom.

Bial, Raymond, Tenement: Immigrant Life on the Lower East Side (Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston, 2002), 11.
source: https://immigrants1900.weebly.com/living-conditions.html
ETHNIC GROUPS AND THEIR CULTURE

01 Language, food, customs, religion and social organizations

are ways of representing ethnicity by large urban ethnic
groups.

Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York City

source: wikipedia
ETHNIC GROUPS AND THEIR CULTURE

02 Yards or gardens planted in certain ways, street games for

children and religious shrines are also the result of the
culture tradition of various ethnic groups.

James Cox Oglethorpe, Georgia, 1987 African American children playing leap frog in a Harlem
Annie Belle Sturgehill in her Garden, Athens,
source: https://www.swansonsnursery.com/blog/african-american-garden- street 1930.
Georgia, 1988
history-and-future source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blackheritage/2320491780
source: https://www.swansonsnursery.com/blog/african-
american-garden-history-and-future
ETHNIC GROUPS AND THEIR CULTURE

03 Festivals and parades were also a part of defining cultural

identity.

Jazz Funerals Flowers and candles set the mood during a Day of the Dead
source: vigil at a cemetery in Oaxaca, Mexico.
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/gravematters/2017/03/25/j
source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/top-ten-day-of-dead-
azz-funerals/
mexico
 WHO BUILDS AMERICA?

01 For many years, almost always white, upper and middle-

classs men dominated the city. They were building
downtowns and imposing order on chaotic immigrant
populations.

02 The history of different ethnic groups is becoming more

represented. Every resident, regardless of his gender, race,
origin, forms America.

02 The United States of America has a racially and ethnically

diverse population.
SOCIAL HISTORY IS PART OF THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

01 Manuel Castells concludes that “the new tendential urban meaning is the spatial and cultural
separation of people from their product and from their history” while suggesting that what
“tends to disappear is the meaning of places for people” he finds many social movements
mobilized against this loss of meaning in places.

source: https:canva photos

CHANGES IN INSTITUTIONS

01 Public institutions such as schools, art museums, symphony orchestras had to expand their
offerings to appeal to broader public.

01 Publics have become more diverse and social classes and political parties have become less
relevant.
SOURCES

1. D. Hayden (1995) The power of place. Urban 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination

Landscapes as Public History. The MIT Press.
6. https://immigrants1900.weebly.com/living-
2. S. Zukin (1995) The Cultures of Cities. Blackwell conditions.html
Publishers.

3. https://books.google.pl/books?
id=DbVOplnDc6oC&lpg=PA50&ots=MiLV-
e5k8z&dq=different%20culture%20in%20urban%20are
as&lr&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=different%20culture%20i
n%20urban%20areas&f=false

4. https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/mph-
modules/PH/CulturalAwareness/CulturalAwareness2.ht
ml