Associated Products
Suburban Disequilibrium (New York Times) (Article)Title: Suburban Disequilibrium (New York Times)
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: The Great Divide is a series on inequality — the haves, the have-nots and everyone in between — in the United States and around the world, and its implications for economics, politics, society and culture. The series moderator is Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, a Columbia professor and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/suburban-disequilibrium/Primary URL Description: Online commentary from the New York Times
Access Model: Open access
Format: Newspaper
Periodical Title: New York Times
Publisher: New York Times
Design Assimilation in Suburbia: Asian Americans, Built Landscapes, and Suburban Advantage in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley since 1970 (Article)Title: Design Assimilation in Suburbia: Asian Americans, Built Landscapes, and Suburban Advantage in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley since 1970
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Author: James Zarsardiaz
Abstract: Ethnic suburban settlement has shaped suburban landscapes in contrasting ways. On one end are ethnoburbs, where ethnic groups used spatial politics to assert their rights of ethnic expression in the landscape. On the other—less noticed—end are places where ethnic settlers arrived en masse, and their presence was scarcely visible. This article focuses on the latter, towns where ethnic suburbanites consented to existing design mores—what we term design assimilation. Using case studies from Asian American suburbs of the west and east San Gabriel Valley, we explore the history of places where Anglo design aesthetics persisted in the midst of profound demographic change. Multiple factors created and protected these landscapes, including stringent regulatory cultures of these suburbs, white political action, accommodations by builders, and Asian American consent. Asian suburbanites supported these landscapes for aesthetic, nostalgic, political, and economic reasons, including the belief that American landscape aesthetics conveyed a social distinction that positioned them above those around them—including other Asians in the ethnoburbs. Our work shows how suburban advantage has been reinforced by new waves of immigrant suburbanites, in ways that reflect the inequities and spatial expression of globalization itself. This work offers a new perspective on immigrant suburbanization and its interface with suburban “landscapes of privilege.”
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://juh.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/11/05/0096144215610773.abstractAccess Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Urban History
Publisher: Sage Publications
Prizes
2015 Arnold Hirsch Award
Date: 10/15/2016
Organization: Urban History Association
Abstract: Arnold Hirsch Award for Best Article in Urban History published in a scholarly journal in 2015 (no geographic restriction)
Introduction: Asian American Suburban History (Article)Title: Introduction: Asian American Suburban History
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: Historiographic review of Asian American suburban history.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/jaeh.htmlAccess Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of American Ethnic History
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Map Room: Stay-At-Home Moms in Los Angeles County, 1950-2000 (Article)Title: Map Room: Stay-At-Home Moms in Los Angeles County, 1950-2000
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: This article explores the social geography of stay-at-home mothers in Los Angeles County, 1950-2000, showing the class and ethnic dimensions of the transformations.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://ch.ucpress.edu/Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: California History
Publisher: University of California Press
The Suburb Reader, Second Edition (Book)Title: The Suburb Reader, Second Edition
Editor: Becky Nicolaides
Editor: Andrew Wiese
Abstract: Since the 1920s, the United States has seen a dramatic reversal in living patterns, with a majority of Americans now residing in suburbs. This mass emigration from cities is one of the most fundamental social and geographical transformations in recent US history. Suburbanization has not only produced a distinct physical environment—it has become a major defining force in the construction of twentieth-century American culture.
Employing over 200 primary sources, illustrations, and critical essays, The Suburb Reader documents the rise of North American suburbanization from the 1700s through the present day. Through thematically organized chapters it explores multiple facets of suburbia’s creation and addresses its indelible impact on the shaping of gender and family ideologies, politics, race relations, technology, design, and public policy. Becky Nicolaides’ and Andrew Wiese’s concise commentaries introduce the selections and contextualize the major themes of each chapter. Distinctive in its integration of multiple perspectives on the evolution of the suburban landscape, The Suburb Reader pays particular attention to the long, complex experiences of African Americans, immigrants, and working people in suburbia. Encompassing an impressive breadth of chronology and themes, The Suburb Reader is a landmark collection of the best works on the rise of this modern social phenomenon.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://www.routledge.com/The-Suburb-Reader-2nd-Edition/Nicolaides-Wiese/p/book/9781138818583Publisher: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9781138818583
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Exploring Lifeways and Values across L.A. Asian American Suburbs, 1960-2000 (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Exploring Lifeways and Values across L.A. Asian American Suburbs, 1960-2000
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: This paper explored the range of political, cultural, and social experiences across Asian suburbs in Los Angeles, from 1960-2000
Date: 11/06/2015
Primary URL:
http://www.sacrph.org/wp.../SACRPH_Program_Booklet_FINAL_USE_BEST_WEB.pdConference Name: Sixteenth National Conference on Planning History, Society for American City and Regional Planning History
Globalization and American Suburbia Since 1970 (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Globalization and American Suburbia Since 1970
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: This invited lecture explored major trends in suburban diversification since 1970, using illustrative examples from Los Angeles.
Date Range: 04/22/2016
Location: Georgia Tech
Primary URL:
http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/54764Keynote address: Stills from L.A.: Reflections on diversity and the remaking of suburban life (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Keynote address: Stills from L.A.: Reflections on diversity and the remaking of suburban life
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: This keynote address of the British Association for American Studies Conference described emerging trends in suburban diversity, using Los Angeles as a rich illustrative example.
Date Range: 04/20/2013
Location: University of Exeter, UK
Primary URL:
http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/research/conferences/baas2013/The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Book)Title: The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945
Author: Becky M. Nicolaides
Abstract: America’s suburbs have been transforming. The conventional story of suburbs as bastions of white, middle-class homeowners no longer describes the suburbs of America’s cities. Today they house a more typical cross-section of the nation—rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. Stories of everyday suburban life, in the process, have taken on new inflections.
Nowhere are these changes more vivid than in Los Angeles. In this suburban metropolis and global powerhouse, lily white suburbs have virtually disappeared, and over two-thirds of the County’s suburbs have become majority minority. Examining this vanguard of change from the postwar to the present, The New Suburbia follows the Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos who moved into white neighborhoods that once barred them. They bought homes, enrolled their children in schools, and began navigating suburban life. They faced a choice: would they remake the suburbs, or would the suburbs remake them? In places like Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, and Lakewood, suburbanites faced the challenges of living together in difference. Historian Becky Nicolaides explores a range of community experiences, from internal resegregation to suburban poverty, an embrace of law-and-order culture to police brutality, friendly neighbors to social withdrawal. In some communities, diverse residents continued longstanding habits of exclusion and perpetuated metropolitan inequality. In others, they embraced more inclusive, multicultural suburban ideals. Through it all, the common denominators of suburbia remained—low-slung landscapes of single-family homes and families seeking the good life.
An authoritative work based on a half-century of quantitative data and unpublished oral histories and interviews, The New Suburbia explores vital landscapes where the American dream has endured, even as the dreamers have changed.
Year: 2024
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No
"How to make sure the LA River Master Plan fulfills its promise to the Gateway Cities" (Article)Title: "How to make sure the LA River Master Plan fulfills its promise to the Gateway Cities"
Author: Jon Christensen
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: "It’s also crucial to ensure that those who live in these cities have a voice in what will happen to them. The Gateway Cities have made it through our region’s toughest history over the last 50 years. They deserve a community-driven plan to benefit from its revival."
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-02-21/los-angeles-river-master-plan-gateway-cities-frank-gehry-gentrification-equitable-developmentAccess Model: Subscription
Format: Newspaper
Periodical Title: Los Angeles Times
Publisher: Los Angeles Times
"From Resourceful to Illegal: The Racialized History of Garage Housing in Los Angeles" (Article)Title: "From Resourceful to Illegal: The Racialized History of Garage Housing in Los Angeles"
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Abstract: In this piece, I explore one slice of the informal housing story, focusing on the history of garage dwellings from the 1920s to the 1990s. At times, I hone in on South and Southeast Los Angeles, a part of Los Angeles where housing always had a dimension of informality to it, reflecting the strategies and needs of working-class residents struggling to get by. For generations, they maximized the productive potentials of their property to help make ends meet, set within the context of suburbia—towns with single-family detached homes, yards, and families. As the ethnic profile of southern Los Angeles changed, those efforts met with harsher challenges and barriers. In a nutshell, informal housing began as an auspicious opportunity for working-class whites in the 1920s, took on patriotic overtones during World War II, and then was essentially racialized and criminalized by the 1980s when the area flipped from white to Latino. Informal housing was suppressed right at a moment when housing need was exploding. This history reveals how housing policy became entwined with immigration policy at the local level, creating formidable barriers to solving L.A.’s on-going shelter problem.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://boomcalifornia.org/2019/01/31/from-resourceful-to-illegal/Access Model: open access
Format: Other
Publisher: Boom California
Keynote Address: "Rethinking the Dream: Old and new frameworks for understanding suburban life in Southern California after 1950" (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Keynote Address: "Rethinking the Dream: Old and new frameworks for understanding suburban life in Southern California after 1950"
Abstract: 2018 George A.V. Dunning Keynote Lecture
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Date: 02/10/2018
Location: Cal Poly Pomona
"The Historic Suburban Landscapes of Los Angeles" (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: "The Historic Suburban Landscapes of Los Angeles"
Abstract: The historic suburban landscapes of Los Angeles are a crucial starting point for understanding suburban life in the region. They established how communities would look, be built, serviced and regulated, and how open they would be to change. LA’s suburban identity originated in the early twentieth century, when city leaders developed a set of ideas and innovative land development practices centered on the suburban ideal. This vision embraced decentralized development as well as racial segregation. Influenced by a regional eugenics movement, LA leaders pioneered and honed tools of racial exclusion in suburbia. With this suburban vision in place, distinct built landscapes emerged. Over 130 years, LA’s historic suburban landscapes included borderlands, streetcar suburbs, picturesque enclaves and garden suburbs, modest subdivisions before 1940, sitcom suburbs, and edge cities and corporate suburbs. Each landscape left a legacy for later generations, in the housing stock, the design of communities, and local regulatory cultures.
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Date: 03/15/2023
Location: Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France
"American Suburban History: Past Themes and Current Projects" (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: "American Suburban History: Past Themes and Current Projects"
Abstract: This joint lecture surveyed the historiography of suburban history, and featured my current book, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford, 2024).
Author: Andrew Wiese
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Date: 09/14/2022
Location: University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
"The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945" (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: "The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945"
Abstract: Clark Davis Memorial Lecture for the LA History & Metro Studies Group. This lecture surveyed the nature of suburban transformations in LA since 1945, then offered a close telling of the recent history of Lakewood, Ca., based on a case study from my book, The New Suburbia.
Author: Becky Nicolaides
Date: 05/05/2023
Location: Huntington Library, San Marino, California