Diaspora

One interesting force that affects cities is the people who live in them! (Duh!) A particular type of this force that is of interest to me is the diaspora of various ethnic groups.

In this article, Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo prisoner, is described as a British born Muslim who is ethnically Indian.

In Enemy Combatant, written with Victoria Brittain after his release from Guantánamo, Begg relates how trips to Mecca and Pakistan, the 1991 Gulf War and the arrival in Britain of Bosnian refugees made him see his faith as the way to unify his disparate identities; Islam became his imagined community.

We in the United States tend to forget that the U.S. is not the only country that is home to many diasporas (diasporae?) - Canada, Brasil, Mexico, France, the UK all contain many modern immigrant communities. Anyway, when there are various forces of racial and cultural friction, cities definitely feel the effects both socially and physically. Think about the food in your city or the gathering places in your city - they are often remnants of or current places of immigrant communities. Many immigrant communities physically aggregate, finding support and familiarity in similarly immigrated families. In terms of logistics, enclaves also make sense - ethnic markets, language schools. It happened a long time ago (Jewish in the Lower East Side in NYC) & it still happens though in different ways (Koreans in La Canada Flintridge) It even continues to happen when ethnic groups are no longer immigrant (Japanese Americans in the South Bay - Torrance, Gardena). Social translates very strongly into the physical architecture of a city.

But what that quote reminded me strongly of was that sometimes the city imagined is just as powerful as the reality of the city. Seems like Begg's identification with this imagined community was powerful enough to drive him to open a bookshop, which "became a local center of Britain's Islamic revival." This imagined community became a physical reality, a basis of a physical community.