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In 2008 Simone Giometti, Secretary General of the Fondazione Romualdo Del Bianco in Florence, asked if I would organize a conference on The New Urban Sociology (the title taken from the third edition of the textbook co-authored with Mark Gottdiener). Later that year I organized three sessions for a symposium on The Tourist City as part of the Florence Expo celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Foundation (November 14–18, 2008). At the conclusion of the Florence Expo, a group of scholars associated with the Del Bianco Foundation, faculty from the University of Florence, and members of INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) met to plan a conference on Henri Lefebvre and the New Urban Sociology – the working title for the conference. After two days of discussion held at the library of the National Institute of Renaissance Studies in the Palazzo Strozzi, it was decided that the conference should be titled Everyday Life in the Segmented City, reflecting very well the breadth of study and wealth of ideas that one finds in Henri Lefebvre's many contributions to urban sociology.

Philanthropy takes many forms among African immigrant communities. It exists in the form of mutual aid for friends, extended family, lineage, and fictive kin. This last category includes, but is not limited to, those from an individual’s ethnic group, or even from their country of origin. Philanthropy is also to be found in the form of kindness and generosity toward strangers. Above all, elements of philanthropy are to be found in the corporatization of community-based efforts to develop the human and material resources among many African ethnic groups. Many studies of the process of urbanization in Africa indicate the ubiquity of formation of hometown organizations that perform social functions including philanthropy among newly urbanized Africans. These organizations assist urbanized home folk from the villages and the towns of origin from which these urbanized groups originally emerged in various respects. The assistance offered include giving material and moral support in times of significant social celebration and mourning, for education as well as for home construction, construction of infrastructure for the home community, and for various other community-based development efforts. The efforts of African immigrants in the United States and elsewhere closely follow the patterns described above. The patterns are so ubiquitous as to warrant a claim of their emergence from a philosophical orientation toward philanthropy in African society.

The boundaries of Little Italy are not precise, and have shifted over time. In the 19th century, the district extended south of Canal Street into the area identified by Jacob Riis as the “Mulberry Bend,” and described as “the foul core of New York’s slums.”³ By the 1960s, Little Italy had retreated across Canal Street, as the Italian population began to leave the neighborhood for other areas in the city. For the purposes of this paper, Little Italy shall be understood as comprising three census tracts in New York City’s Manhattan county, numbers 41, 43, and 45. This area, lying within a short walking distance of City Hall, is roughly bounded by Canal Street on the south, Bowery on the East, Broadway on the west, and East Houston street to the north. Nicknamed the Mulberry District, it became the first and largest Italian enclave in the United States between 1870s and 1924. While there had been an Italian community in New York for generations, historian George Pozetta has argued that the winter of 1872–1873 was pivotal in the development of this community, when more than 2000 poor Italian immigrants, arrived at Castle Garden, the immigrant reception center, unable to care for themselves.⁴ These immigrants were quickly fitted in to the preexisting Italian community, taking advantage of the contacts provided by the bossi, typically northern Italian men who had arrived earlier, to find jobs in such local enterprises as groceries and saloons, and with American employers. Once the new comers settled, a process of chain-migration began. By the later 1870s, the bossi were acting as agents for gangs of labor sent out from New York to work in other areas across North American. As a result, the Mulberry district became a sort of transshipment point for Italian labor.

Dominant in the urban sociology literature on immigrant incorporation is the role of ethnic enclaves – ethnic neighborhoods that provide a “port of entry” or “context of reception” and help facilitate incorporation in the host society by generating informal resources, networks, and institutions that provide linguistic and cultural services and products (Portes & Rumbaut, 1990). While New York City's stature as a global city is replete with nostalgia about historic ethnic immigrant neighborhoods, contemporary immigrant settlement is once again transforming urban landscapes not only by renewing enclave formations but by creating numerous multiethnic, multiracial neighborhoods (Hum, 2004). As often cited, in no other historic period has New York City received as diverse a range of people from all over the world – certainly, this diversity is reshaping local neighborhood landscapes.

The political campaigns of Una Clarke and Major Owens show an interesting display of ethnic politics. In this paper, I argue that the presence of a Caribbean population in Brooklyn New York presents itself as a challenge to the already present African-American structure. The Caribbean politicians do not subscribe nor fully ally with the African-American politicians, and instead, seek to carve out a niche for themselves and utilize their ties to home in an effort to cajole the Caribbean populace for support. Through the purview of a political campaign in Brooklyn between an African-American incumbent and a Caribbean insurgent, I attempt to contribute to the transnationalist literature through illustrating the concept of the nation−state, which can be explained as an immigrant’s continual bond to their home country while living abroad.

While I do not intend to provide an exhaustive survey of North African emigration to France and the history of banlieue and urban formation in France (see Stovall, 2003), I nonetheless provide a brief background related to place and immigrants in order to contextualize how place is invoked, or is not, in second-generation North African immigrant identities. France's relationship with the Maghreb began with the colonization of Algeria in 1830, of Tunisia in 1831, and of Morocco in 1931. Algeria remained in French control until 1962, and Tunisia and Morocco remained in French control until 1956.

Wangjing is a large residential cluster located at the intersection of the Fourth Ring Road and the airport expressway in the northeast part of Beijing. The area is a “suburb” according to official statistics and academic accounts, which often classify urban areas beyond the historical old city as suburbs. Due to its proximity to the airport and major expressways, Wangjing has developed quickly since the late 1990s. As more high-rise luxury apartment buildings get built, the area's population has reached 150,000 as of 2010, including more than 30,000 foreign expatriates living here amid Chinese urban professionals. Across the airport expressway from Wangjing is the 798 Factory, a hip arts quarter developed within a former electronics factory built in the 1950s. Looking for large studio space, a few artists moved into the Bauhaus-style workshops here in the late 1990s, and quickly bookstores, coffee shops, and galleries followed suit. By 2005, the 798 Factory had become the center of the contemporary Chinese art scene and home to many prestigious international galleries. Outside the factory compound is a working-class neighborhood developed in the 1950s to house workers at the nearby factories and their families. The living conditions here have not changed much for decades, with some families still sharing common kitchens and bathrooms with their neighbors in dilapidated apartment buildings. To the west side of Wangjing, after about a 15-minute drive along the Fourth Ring Road, one reaches the Olympic Park, a brand-new area of parks, stadiums, five-star hotels, golf courses, and exclusive gated communities of villas – all developed in the short period before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Beyond the Fifth Ring Road, one can see many “urban villages,” former agricultural villages that have become populated by migrant workers with low-paid jobs – taxi drivers, construction workers, waiters, nannies, security guards, and street vendors. Unable to afford to live in the central city, migrant workers rent rooms from local peasants at the city's edge. Many of these villages are to be demolished soon to make space for commercial property development, and the migrant worker tenants will have to move to another village farther away from the city.