From shopping centers to cultural centers: Los Angeles strip malls as sites of ethnic and immigrant placemaking

ABSTRACT

The strip mall is a ubiquitous urban design type formed by a strip of commercial establishments on a single parcel of land that surround an open, street-facing parking lot. We hypothesize that they are important sites for ethnic and immigrant businesses in LA and, in particular, that their relatively low rents, location, and design (including site layout, unit size, and structure quality) are particularly conducive for ethnic cultural placemaking. Using data about the built environment, real estate market, and our own original “EthniCITY” spatial database of race/ethnicity placemaking patterns in Los Angeles, we use mapping and spatial analysis, descriptive statistics, a hedonic price model, and groundtruthing fieldwork to find that small and medium-sized strip malls are important ethnic places in Los Angeles, hosting the most ethnic commercial establishments amongst all commercial building types. We also find that half of all small strip malls are located within ethnic cultural hubs. Our findings suggest that physical urban design matters in shaping the cultural life of cities and the geographic opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurship.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• immigration
• commercial real estate
• urban design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Consider, for example Bill’s Taco House in LA, a Korean-American business owner selling a version of tacos cooked by Mexican-American immigrants to a primarily African-American clientele (see https://slab.today/2019/09/ethnicity-grace).

2 Of course, even this systematic approach has its limitations as many countries are multi-ethnic and multi-cultural within them, such that our map can be privileging the dominant cultural group of a nation. In particular, our strategy does not allow us to search for stateless ethnic minority groups. This is a limitation certainly worth further research in the future.

3 We compared our African-American culture map with Miller’s definitive Black-owned business map to verify our data (Miller, 2018).

4 We name the clusters we observe “ethnic cultural hubs” instead of “ethnic commercial hubs” because these places include non-businesses such as residential buildings, churches, community institutions, and the like.