ABSTRACT
Ethnic minorities in Britain and the USA have developed an extensive range of organisations to represent their interests. There are social, educational, economic and political organisations which work with national and local governments to promote urban renewal and social improvement. In general, the political articulation of urban ethnic minorities is reflective of a situation in which their communities are located in the most distressed districts where the impact of the ‘high-tech political culture’ of the ‘boom’ towns represents something remote. These are districts where local governments have been constrained by budget cuts and falling tax bases. To the extent that urbanisation has impacted on these communities, it has frequently been defined in substantially negative terms, attracting resources and investment away from them to out-of-town locations and the new growth centres in the expanding suburbs (see Chapters 3 and 4).
