ABSTRACT
To explore the mutual shaping of local streets and global trends, this chapter creates a transnational research project with six local teams of research partners. Urban researchers need to understand local laws and policies, from zoning laws that dictate the uses of buildings in different districts of the city to plans for redevelopment that have been debated. The research issues introduces four big empirical questions: Change, Community, Government, Homogenization. Efforts to categorize businesses by their "ethnic character" brought up similar issues of data, compounded by own unwillingness to accept stereotypes. New York research team, discusses aesthetics for characterized to subjective. It is easy to do ethnography if one work on our research site. And in some cities gentrification associates with "diversity" and praised for fostering social integration. Finally, the chapter thank the students in their research team in the PhD Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
