ABSTRACT
Concepts of mobility are often related to freedom of movement, relocation, flexibility, or even an unruly yet liberating process. Forced or constrained movement serves as a mirror to mobility and the right to choose where one may live, establish a business, or engage in religious practice. The urban imaginary leans towards the idea of movement through space as utopian and free. Japanese Americans and African Americans have historically had different structures of access to mobility and property in their shared and overlain spaces in San Francisco's Japantown. Their access was constrained, thus relatively unfree, because of complex embedded practices of racial discrimination in housing and real estate. These constraints were not limited to legal constraints, such as in the barring of Asian immigrants from property ownership or the use of racial covenants, but also cultural as in the marketing of racial covenants, blight, and the devaluation of space people of color inhabit.
