ABSTRACT
Urban localities, neighborhoods, and boroughs incur change due to effects of global flows of information and images, arrival of new demographic groups and immigrants, fashionable ideas about buildings and houses, and consumption patterns. Visible components of the urban and built environment are associated with particular ethnic communities and can often be highlighted in this complex context of changing landscapes. These are perceived as the cause of undesirable changes, and neighborhood communities become divided along lines of ethnicity, race, and cultural identity. Queens, an ethnically diverse and dynamic borough, tends toward segregated settlements for many cultural groups, and has a history of ethnic tensions and racial issues (Frazier 2011). This chapter addresses the circumstances, processes and outcomes of Indian immigrants residing in Queens from a critical perspective about place and place remaking, and how remaking place by new ethnic groups incites protest from existing residents. Importantly, these protests coalesce around a particular architecture, building, or site in the neighborhood environment and the sites become instrumental in the trajectory of tensions. Despite similarities, Indian identity and settlement structures emerge differently across United States regions, including those that seek invisibility, as well as those that promote visibility, and sometimes present success through architecture. Ethno-architecture and ethnic functions play important roles in the transformation of place. Ethnic identity, European or Indian, contributes to the creation of a sense of place, but new associations in the process of remaking a landscape to enhance belonging for recently arrived groups also trigger a sense of loss and nostalgia for existing residents and this induces ethnic tensions.
