Contenu du sommaire : Diversité des populations d'Amérique du Nord

The purpose of this research is to understand how rapid population growth in the Mountain West region in the U.S. during the 1990s has affected the spatial distribution of income and poverty. Population growth in the Mountain West during the 1990s was principally through the mechanism of internal and international migration. In previous research we found that much of this growth, and the income growth that went along with it, was highly concentrated in only a few, high-amenity counties. In this paper we use IRS/Census Bureau data on income migration to identify migration of different income groups and how their migration during the 1990s has affected spatial patterns of income and poverty. Counties with the lowest levels of poverty had the largest increase in poverty during the decade. However, somewhat paradoxically, these counties also experienced the largest increase in income due to outmigration of lower income people. In general, migration patterns between 1995 and 2000 within and from beyond the Mountain West region tended to reinforce existing spatial patterns of poverty with higher income people moving to lower poverty counties and lower income people moving to higher poverty counties.

The Shinking of Population in the Great Plains of the United States. In the Plain States (Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota), where many of the American counties experiencing losses in population are concentrated, the variety of population dynamics is wider than expected. Besides persistent decline linked to rural outmigration and ageing in remote locations, the is also a rapid growth of the principal metropolitan areas of the region. In several counties, the reversal of demographic fortunes is linked to the recent creation of large meatpacking plants, which have recruited Mexican labor. The sudden arrival of Hispanics in small rural towns has generated tensions. The magnitude of rural depopulation in some counties has led to the proposal of a return to the original pre-Pioneer state of the area, known as the Buffalo Commons concept.

About Metropolization and Glocalization: Discourse of American Researchers and its Impact. The globalization of the economy leads to major changes bringing about urban sprawl and a work market on the scale of the urban region. American researchers see a correlation between local and global and talk about the emergence of a spatial order they call glocalization. They use metaphors such as spatial mismatch and reverse commuting to designate the distance between the localization of jobs and the innercity neighborhoods while the metaphor metropolitics deals with the issue of the invention of a politics at the urban region scale. The analysis of these metaphors as well as the implementation of welfare reform stresses researchers' contribution to a political discussion of spatial transformations.

The Actual Challenge of Major American Central Cities in the Era of Métropolisation. For a century now, the metropolitan level has been part of the US Census survey (metropolitan districts). At the beginning, the concentration movement in the central-city was the major trend ; but since World War II, the development of metropolitan areas is the main evolution of urban America. The Concentric Zone Model structured around the influent core of the inner city is quite obsolete : now, the Multiple Nuclei Model shows us the relative demographical, economical and social weakness of central cities. The Census 2000 data doesn't report a radical change in this unbalanced urban morphology evolution but some authors point out the resurgence of major central cities. The diffusion of smart growth programs, in response to the negative impacts of urban sprawl, and the international immigration seam to be the main reasons of this renewal.

Urban Sprawl: What are the Trends in Rural US ?. The U.S. population is sprawling on the American land ; the use of the term sprawl today is commonplace when speaking about disorganized settlement with moderate densities. It is accused to consume excessive open and agricultural space and leads to the increase of economical, social, and environmental costs. The ability to cure the pricey consequences of sprawl in the U.S. suppose the understanding of the multiple faces it can encompass in different context. Sprawl is linked to the high dependency of the American society on cars. It expresses the evolution of the American culture and life style. The State of Kentucky offers the case study of spreading population patterns in a rural context.

In the 2000 census, Americans were allowed to choose more than one "racial" group for the first time. Indigenous people had a higher rate of multiracial identification than other population groups. The larger number of people who identify as partly indigenous, along with the reduction in the level of undercount compared with the 1990 census, means that the total enumerated indigenous or partly indigenous population in 2000 was more than twice the size of the reported population in 1990. The intensity of indigenous identification among American Indians (measured by the share of indigenous people who claim a single racial identity) varied geographically, with higher levels on and near reservations and in western states. The core (one-race) population was much more spatially clustered than the peripheral (multi-race) population.

Although the number of Muslims in the United States is now large and growing, it is difficult to know how large and at what rate the population is increasing, since there are no official statistics on religious identification. For this reason there have been few serious attempts to quantify the geographic distribution of the Muslim population within the United States. Several recent surveys have provided a narrowing range of estimates of the likely size of the national U.S. population and, importantly, have provided a means for estimating the percentage of African Americans who are Muslim. Using these survey data in combination with 1990 PUMS data and recently released Census 2000 data on ancestry, language, and place of birth, I have produced estimates of the Muslim population by state. My overall national estimate based on this technique is 3.4 million Muslim as of 2000, which is slightly higher than, but close to the range of estimates generated from all recent surveys except one. The Muslim Population is currently growing at a rate of about 3.5 percent per year which is almost three times the national rate. I use these estimates at the state level to show that there are clusters of Muslims in the New York-New Jersey region, the Washington, D.C. region, the Great Lakes region, and large populations also in California and Texas. The Muslim population in Texas appears to be growing rapidly, whereas the California population is not.

Immigration and Urban Geopolitics: Housing Policy and Minorities in Oakland, CA. The housing issue is an interesting window into the multiple spatial redistributions operating under the intense pressure of Asian and Hispanic immigration in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Oakland, mayor Jerry Brown's housing policy intends to revitalize an economically depressed city by attracting wealthy white populations into the city center thanks to skyrocketing housing prices in the Bay Area. The first signs of economic recovering in Oakland are certainly due to the global context of economic growth but probably also to Jerry Brown's personality if not to the fact he is white. The long term success of his policy is less certain and is likely to have tremendous consequences for the population like pushing the poor out of the city and participating to the already started dilution of Black electoral power.

The Mission, the San Francisco « Barrio»: the Making of an Hispanic Neighborhood and its Commercial Street in the United States (1950-2000). Today, the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco is identified as the Hispanic neighborhood of the city - the « barrio». It was not always the case : after World War II, it was still predominantly inhabited by white working class residents who immigrated from Europe a few decades ago. From the 1950s on, and increasingly in the 1960s and 1970s, the Mexican and Central American immigration deeply changed the neighborhood and its shopping street. However, at the turn of the century, the Mission residents are much more diverse than it is commonly believed. Analyzing the role of church, school and local organizations also shows that social ties in the neighborhood are weak. It shatters the myth of a strong coherent immigrant community.

This paper examines the problems and issues of Post-Soviet immigrants of Jewish origin, who came to the United States from European part of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and currently live in the Los Angeles area, namely, in the City of West Hollywood. The basic results of the questionnaire survey carried out in April 2000 (N=92) on the immigration/adaptation experience of these immigrants are presented in light of some of the existing relevant theories.

Conditioned by the largely rejecting and discriminatory socio-political climates in the United States and the transplanted Chinese cultural traditions, the Chinese in metropolitan Chicago before WW II displayed striking occupation concentration and residential dispersion. The dispersion, however, had little bearing in assessing their incorporation into the mainstream as their primary group association was intricately connected to Chicago's Chinatown. More than half a century later, Asian population, Chinese being one of the largest components, in metropolitan Chicago has achieved substantial spatial integration. In comparison with blacks and Hispanics, Asians in general and Chinese in particular have demonstrated higher degree of residential integration, education attainment, and general socio-economic achievements. This is partly attributable to the changing composition of the Chinese population and the much improved pluralistic, cultural and socio-economic climates in the United States.

The Polish and Somalis immigrants in Toronto differ widely. The Polish is an older non-visible group with well-defined neighbourhoods complete with its own institutions, and the Somali is a more recent visible group much smaller in size and lacking an institutional structure. Based on a survey of Polish and Somali entrepreneurs arriving at Canada since 1981, the study finds that in comparison, the more recent Somali group relies much more heavily on community resources to start and sustain their businesses, and they face more economic barriers in the process of building their own ethnic economy. The results suggest that institutional completeness of an immigrant community may affect successful entrepreneur-ship.

Financial exclusion arises as a social problem when some individuals are systematically denied equal (or any) access to the core financial services required to conduct transactions and provide for future security. This essay contributes to the geographic literature on financial exclusion in two ways: first, we identify some of the micro- and macrostructural determinants of this phenomenon for the U.S. case, including strategic shifts in the banking industry; second, we consider the relationship between financial exclusion and the emerging ethnie banking sector in Los Angeles. In the U.S., financial exclusion takes the form of lower-income and minority households' unequal access to bank accounts, loan markets, and capital accumulation. The U.S. case constitutes an interesting point of departure, as it has a relatively high income but a degree of inequality among the largest in the world. Los Angeles' ethnic banks offer an interesting example, in turn, because this sector has grown to constitute about one-fourth of the banking sector in the county as a whole. We find that increasing financial exclusion is a byproduct of banks' strategic shifts in the wake of deregulation and global financial competition; further, it is very likely to be observed under particular sets of macrostructural circumstances - and these circumstances are especially likely in lower- income areas. Ethnobanks, whose strategic approach often differs from other banks', can help to reverse the extent of financial exclusion in the communities they serve. But because Los Angeles' most successful ethnobanks have undertaken this exclusion- reversing strategic approach in very special macrostructural (and privileged) circumstances, it is possible that this success story is an exception that proves the rule.