Representations of an Urban Ethnic Neighbourhood: Residents' Cognitive Boundaries of Koreatown, Los Angeles

Abstract

Author(s): Bae, Crystal | Advisor(s): Montello, Daniel R. | Abstract: The neighborhood has long been studied in such fields as geography, sociology, political science, and urban planning as a meaningful unit of analysis, with deep connections for residents and an ever-shifting form. This study expands on foundational research about geographic regions (particularly informal or vague cognitive regions), sense of place, and environmental and travel perception, and takes as its focal area the neighborhood of Koreatown in Los Angeles. By collecting information about residents’ individual attributes, their concepts of this neighborhood region, and their travel activity within the city, I elucidate how ideas about the neighborhood fit into theories about sense of place. My work additionally demonstrates the value of surveying residents about vague concepts of local regions, and ways in which to measure and express these ideas.I conducted in-person surveys to explore the connection between residents’ cognitive boundaries of Koreatown, through drawn boundaries and explanations, and their behavior within the city of LA, represented by activity space measures. In doing so, I find ways in which respondents’ cognitive boundaries of the Koreatown neighborhood align with and differ from otherwise established definitions of Koreatown, presenting two methods of evaluating individual boundaries of a region. One of these ways of comparing polygons, the radial intersect method, is originally extended to the summary of multiple polygons. Collected temporary travel behavior of respondents provides a way of depicting respondents’ activity spaces in the LA region for comparison with their cognitive regions. Survey data is supplemented with socio-demographic data from the Census and field observations to contextualize these findings by looking at residential clustering and ethnic composition in the neighborhood and the greater Los Angeles region. My research makes an important contribution to our understanding of the urban neighborhood through an extensive analysis of a unique ethnic enclave from the perspective of local residents in one of the nation’s largest metropolises.