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Social Movements and Urban Tolerance

To examine these questions, I turn to social movement and group concentration theories focusing particularly on those that use space as an integral component. At its base, social movements describe the collective action of a group of individuals connected by an economic, social or political identity. Social movements can be connected to space, if that group’s
identity is socially embedded to a particular place. In the case of gays, Castells writes that when they become “conscious enough and strong enough to ‘come out’ collectively, they earmarked place where they could be safe together and could develop new life styles” . Place in this respect refers to specific spaces where gays gravitated to be out and gay. Portes describes this as bounded solidarity . Bounded solidarity is a source of pride and cohesion, connecting its residents together in meaningful ways through the power of shared identity . Identity is also a key hallmark of social movement theory.

In San Francisco, gay identity was and still is socially embedded in the Castro area. As a homophobic and intolerant environment up to the mid 1960s, Castro served as a meeting ground where a bar or two existed. As the space changed to a gay meeting place, the area became a node for the developing gay community. Nodes in social movement theory are places where social networks intensify creating strong interconnectedness among that group’s actors (Moody and White 2003). At first, people gravitated to Castro because of homophobic intolerance in the larger region. There simply was no safe place to be out as gay, except for a few gay businesses located in the Castro. That changed as the Castro node became larger with the increasing spatial concentration of gays and lesbians.

At some point in the mid-1960s, Castells (1983) and Bailey (1999) write that Castro contained a critical mass of people that could support a fully thriving gay community, able to politically challenge the heterosexual majority. Critical mass is another key tenant of social movement theory. This critical mass led to the eventual election of Harvey Milk as the city’s first openly gay supervisor, new tolerant laws and greater institutional thickness in the form of political and social organizations . Spatial concentration can be caused by intolerance, but that concentration can often result in social capital, cohesion and political power that creates tolerance by demanding civil rights or concessions . From the 1960s to today, Castro has experienced enormous gentrification and population growth. Gays from around the country move in waves to Castro to be out and celebrated.

The Castro district is now embraced as a sign of cosmopolitanism and tolerance by the city that once tried to prevent its emergence. Politicians, especially the mayor, and residents from all over San Francisco attend pride, Halloween and other gay festivals. Real estate market prices in Castro are some of the highest in the area, leading gays to choose Oakland and the upper and lower Haight areas as additional places to live.

Beyond gays, social movement theories also apply to immigrants. Identity and bounded solidarity plays a key role in where immigrants choose to live. Models of place-stratification and segmentation attribute their spatial location decisions to maintaining a sense of cultural identity . Immigrants maintain cultural identity by locating businesses and residences in proximity to other immigrants, even as they become upwardly mobile . This research points to cultural preferences in choosing where to live as opposed to purely job and language driven decisions . Ethnic niche markets create job opportunities within the local ethnic economy creating incentives for immigrants to remain . Living near one’s own ethnic group is also associated with neighborhood ownership, cohesion and pride . When ethnic economies cluster in space, Portes and Jansen describe them as enclave economies pointing to the spatial agglomeration effects of labor, customer base and networking. Enclave economies also exhibit sectoral specialization in key industries like ethnic-specific goods, garments, fashion, cigars, ethnic-specific restaurants, etc . Castells (1983) argues that the ethnic enclave paired with concentration of Hispanics in the Mission area of San Francisco led to the first Latino-elected supervisor and concessions by the mayor to halt urban renewal projects in the area in the early 1970s. Like gays, Hispanics formed their own political and social organizations to mobilize against the majority rule.

Figure 10 visually displays the processes describe above, generally characterized by the following progression: (1) group concentration (2) identity formation and attachment to place (3) node and enclave development (4) social networks and place steering (5) political and social capital (6) granting of civil rights and (7) potential dispersion of the group to regional clusters. Moving from left to right, the population of the group increases as the region is known as more tolerant. Darker shading indicates increasing group percentages. At first, the population may be spread out across the whole region with a very small centrally concentrated base. As the center becomes a node, the group population gravitates towards the concentrated space where tolerance is socially embedded.

The node grows larger, gaining political and social capital, which is then translated into civil rights or political concessions validating the group. Once the region is perceived as tolerant, then generally, the affected groups become more dispersed, especially if their ‘homebase’ has become unaffordable due to being discovered or crowded out. The region becomes more tolerant as the diversity of its residents increases. At the neighborhood level, the group may still be geographically isolated and segregated, but also has political power.

I argue that tolerance is influenced at a regional level in part by the spatial concentration process of diversity. Returning to the central question of the paper, what is the nature of the tolerance connection between these diverse groups and the Creative class? Florida argues that creatives gravitate to certain regions they view as tolerant, based upon the presence of diversity. However, the spatial concentration modeling described earlier would suggest that these diverse groups are segregated.