History of American Cities Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

History of American Cities - Essay Example The influx of the foreigners in relatively large numbers have produced a multicultural environment that is responsible for the rapidly changing socio-political scenario of the cities. The existing society and the social setup has accommodated the growing numbers of new inhabitants by not only creating new jobs but new suburbs and slums thus embarking on a new road that defines the inhabitants by the location and locations could reliably affirm the inhabitants’ race and culture. Historians and social scientists, through the years, have conducted studies to this effect and have come to some amazing results backed by research asserting that cities and suburbs are divided into specific locations that are characterized by the people who may be represented by their race, economic status or by their creative differences.  The cosmopolitan flavor of New York is distinguished by the colonies named after the different nationals inhabiting them, like Chinese colony, German colony, Span ish or Jewish colony. ‘Even the Arab, who peddles ‘holy earth’ from the battery as a direct importation from Jerusalem, has his exclusive preserves at the lower end of Washington Street’ (Riis). In the mid nineteenth century, the author Riis studied the immigrant population, living in tenements, in the lower New York and observed that the tenements developed according to the immigrants, well defined by their race and cultural background. The Italians, for example, had largely come to America in search of work and this was carried out by the fellow Italians who facilitated their immigration and later exploited them for their own vested interests.