The dramatic shifts affecting gentrifying neighborhoods are experienced as intensely local. Bangladeshi Tower Hamlets with its children working in the rag trade is a world away from the "Indianised" Southall with its prosperous restaurateurs; and within the same neighborhood, Brick Lane is a very different place from Commercial Road. Yet the processes and forces shaping the new urbanism are global as much as local. Gentrification and homelessness in the new metropolis are a particular microcosm of a new global order etched first and foremost by the rapacity of the capital. Not only are broadly similar processes remaking cities around the world, but the world itself impinges dramatically on these localities. Not only does international capital flood the real estate markets that fuel the process, but international migration provides a workforce for many of the professional and managerial jobs associated with the new urban economy- a workforce that needs a place to stay. Even more the international migration provides the service workers for the new economy. Immigrants come to the metropolis from every country where capital has opened markets, disrupted local economies, extracted resources , removed people from the land, or sent troops as a "peace-keeping force." This global dislocation comes to roost in the "Third-Worlding " of the First-World city, which, combined with the threat of increasing crime and repressive policing of the streets, invites visions of a predaceous assault on the very gentrification that it helped to stimulate.

Neither is it possible to divorce the grim and steady rise in brutal and racist violence and populist racist culture from the mutating political economies, which have produced the economic space of East End, Brixton and Southall nor is it possible to reduce such racist cultural forms to the status of mere effects of these sea changes.

In London’s gentrifying Docklands and East End, anarchist gangs of unemployed working- class kids justify mugging as their "yuppie tax. " As homes and communities are converted into a new frontier, there is an often clear perception of what is coming as the wagons are circled around. Frontier violence comes with cavalry charges down city streets, rising official crime rates, police racism and assaults on the "natives."

In the constantly evolving political practice of the immigrant groups, the local populace and the multiple pluralistic constituents of these locations in London, how do we interpret the ambitions, values, goals and everyday practices of each group? How do we nurture, enable, and aid their current ambitious practices, trade-offs, and strategies of assimilation, reconciliation, mutual support and cohesion? What are the ethics (normative) of such a venture, and what are the strategies (instrumental) to be employed?

Homi Bhabha argues for a project of radical contextualization, which acknowledges the contingencies of all identities and affirms the traces of historicity and spatiality inscribed not just by presence but also by absence. Defining as "a dialectic of cultural negation as negotiation" he gives the examples of the territory of the minority in the metropolitan space, while in the transnational space it is the border problem of the diasporic, the migrant; in both the cases the collective identities interstitial and by all means provisional.

How do organized and institutionalized spatial practices like urban design and community planning with their own historical roots and developments respond to these situations is a subject of much importance. One important thing that distinguishes 20^th century urbanism is the rapid evolution of these interstitial identities and constituencies. To decipher, articulate, frame and develop spatial strategies, which remain engaged with and are proactive to these multiple identities, and remain cognizant of their strategic goals and ethical priorities is one critical part of this broad task.