Chinatown

A Chinatown is a section of an urban area associated with a large number of Chinese residents or commercial activities within a city outside China. Chinatowns are most common in Southeast Asia and North America.

In the past, overcrowded Chinatowns in urban areas were generally shunned by the non-Chinese public as ethnic ghettos, and seen as places of vice and cultural insularity where "unassimilable foreigners" congregated. Nowadays, many old and new Chinatowns are considered significant centers of commercialism and tourism. Some of them also serve, to various degrees, as centers of multiculturalism, if in a somewhat superficial manner. It is a misconception to assume that a city's 'Chinatown' constitutes the place where most of the city's people of Chinese ancestry live.

Many Chinatowns are focused on commercial tourism whereas others are actual living and working communities; some are a synthesis of both. Chinatowns also range from rundown ghettoes to sites of recent development. In some, recent investments have revitalized run-down and blighted areas and turned them into centers of economic and social activity. In some cases, this has led to gentrification and a reduction in the specifically Chinese character of the neighborhoods.

One of the formal entrances or Paifang to Chinatown in London, in Soho around Gerrard Street, Lisle Street and Shaftesbury AvenueMany Chinatowns have a long history, such as Shinchimachi, the nearly three-century old Chinatown in Nagasaki, Japan, or Yaowarat Road in Bangkok, which was founded by Chinese traders more than 200 years ago. Melbourne Chinatown, established in the Victorian gold rush in 1854, is the longest continuously running Chinatown outside of Asia (San Francisco Chinatown was built earlier during the California Gold Rush, but rebuilt after it was destroyed by earthquakes). Other Chinatowns are much newer, for example, the Chinatown in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. formed in the 1990s. Most Chinatowns grew without any organized plans, while a very few (such as the one in Las Vegas and a new area outside the city limits of Seoul, South Korea to be completed by late 2005) were developed following deliberate plans (sometimes as part of redevelopment projects to better the location). Indeed, many areas of the world promote the commercial development and redevelopment (or regeneration) of Chinatowns,