Here I consider the spatial resilience of immigrant-orientated voluntary-sector organisations – and how they enabled resilience socially – set within a predominantly immigrant community space: Pico-Union in Los Angeles and Tower Hamlets borough in London. The two most important immigrant groups in these enclaves are made up of Central American and Bangladeshi people, respectively, and both consider these areas their original settlement hubs. Accordingly, I focused on the service hubs that have emerged to cater to an immigrant clientele. While Sydney is most definitely a migrant metropolis and the primary magnet for Australia (Forrest & Dunn, 2007), its inner city has been gentrified to the point where many immigrants now head directly to the (inner-western) suburbs, particularly within 20 kilometres of Auburn CBD (Lalich, 2006). More generally, inner-city Australia has been, using Shaw's term (2007), ‘white-washed’ (see Walters & McCrea, 2014, for Brisbane; Van Hulten, 2010, for Melbourne; and Byrne & Houston, 2005, for Perth). In Sydney, the obvious exception to this trend has been Chinatown, but beyond it there was a generalised evacuation of immigrant community space that was more advanced than Inner London and most certainly for inner-city Los Angeles.

Threats of displacement in Pico-Union and Tower Hamlets came in two forms: the threat of absolute homelessness for what are two very vulnerable groups – the response to which involved the voluntary sector enabling and transferring social resilience to the community – as well as broader threats through gentrification and redevelopment, which involved voluntary-sector spatial resilience. Sometimes forgotten by proponents of professionalisation (Hamnett, 2003), immigrant community space is crucial in that it reflects the polarisation endemic to global cities, but also contains the very voluntary-sector organisations designed to allay its worst tendencies. Moreover, the relationship between immigrant community space and gentrification seems woefully understudied (but see Walks & Maaranen, 2008), and certainly worthy of further consideration. For instance, different models of relationships can be proposed: for Sydney, it was a suburban model whereby immigrants shun the gentrifying inner city; for London it was more of a bubble model, whereby gentrifiers have moved into inner-city immigrant community space but have yet to displace it entirely, relying instead on a spatially proximate but socially apart existence (May, 1996; Butler, 2003; Clerval, 2013);