Author: Janet L. Abu-Lughod
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9781557865250
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
This landmark study explores a new reality in today's inner cities - one that diverges radically from the dominant models of either the urban village, with its shared culture, or the disorganized zone of urban anomie. Growing numbers of inner city neighbourhoods now contain populations drawn from a multiplicity of ethnicities, subcultures, and classes. These groups may share physical space, but they pursue disparate ways of life and hold very different views of their neighbourhood's future. Such areas have become contested turf - arenas of heated political struggle. Nowhere has this struggle been so complexly joined than in the East Village on New York's Lower East Side. For over two decades, established and new immigrants, community activists, hippies, squatters, yuppies, developers, drug dealers, artists, the homeless, and the police have been battling for control of the district and its central meeting ground, Tompkins Square Park. Based on five years of research and participant observation, this book gives a vivid account of the contestants and their struggles in the battle for the Lower East Side. It is a battle which is likely to be replicated, perhaps less violently, in many other parts of urban America.
From Urban Village to East Village
Author: Janet L. Abu-Lughod
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9781557865250
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
This landmark study explores a new reality in today's inner cities - one that diverges radically from the dominant models of either the urban village, with its shared culture, or the disorganized zone of urban anomie. Growing numbers of inner city neighbourhoods now contain populations drawn from a multiplicity of ethnicities, subcultures, and classes. These groups may share physical space, but they pursue disparate ways of life and hold very different views of their neighbourhood's future. Such areas have become contested turf - arenas of heated political struggle. Nowhere has this struggle been so complexly joined than in the East Village on New York's Lower East Side. For over two decades, established and new immigrants, community activists, hippies, squatters, yuppies, developers, drug dealers, artists, the homeless, and the police have been battling for control of the district and its central meeting ground, Tompkins Square Park. Based on five years of research and participant observation, this book gives a vivid account of the contestants and their struggles in the battle for the Lower East Side. It is a battle which is likely to be replicated, perhaps less violently, in many other parts of urban America.
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9781557865250
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
This landmark study explores a new reality in today's inner cities - one that diverges radically from the dominant models of either the urban village, with its shared culture, or the disorganized zone of urban anomie. Growing numbers of inner city neighbourhoods now contain populations drawn from a multiplicity of ethnicities, subcultures, and classes. These groups may share physical space, but they pursue disparate ways of life and hold very different views of their neighbourhood's future. Such areas have become contested turf - arenas of heated political struggle. Nowhere has this struggle been so complexly joined than in the East Village on New York's Lower East Side. For over two decades, established and new immigrants, community activists, hippies, squatters, yuppies, developers, drug dealers, artists, the homeless, and the police have been battling for control of the district and its central meeting ground, Tompkins Square Park. Based on five years of research and participant observation, this book gives a vivid account of the contestants and their struggles in the battle for the Lower East Side. It is a battle which is likely to be replicated, perhaps less violently, in many other parts of urban America.
Selling the Lower East Side
Author: Christopher Mele
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816631810
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
The Lower East Side of Manhattan is rich in stories -- of poor immigrants who flocked there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; of beatniks, hippies, and artists who peopled it mid-century; and of the real estate developers and politicians who have always shaped what is now termed the "East Village". Today, the musical Rent plays on Broadway to a mostly white and suburban audience, MTV exploits the neighborhood's newly trendy squalor in a film promotion, and on the Internet a cyber soap opera and travel-related Web pages lure members of the middle class to enjoy a commodified and sanitized version of the neighborhood. In this sweeping account, Christopher Mele analyzes the political and cultural forces that have influenced the development of this distinctive community. He describes late nineteenth-century notions of the Lower East Side as a place of entrenched poverty, ethnic plurality, political activism, and "low" culture that elicited feelings of revulsion and fear among the city's elite and middle classes. The resulting -- and ongoing -- struggle between government and residents over affordable and decent housing has in turn affected real estate practices and urban development policies. Selling the Lower East Side recounts the resistance tactics used by community residents, as well as the impulse on the part of some to perpetuate the image of the neighborhood as dangerous, romantic, and bohemian, clinging to the marginality that has been central to the identity of the East Village and subverting attempts to portray it as "new and improved". Ironically, this very image of urban grittiness has been appropriated by a cultural marketplace hungry for new fodder.Mele explores the ways that developers, media executives, and others have coopted the area's characteristics -- analyzing the East Village as a "style provider" where what is being marketed is "difference". The result is a visionary look at how political and economic actions transform neighborhoods and at what happens when a neighborhood is what is being "consumed".
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816631810
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
The Lower East Side of Manhattan is rich in stories -- of poor immigrants who flocked there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; of beatniks, hippies, and artists who peopled it mid-century; and of the real estate developers and politicians who have always shaped what is now termed the "East Village". Today, the musical Rent plays on Broadway to a mostly white and suburban audience, MTV exploits the neighborhood's newly trendy squalor in a film promotion, and on the Internet a cyber soap opera and travel-related Web pages lure members of the middle class to enjoy a commodified and sanitized version of the neighborhood. In this sweeping account, Christopher Mele analyzes the political and cultural forces that have influenced the development of this distinctive community. He describes late nineteenth-century notions of the Lower East Side as a place of entrenched poverty, ethnic plurality, political activism, and "low" culture that elicited feelings of revulsion and fear among the city's elite and middle classes. The resulting -- and ongoing -- struggle between government and residents over affordable and decent housing has in turn affected real estate practices and urban development policies. Selling the Lower East Side recounts the resistance tactics used by community residents, as well as the impulse on the part of some to perpetuate the image of the neighborhood as dangerous, romantic, and bohemian, clinging to the marginality that has been central to the identity of the East Village and subverting attempts to portray it as "new and improved". Ironically, this very image of urban grittiness has been appropriated by a cultural marketplace hungry for new fodder.Mele explores the ways that developers, media executives, and others have coopted the area's characteristics -- analyzing the East Village as a "style provider" where what is being marketed is "difference". The result is a visionary look at how political and economic actions transform neighborhoods and at what happens when a neighborhood is what is being "consumed".
Neither Urban Jungle Nor Urban Village
Author: Sara Stoutland
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136769021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
First published in 1997. This is part of the Children of Poverty series, a collection of works on the effects of single parenthood, the feminisation of poverty and homelessness. This text looks at women, families and community development using case studies of tenant activists in Egleston Square and Boston.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136769021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
First published in 1997. This is part of the Children of Poverty series, a collection of works on the effects of single parenthood, the feminisation of poverty and homelessness. This text looks at women, families and community development using case studies of tenant activists in Egleston Square and Boston.
Community
Author: Gerard Delanty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134005504
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Book Description
The increasing individualism of modern Western society has been accompanied by an enduring nostalgia for the idea of community as a source of security and belonging and, in recent years, as an alternative to the state as a basis for politics. Gerard Delanty begins this stimulating introduction to the concept with an analysis of the origins of the idea of community in Western Utopian thought, and as an imagined pristine condition equated with traditional societies in classical sociology and anthropology. He goes on to chart the resurgence of the idea within communitarian thought, the complications and critiques of multiculturalism, and its new manifestations within a society where new modes of communication produce both fragmentation and the possibilities of new social bonds. Contemporary community, he argues, is essentially a communication community based on new kinds of belonging. No longer bounded by place, we are able to belong to multiple communities based on religion, nationalism, ethnicity, life-styles and gender
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134005504
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Book Description
The increasing individualism of modern Western society has been accompanied by an enduring nostalgia for the idea of community as a source of security and belonging and, in recent years, as an alternative to the state as a basis for politics. Gerard Delanty begins this stimulating introduction to the concept with an analysis of the origins of the idea of community in Western Utopian thought, and as an imagined pristine condition equated with traditional societies in classical sociology and anthropology. He goes on to chart the resurgence of the idea within communitarian thought, the complications and critiques of multiculturalism, and its new manifestations within a society where new modes of communication produce both fragmentation and the possibilities of new social bonds. Contemporary community, he argues, is essentially a communication community based on new kinds of belonging. No longer bounded by place, we are able to belong to multiple communities based on religion, nationalism, ethnicity, life-styles and gender
Remaking New York
Author: William Sites
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452906294
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452906294
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Selling the Lower East Side
Author: Christopher Mele
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816631827
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
The Lower East Side of Manhattan is rich in stories -- of poor immigrants who flocked there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; of beatniks, hippies, and artists who peopled it mid-century; and of the real estate developers and politicians who have always shaped what is now termed the "East Village". Today, the musical Rent plays on Broadway to a mostly white and suburban audience, MTV exploits the neighborhood's newly trendy squalor in a film promotion, and on the Internet a cyber soap opera and travel-related Web pages lure members of the middle class to enjoy a commodified and sanitized version of the neighborhood. In this sweeping account, Christopher Mele analyzes the political and cultural forces that have influenced the development of this distinctive community. He describes late nineteenth-century notions of the Lower East Side as a place of entrenched poverty, ethnic plurality, political activism, and "low" culture that elicited feelings of revulsion and fear among the city's elite and middle classes. The resulting -- and ongoing -- struggle between government and residents over affordable and decent housing has in turn affected real estate practices and urban development policies. Selling the Lower East Side recounts the resistance tactics used by community residents, as well as the impulse on the part of some to perpetuate the image of the neighborhood as dangerous, romantic, and bohemian, clinging to the marginality that has been central to the identity of the East Village and subverting attempts to portray it as "new and improved". Ironically, this very image of urban grittiness has been appropriated by a cultural marketplace hungry for new fodder.Mele explores the ways that developers, media executives, and others have coopted the area's characteristics -- analyzing the East Village as a "style provider" where what is being marketed is "difference". The result is a visionary look at how political and economic actions transform neighborhoods and at what happens when a neighborhood is what is being "consumed".
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816631827
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
The Lower East Side of Manhattan is rich in stories -- of poor immigrants who flocked there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; of beatniks, hippies, and artists who peopled it mid-century; and of the real estate developers and politicians who have always shaped what is now termed the "East Village". Today, the musical Rent plays on Broadway to a mostly white and suburban audience, MTV exploits the neighborhood's newly trendy squalor in a film promotion, and on the Internet a cyber soap opera and travel-related Web pages lure members of the middle class to enjoy a commodified and sanitized version of the neighborhood. In this sweeping account, Christopher Mele analyzes the political and cultural forces that have influenced the development of this distinctive community. He describes late nineteenth-century notions of the Lower East Side as a place of entrenched poverty, ethnic plurality, political activism, and "low" culture that elicited feelings of revulsion and fear among the city's elite and middle classes. The resulting -- and ongoing -- struggle between government and residents over affordable and decent housing has in turn affected real estate practices and urban development policies. Selling the Lower East Side recounts the resistance tactics used by community residents, as well as the impulse on the part of some to perpetuate the image of the neighborhood as dangerous, romantic, and bohemian, clinging to the marginality that has been central to the identity of the East Village and subverting attempts to portray it as "new and improved". Ironically, this very image of urban grittiness has been appropriated by a cultural marketplace hungry for new fodder.Mele explores the ways that developers, media executives, and others have coopted the area's characteristics -- analyzing the East Village as a "style provider" where what is being marketed is "difference". The result is a visionary look at how political and economic actions transform neighborhoods and at what happens when a neighborhood is what is being "consumed".
Ours to Lose
Author: Amy Starecheski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639994X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Book Description
Before the Lower East Side was one of the most expensive and heavily gentrified neighborhoods in New York City, it was infamous as a site of class conflict, abandonment, and open-air drug dealing. With a deep radical history and a thriving arts scene, it was also the incubator for a squatting movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting into something never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose by anthropologist and historian Amy Starecheski follows a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters as they occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, defended them for decades, and then, in 2002, began a long and difficult process of converting their illegal occupation into legal cooperative ownership. This book does not just tell an interesting story about housing in New York. It uses this case to shed light on how property is crucial to our sense of ourselves as social beings. Starecheski also draws out surprising lessons about homeownership and the morality of debt in post-recession America. This is a timely contribution to the literature on urban housing, inequality, and direct political action by socially marginalized New Yorkers living just a few blocks from Wall Street.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639994X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Book Description
Before the Lower East Side was one of the most expensive and heavily gentrified neighborhoods in New York City, it was infamous as a site of class conflict, abandonment, and open-air drug dealing. With a deep radical history and a thriving arts scene, it was also the incubator for a squatting movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting into something never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose by anthropologist and historian Amy Starecheski follows a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters as they occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, defended them for decades, and then, in 2002, began a long and difficult process of converting their illegal occupation into legal cooperative ownership. This book does not just tell an interesting story about housing in New York. It uses this case to shed light on how property is crucial to our sense of ourselves as social beings. Starecheski also draws out surprising lessons about homeownership and the morality of debt in post-recession America. This is a timely contribution to the literature on urban housing, inequality, and direct political action by socially marginalized New Yorkers living just a few blocks from Wall Street.
Handbook of Urban Studies
Author: Ronan Paddison
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803976955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 524
Book Description
The Handbook of Urban Studies provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date account of the urban condition, relevant to a wide readership from academics to researchers and policymakers. It provides a theoretically and empirically informed account embracing all the different disciplines contributing to urban studies. Leading authors identify key issues and questions and future trends for further research and present their findings so that, where appropriate, they are relevant to the needs of policymakers. Using the city as a unifying structure, the Handbook provides an holistic appreciation of urban structure and change, and of the theories by which we understand the structure, development and changing character
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803976955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 524
Book Description
The Handbook of Urban Studies provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date account of the urban condition, relevant to a wide readership from academics to researchers and policymakers. It provides a theoretically and empirically informed account embracing all the different disciplines contributing to urban studies. Leading authors identify key issues and questions and future trends for further research and present their findings so that, where appropriate, they are relevant to the needs of policymakers. Using the city as a unifying structure, the Handbook provides an holistic appreciation of urban structure and change, and of the theories by which we understand the structure, development and changing character
Urban Space and Late Twentieth-Century New York Literature
Author: C. Neculai
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137340207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
Interdisciplinary in nature, this project draws on fiction, non-fiction and archival material to theorize urban space and literary/cultural production in the context of the United States and New York City. Spanning from the mid-1970s fiscal crisis to the 1987 Market Crash, New York writing becomes akin to geographical fieldwork in this rich study.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137340207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
Interdisciplinary in nature, this project draws on fiction, non-fiction and archival material to theorize urban space and literary/cultural production in the context of the United States and New York City. Spanning from the mid-1970s fiscal crisis to the 1987 Market Crash, New York writing becomes akin to geographical fieldwork in this rich study.
Upscaling Downtown
Author: Richard E. Ocejo
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176310
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
Once known for slum-like conditions in its immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, New York City's downtown now features luxury housing, chic boutiques and hotels, and, most notably, a vibrant nightlife culture. While a burgeoning bar scene can be viewed as a positive sign of urban transformation, tensions lurk beneath, reflecting the social conflicts within postindustrial cities. Upscaling Downtown examines the perspectives and actions of disparate social groups who have been affected by or played a role in the nightlife of the Lower East Side, East Village, and Bowery. Using the social world of bars as windows into understanding urban development, Richard Ocejo argues that the gentrifying neighborhoods of postindustrial cities are increasingly influenced by upscale commercial projects, causing significant conflicts for the people involved. Ocejo explores what community institutions, such as neighborhood bars, gain or lose amid gentrification. He considers why residents continue unsuccessfully to protest the arrival of new bars, how new bar owners produce a nightlife culture that attracts visitors rather than locals, and how government actors, including elected officials and the police, regulate and encourage nightlife culture. By focusing on commercial newcomers and the residents who protest local changes, Ocejo illustrates the contested and dynamic process of neighborhood growth. Delving into the social ecosystem of one emblematic section of Manhattan, Upscaling Downtown sheds fresh light on the tensions and consequences of urban progress.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176310
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
Once known for slum-like conditions in its immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, New York City's downtown now features luxury housing, chic boutiques and hotels, and, most notably, a vibrant nightlife culture. While a burgeoning bar scene can be viewed as a positive sign of urban transformation, tensions lurk beneath, reflecting the social conflicts within postindustrial cities. Upscaling Downtown examines the perspectives and actions of disparate social groups who have been affected by or played a role in the nightlife of the Lower East Side, East Village, and Bowery. Using the social world of bars as windows into understanding urban development, Richard Ocejo argues that the gentrifying neighborhoods of postindustrial cities are increasingly influenced by upscale commercial projects, causing significant conflicts for the people involved. Ocejo explores what community institutions, such as neighborhood bars, gain or lose amid gentrification. He considers why residents continue unsuccessfully to protest the arrival of new bars, how new bar owners produce a nightlife culture that attracts visitors rather than locals, and how government actors, including elected officials and the police, regulate and encourage nightlife culture. By focusing on commercial newcomers and the residents who protest local changes, Ocejo illustrates the contested and dynamic process of neighborhood growth. Delving into the social ecosystem of one emblematic section of Manhattan, Upscaling Downtown sheds fresh light on the tensions and consequences of urban progress.