From Urban Village to East Village

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.

Welcome to the neighborhood / Janet Abu-Lughod

The changing economy of the Lower East Side / Jan Chien Lin

The tenement as a built form / Richard Plunz and Janet Abu-Lughod

A history of Tompkins Square Park / Marci Reaven and Jeanne Houck

Déjà vu: replanning the Lower East Side in the 1930s / Suzanne Wasserman

Neighborhood "burn-out": Puerto Ricans at the end of the queue / Christopher Mele

Appendix: The other side of the coin: culture in Loisaida / Mario Maffi

From disinvestment to reinvestment: mapping the urban 'frontier' in the Lower East Side / Neil Smith, Betsy Duncan, and Laura Reid

The process of gentrification in Alphabet City / Christopher Mele

Public action: New York City policy and the gentrification of the Lower East Side / William Sites

A resident's view of conflict on Tompkins Square Park / Diana R. Gordon

The battle for Tompkins Square Park / Janet Abu-Lughod

The residents in Tompkins Square Park / Dorine Greshof and John Dale

The squatters: a chorus of voices ... but is anyone listening? / Andrew Van Kleunen

Defending the cross-subsidy plan: the tortoise wins again

Conclusions and implications / Janet Abu-Lughod

"[a] fascinating book ... From Urban Village to East Village is a formidable achievement." Progress in Human Geography ./ "As one who has done community studies, my first reaction to Janet Abu-Lughod's ambitious volume about New York's Lower East Side was frankly one of jealousy. I envy her the cadre of able student ethnographers that she was able to field. I envy the colleagues from various disciplines-political scientist Diana Gordon, photographer Marlis Momber, architectural historian Richard Plunz, and geographer Neil Simth-who she draws on to fill in the gaps in the student accounts. I envy her this research site-no doubt among the most politically contested and sociologically complex two square miles of real estate in America. Mostly, I suppose I envy her nerve. Not surprisingly, Abu-lughod was new to New York when she began this project. It is hard to imagine anyone more immersed in the local political culture taking on an area so historically dense. What is surprising is how generally successful the resulting volume is."
Philip Kasinitz, AJS Vol 101 No 5

"From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York's Lower East Side works towards bridging this troubling gap in the literature by examining stuggles over urban space on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The result of a collaborative research project directed by Janet Abu-Lughod, the volume situates recent and highly publicized conflicts over housing and public space on the Lower East Side within an interdisciplinary analysis of the neighborhood's changing relationship to the city's political economy... The volume's refreshingly political analysis of contests over urban space, too complex to treat fully here, underscores both the rewards of collaborative research and the importance of grounding our analyses of urban restructuring in particular palces in the multiple arenas of political practice where space is invested with cultural meaning and economic value."
Steven Gregory, Urban

Janet L. Abu-Lughod is Professor of Sociology in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York. She is one of America's leading commentators on urban affairs. 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.