Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, Norman Street is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-1978. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons still resonate in the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives.

Based on a three-year study of Brooklyn's Greenpoint-Williamsburg area, Norman Street is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Over the decades, Greenpoint-Williamsburg has become home to artists, actors, writers and young people with alternative cultural aspirations. Susser documents how these groups, in many ways, have joined with the remaining working class population to build a thriving community that is now threatened with displacement by municipal rezoning which has facilitated massive plans for new corporate investment. Increasingly prescient at a moment of economic crisis when people are again occupying public spaces in major American cities, spurred to collective action by mounting economic inequalities and the government's role in perpetuating them, Susser's study of change, action, and conflict in a neighborhood that has become emblematic of urban transformation-for better and worse-has much to say to us today.

A Companion to Urban Anthropology BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY A Companion to Urban Anthropology “The city is becoming the basic currency of human – and non-human – life: a pile of interconnections which makes a series of difficult wholes. This volume navigates the anthropology of this medium with the greatest aplomb.” Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick A Companion to Urban Anthropology presents original essays on central concepts in urban anthropology and ethnography. Featuring contributions from more than 25 leading international scholars in urban studies, the readings cover a wide variety of topics. Each essay explores a key phenomenon and is grounded in the author’s original research along with findings of other urbanists. Classic issues such as built structures and urban planning, community, markets, and race lead to emergent areas of study including borders, sexualities, nature, extralegality, and resilience and sustainability. A Companion to Urban Anthropology offers revealing insights into the complex forces that continue to shape the urban experience.

This book delves into the ethical dimension of urban life: how should one live in the city? What constitutes a ‘good’ life under urban condition? Whose gets to live a ‘good’ life, and whose ideas of morality, propriety and ‘good’ prevail? What is the connection between the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ in urban life? Rather than philosophizing the ‘good’ and proper life in cities, the book considers what happens when urban conflicts and urban futures are carried out as conflicts over the good and proper life in cities. It offers an understanding of how ethical discourses, ideals and values are harmonized with material interests of different groups, taking up cases studies about environmental protection, co-housing schemes, political protest, heritage preservation, participatory planning, collaborative art production, and other topics from different eras and parts of the globe. This book offers multidisciplinary insights, ethnographic research and conceptual tools and resources to explore and better understand such conflicts. It questions the ways in which urban ethics draw on tacit moral economies of urban life and the ways in which such moral economies become explicit, political and programmatic. Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Norman Street is the first serious examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the country. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, Susser deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.