with its shared culture, or the disorganizedzone of urban anomie.Growing numbers of inner city neighbourhoods now containpopulations drawn from a multiplicity of ethnicities, subcultures,and classes. These groups may share physical space, but they pursuedisparate ways of life and hold very different views of theirneighbourhood's future. Such areas have become contested turf -arenas of heated political struggle.Nowhere has this struggle been so complexly joined than in the EastVillage on New York's Lower East Side. For over two decades,established and new immigrants, community activists, hippies,squatters, yuppies, developers, drug dealers, artists, thehomeless, and the police have been battling for control of thedistrict and its central meeting ground, Tompkins SquarePark.Based on five years of research and participant observation, thisbook gives a vivid account of the contestants and their strugglesin the battle for the Lower East Side. It is a battle which islikely to be replicated, perhaps less violently, in many otherparts of urban America.

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