Description:
In this book, Hae explores how nightlife in NYC, long associated with various subcultures of social dancing, has been recently transformed as the city has undergone gentrification, and how this transformation has dampened urban inhabitants' rights to the uses of urban space and access to diverse urban cultures.
Review Quotes:
"What happens when alternatives to bourgeois living can find no space in the city? This question is at the heart of Laam Hae's important new book. The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City not only shows that the cost to alternative modes of life, as well as to our collective right to the city, is high, but also shows in sophisticated theoretical and empirical detail just how the squeeze on alternative ways of life - day and night - has been put on New York City. Drawing on a wealth of interviews with city officials, nightlife entrepreneurs and DJs, as well as a trove of historical documents and contemporary accounts, Hae engages in a deep reading of the lawsuits, political struggles, zoning decisions, and structural forces that have brought us to the sorry state where gentrification has become a force for the implantation of an exceedingly narrow, commodified, bourgeois nightlife up and down the length of the city, even as it has become an ever-more powerful force against the survival of the kind of less-commodified nightlife that makes a city a city. The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City is essential reading for all of us who care about what makes cities really worth living in and what the forces are that are arrayed against us - not just in New York, but everywhere."
- Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography, Syracuse University, author of The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space
"Laam Hae used an impressive amount of sources and methods to tell the story. Her ethnographic research is based on policy documents, transcripts of public hearings, historical zoning maps and reports, local newspaper reports, internet list-serves. Also involved are interviews with officials and civil servants, members of activist groups or pro-nightlife organisations or club owners."
- Valerie De Craene, Urban Studies Journal, University of Leuven, Belgium