The Urban Villagers: Group And Class In The Life Of Italian-Americans
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Slight tear to back cover.
At the intersection of urban sociology and cultural anthropology stands The Urban Villagers, Herbert J. Gans's landmark study of the Italian-American working-class community of Boston's West End — a neighbourhood on the brink of destruction through urban renewal. Drawing on years of firsthand fieldwork, Gans chronicles the rich, tightly-knit social fabric of a people whose peer-group networks, family loyalties, and class identity defined an entire way of life, even as the bulldozers of mid-century progress threatened to erase it entirely. With unflinching clarity and remarkable intimacy, the work presents a community not as a problem to be solved but as a living, breathing society with its own coherent values and internal logic. Gans writes with the precision of a trained sociologist and the empathy of a true participant-observer, producing a text that became a foundational document in urban studies and sparked fierce debate about the human cost of top-down city planning. The Urban Villagers argues powerfully that class — not ethnicity alone — shapes the aspirations, behaviours, and fates of working-class Americans, a thesis as urgent today as when it was first published. For anyone who wishes to understand how communities are built, sustained, and ultimately lost, this book remains an essential and profoundly moving reckoning.
Author: Herbert J. Gans
Format: Paperback
Genre: Society & culture
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Slight tear to back cover.
At the intersection of urban sociology and cultural anthropology stands The Urban Villagers, Herbert J. Gans's landmark study of the Italian-American working-class community of Boston's West End — a neighbourhood on the brink of destruction through urban renewal. Drawing on years of firsthand fieldwork, Gans chronicles the rich, tightly-knit social fabric of a people whose peer-group networks, family loyalties, and class identity defined an entire way of life, even as the bulldozers of mid-century progress threatened to erase it entirely. With unflinching clarity and remarkable intimacy, the work presents a community not as a problem to be solved but as a living, breathing society with its own coherent values and internal logic. Gans writes with the precision of a trained sociologist and the empathy of a true participant-observer, producing a text that became a foundational document in urban studies and sparked fierce debate about the human cost of top-down city planning. The Urban Villagers argues powerfully that class — not ethnicity alone — shapes the aspirations, behaviours, and fates of working-class Americans, a thesis as urgent today as when it was first published. For anyone who wishes to understand how communities are built, sustained, and ultimately lost, this book remains an essential and profoundly moving reckoning.