The acclaimed Columbia University sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York’s divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the city’s underground economy. Based on Venkatesh’s interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high-end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city’s true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity—revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York. A memoir of sociological investigation, Floating City draws from Venkatesh’s decade of research within the affluent communities of Upper East Side socialites and Midtown businessmen, the drug gangs of Harlem and the sex workers of Brooklyn, the artists of Tribeca and the escort services of Hell’s Kitchen. Venkatesh arrived in the city after his groundbreaking research in Chicago, where crime remained stubbornly local: Gangs stuck to their housing projects and criminals stayed on their corners. But in Floating City, Venkatesh discovers that New York’s underground economy unites instead of divides inhabitants: a vast network of “off the books” transactions linking the high and low worlds of the city. Venkatesh shows how dealing in drugs and sex and undocumented labor bridges the conventional divides between rich and poor, unmasking a city knit together by the invisible threads of the underground economy. Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy chronicles Venkatesh’s decade of discovery and loss in the shifting terrain of New York, where research subjects might disappear suddenly and new allies emerge by chance, where close friends might reveal themselves to be criminals of the lowest order. Propelled by Venkatesh’s numerous interviews and firsthand research, Floating City at its heart is a story of one man struggling to understand a complex global city constantly in the throes of becoming.
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“Crime and
vice are the ties that bind an unlikely community of New Yorkers in this
fascinating X-ray of the city…Venkatesh focuses on the sex trade: ghetto
streetwalkers, Ivy League grads moonlighting as call girls, smug Wall Street
johns who insist their dalliances strengthen their marriages, and an heiress
who sets herself up as a madam. Venkatesh’s engrossing narrative dissects the
intricacies of illegal commerce and the subtle ways it both divides and
entwines different classes and races, while painting rich, novelistic portraits
of its participants and their dreams of self-reinvention. Meanwhile, he
weathers his own identity…as a chronicler of a city on the make.”
—
Publishers Weekly (starred review)