Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy

Well written, hard to put down, a fascinating account of prostitutes and drug dealers studied by a socialist.But surely this is only a small part of "the floating city" , I could envision a huge web of interlocking personalities, lives and conflicts that go to make up the whole city. Come on Sudhir, give us more!

I felt the writer was a bit self conscious. He admits that, but still, I admit it did bother me at times. In the world in which he chose to navigate and 'research' one never knows exactly how accurate an account of that he wishes to study, that he is actually obtaining. It seemed interesting, yet ambiguous, neither research nor novel, vignettes, almost a story, but not quite. There is so little to reference it in some ways. He doesn't explore the personalities and character of his subjects deeply. That is OK, but it lacks the intensity of a fiction where we become involved with the lives of those we are meeting in the pages. There is something impersonal about the people in the book and our author appears to try to keep it that way. Yet, I also had the feeling that he cared for several of them and those are the ones we got to know a bit more than some of the others. There is little discussion of social morality or what the effects of those social practices are upon their practitioners. Perhaps that is as it should have been for the purposes of the kind of book he wished to write. It did occur to me some days after finishing reading the book how much better off our world would be if drugs and prostitution were totally legal in every way and regulated as legitimate commerce. I didn't have any sense of how the author felt about that and perhaps its unimportant, but such a book does assist one in thinking of such things. I think that is good. I was disappointed in that the author himself remained such an enigma. After all, we spent all our time with him. I never felt as if I met him, this guy I spent a whole book with, reading his thoughts.

Great book! I don't know how many times I found myself reading FLOATING CITY after 1AM because there were more things that I just had to learn about. A wonderful perspective and a new perspective, Sudhir gave me the new language and vocabulary that I needed to describe what happens in New York. I can not know something until I have the words for it, and now I have the words. Thank you!

I read Floating City today -- I had pre-ordered it to be downloaded to my ipad. The stories in the book about all the people in the 'underground' Venkatesh encountered are very well done and the fact that white elites were among them makes the book even more compelling to read. However, while Venkatesh frames New York City as one that floats; his continued somewhat unenthusiastic dialogue about the general field of Sociology as well as his Columbia colleagues becomes a broken record pretty early on in the book. This distracts from all the complex, sometimes dark, and interesting characters and social networks that unfold in the book. Shine tells Venkatesh near the end of the book that he and others know how to move on but he sees Venkatesh as standing still and doing nothing. Venkatesh did write this book and it does have a lot to offer, but the narrative feels somewhat forced specifically because of his fixation on how Sociology doesn't seem to take him that seriously. The result is that he often comes off as somewhat whiny. So let's look at the evidence: he is a tenured full professor with an endowed chair at one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the country. His documentary film, Dislocation, which focuses on the forced relocation of public housing residents in Chicago, is used in urban sociology, geography, and urban policy classrooms all over the country -- as is his previous autobiographical book "Gang Leader". I'd say he is doing very well as a Sociologist. Implicit here is that Columbia University and his colleagues have supported his research both for academic and broader audiences.

Another work by the Columbia University sociologist Venkatesh, who illuminates the "darker" side of New York City dwellers. If you still believe that the poor don't try hard enough, read this book. It demonstrates how some poor people can't catch a break and how others resort to any means they can to survive.

Author does research on the sex industry in NY and the interactions of the different people with each other.He becomes emotionally involved ( not sexually) with his subjects. Author links some of his feelings with his own failing marriage but that was a side issue.The book was drawn out for too many chapters and did not follow characters in depth as much as the reader would have liked.Most of what he writes about is illegal ,such as prostitution ,drug pushing and pimping so how he could write about it without police involvement made me wonder how much the police ignore and how much they are paid to ignore.Interesting book but not a compelling read.

Finally open my eyes to the rich other side. I am learning their world for a few dollars.

Great read. Sudhir mixes in his personal life a bit, creating an enthralling study-cum-life experience. Looking forward to his next work.

Just over five years ago I spent a very short-seeming flight from London to Toronto reading Sudhir Venkatesh's first book, Gang Leader For A Day, recounting his field work as a sociologist in Chicago. It's totally fascinating, and when I read of the publication of Floating City I bought it without hesitation.This time he's in New York, established as a professor at Columbia and looking for an angle in the sex industry. The book's title evokes the Japanese concept of the floating world, of prostitution and so on, but also including geisha. But it also here refers to the transience of the society into which the author, as an ethnographer, inserts himself, with a shifting population, shifting alliances, shifting relationships. People float in; people float out.In the opening pages Venkatesh proves himself an astute observer, catching the expressions in people's eyes, inflections in their voices, and attitudes in their postures. He notes interactions, how people respond to each other, throughout.His opening story is of how an acquaintance shocks him with a confession to being a madam, a sex broker, but unlike his usual subjects she is not poor but a bourgeois heiress. It is for him the latest in a long line of revelations which transport him out of his comfort zone, created in Chicago, of static neighbourhoods, which he begins to realise are not the norm, that life in some locales is in fact a "moving picture", in constant flux and difficult to capture. The world he conceived of as ordered, fixed and bounded is in fact chaotic and changing, with people constantly moving between boxes, often effortlessly, often consciously and willingly irrespective of the risks.In Gang Leader, Venkatesh came over as sometimes quite endearingly naïve, and this persists. It may even be what makes him good. Things some of us may take for granted seem to surprise him, and he then makes us notice them too, whereas before we treated them as part of the furniture and never questioned them. In one hilarious episode he is confronted by a bouncer in a strip club, who to the author's apparent surprise is not impressed by his claims to be a sociologist conducting research into sex work (a similar episode in Gang Leader saw Venkatesh imprisoned in a urine-soaked stairwell by a gang suspecting him of being a spy for the opposition) and marches him, through a scene straight out of an episode of Law And Order, to an office in which a scantily clad woman is being interviewed by two managers, who also are unimpressed and have him turfed out.Venkatesh's wanderings reveal a complex network of interconnections between the people of the area, from every corner of the world, and shatter a number of preconceptions: the sex workers he encounters are, in the majority, supporting not a drug problem but families, neighbourhoods and businesses. The players come across as hard-working and underpaid: they hustle, but usually not in a way that disadvantages others.But the fragility of the network is cruelly exposed to Venkatesh one Christmas as he drops by to give a contact a present for his son, only to find the contact gone and his replacement hostile and unaware either of his predecessor or his whereabouts, and suddenly none of the hookers he knows is answering her phone. After a desperate search he finds his contact has fled, following a beating during a shake-down, and suddenly he's not the only one, as the neighbourhood gentrifies and the delicate web of support begins to unravel, an experience at least familiar to him from his time in Chicago.But the gentrification has other consequences. It sucks in other immigrants as service workers who, unlike their predecessors in New York, are fragmented and unable to unionise, have little or no access to a route out, and are paid next-to-nothing, hence one in three are in poverty.In search of new contacts, Venkatesh inadvertently finds himself bumping up against the other side of the coin, the rich, sometimes new inhabitants of New York, sometimes white, sometimes black or brown but with none of the street connections of his other subjects. He toys, amusingly, with the idea of a Coming Of Age In Samoa in reverse, but his early dabbling in the area is a disappointment: unlike his usual subjects, possibly flattered by the attention, the rich, white heirs and heiresses he encounters initially treat him as either the help or the furniture the help comes over to clean.Meanwhile, his customary subjects are experiencing change all around them and trying to adjust; as he says, they do so in the way any entrepreneur confronted with "creative destruction" does, except they lack "legitimacy", legality and, often, even bank accounts, and certainly not a health plan. Nevertheless, the one thing they are not is passive victims.Finally, Venkatesh finds himself a contact to ease him into the world of upper-end sex work, a sex broker who for a while had done the work herself. But he is also going through a wrenching separation from his wife, and his contact recognises his vulnerability and steers him away from the workers themselves, instead advising him to talk to other brokers. Very soon he realises the wisdom of this as he begins to realise once again, as he had in Chicago, the way the shadow economy regulates itself through the offices of informal mediators, and armed with this he begins to piece other experiences together into the touchstone of his craft, generalisability.Soon after he engineers a real breakthrough, securing interviews with the sex workers themselves and, to his amazement, their clients. But here his constant reflexivity, his researcher's in-built self-questioning of motivations, kicks in to a point which he finds disturbing, and indeed by the end of the book it is apparent he has learnt a great deal about himself as well as his target environment.Intrigued by the pop version of his research, I sought out a couple of the associated academic papers. My own academic endeavours have brought me into contact with other research connected with the sex industry, specifically the work of Lowman, O'Doherty and Bungay in Vancouver, and Sanders in the UK. Whilst carefully unemotive in tone, this work nevertheless highlights the dangers of the sex trade, also brought out in Floating City, and finds that one way sex workers guard against beatings and robbery is by working indoors and carefully screening their clients, rather than working on the streets where they are more open to predation by pimps, johns and sometimes the police. One of Venkatesh's conclusions, to the contrary, is that setting up indoors, and particularly the creeping professionalisation he observes, serves only to normalise and perpetuate sex work as an occupation, which he considers dangerous in itself.So, thought provoking and a little controversial, with real implications for the way society is and could be. Floating City is that and more. It is also superbly and engagingly written, and the proofreading is, so far as I saw, perfect; excellent QA. As with Gang Leader, I found it hard to put down, and was sad when it ended. But that's partly because, as Venkatesh intimates, this is a story that really hasn't concluded, and is even now playing out on the streets of the cities of the world, not just those of New York.

This is more of a sociological study/ essay than a novel or real life story. There are sections of it which are very good and I would suggest that it might prove very useful to a student of sociology and life in large cities. For the rest of us it is a little turgid, something you dip in and out of.

Contains lots of interesting anthropology, but this book isn't as coherent, interesting or content-heavy as the previous work on Chicago, and doesn't get as much detail as other truly seminal works. Disappointingly navel-gazing at times

This is a fantastic book I love me some Sudhiruodate: still love the book but I've brought it down to three stars because i ordered a paperback copy and it never arrived!

interesting and entertaining