Discussions of street culture exist in a variety of academic disciplines, yet a handbook that brings together the diversity of scholarship on this subject has yet to be produced. The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture integrates and reviews current scholarship regarding the history, types, and contexts of the concept of street culture. It is comprehensive and international in its treatment of the subject of street culture. Street culture includes many subtypes, situations, locations, and participants, and these are explored in the various chapters included in this book. Street culture varies based on numerous factors including capitalism, market societies, policing, ethnicity, and race but also advances in technology. The book is divided into four major sections: Actors and street culture, Activities connected to street culture, The centrality of crime to street culture, and Representations of street culture. Contributors are well respected and recognized international scholars in their fields. They draw upon contemporary scholarship produced in the social sciences, arts, and humanities in order to communicate their understanding of street culture. The book provides a comprehensive and accessible approach to the subject of street culture through the lens of an inter- and/or multidisciplinary perspective. It is also intersectional in its approach and consideration of the subject and phenomenon of street culture.
Foreword: From the Chicago School to the Routledge Handbook of Street Culture
Peter K. Manning
Introduction: Disentangling Street Culture
Jeffrey Ian Ross
PART I: Actors and Street Culture
1. A Street Culture of Homelessness
Tyler Frederick
2. Currando las margenes: Roma Street Culture
Daniel Briggs
3. Street Performers and Street Culture
Paul Watt
4. How Municipal Police Interact with Street Culture
Jeffrey Ian Ross and Michael Rowe
5. Youth Street Cultures: Between Online and Offline Circuits
Ricardo M. O. Campos
PART II: Activities Connected to Street Culture
6. Graffiti, Crime and Street Culture
Stefano Bloch and Susan A. Phillips
7. From Graffiti to Gallery: The Street Art Phenomenon
G. James Daichendt
8. Taxi Driving and Street Culture: Acquiring and Utilizing Street Knowledge
Jeffrey Ian Ross
9. Skateboarding and Street Culture
Iain Borden
10. Parkour and Street Culture: Conviviality, Law, and the Negotiation of Urban Space
Paul Gilchrist and Guy Osborn
11. Mobilising Street Culture: Understanding the Implications of the Shift from Lifestyle Bike Messengers to Gig Economy Workers
Justin Spinney and Cosmin Popan
12. Street Vending and Everyday Life in an Authentic 21st Century
Renia Ehrenfeucht
13. Private Uses Make Public Spaces: Street Vending in Ho Chi Minh City and Rome
Francesca Piazzoni and Huê-Tâm Jamme
14. Street Scavenging and Street Culture
Ben Stickle
15. Street Life and Masculinities
Christopher Mullins and Daniel Ryan Kavish
16. Gentrification’s Impact on Street Life
Mirko Guaralda and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi
PART III: The Centrality of Crime to Street Culture
17. Street Culture and Street Crime: The Enduring and Unequivocal Link
Jeffrey Ian Ross and Bárbara Barraza Uribe
18. The Code of the Street: Causes and Consequences
Jonathan Intravia
19. A Cross-Cultural Perspective of the Code of the Street
Sebastian Kurtenbach
20. Street Culture and Street Gangs
Timothy Lauger and Brooke Horning
21. Suburbia’s Delinquent Street Cultures
Simon I. Singer
22. Writing "Street Culture" Should be a Crime
Karen Coen Flynn and Mark S. Fleisher
PART IV: Representations of Street Culture
23. The Relationship between Popular Culture and Street Culture: A Case Study of Baltimore
Jeffrey Ian Ross
24. Portrayals of Street Culture in Hollywood Films
James Wicks
25. On the Street: Photography and the City
Donna West Brett
26. Street Styles Serenade: Urban Street Styles Emerging from Music Scenes
Therèsa M. Winge
27. Re-Inventing Luxury in the Streets: An Assemblage View of the Relationship Between Luxury Brands and Street Culture
Hélène De Burgh-Woodman
28. Language and Street Culture in the Big City
Eivind Nessa Torgersen
29. Street Food and Placemaking: A Cultural Review of Urban Practices
Anna Svensdotter, Mirko Guaralda and Severine Mayere
30. Digital Streets, Internet Banging, and Cybercrimes: Street Culture in A Digitized World
Robert Roks and Jeroen van den Broek
Biography
Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D., is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice, College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore. He has been a visiting professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, and University of Padua, Italy. He has researched, written, and lectured primarily on corrections, policing, political crime, state crime, crimes of the powerful, violence, street culture, and crime and justice in American Indian communities for over two decades. Ross’ work has appeared in many academic journals and books, as well as popular media. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of several books including the Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art (Routledge, 2016). In 2018, Ross was given the Hans W. Mattick Award, "for an individual who has made a distinguished contribution to the field of Criminology & Criminal Justice practice," from the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2020, he received the John Howard Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ Division of Corrections. The award is the ACJS Corrections Section’s most prestigious award, and was given because of his "outstanding research and service to the field of corrections."
'At its most vibrant, the culture of the street is a remarkable human accomplishment – an eclectic, contested mélange of people, styles, and interactions. The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture captures just this vibrancy, documenting efflorescences of street culture across a range of global urban settings, and revealing the ways in which street culture seeps into media and digital worlds as well. I enthusiastically recommend this book – and I recommend that you read it on the front stoop, or maybe down on the corner.'
Jeff Ferrell, Professor, Texas Christian University, USA
'The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture offers a dedicated approach to the critical analysis of a series of social phenomena often considered in isolation, allowing a new and interesting reading of a culture that crosses borders, disciplinary and beyond. Ross recovers the value and complexity of cultural productions that are considered marginal, to demonstrate their pervasiveness and importance in shaping our way of seeing the world. Authors from different disciplines and fields of social knowledge find for the first time a common language to promote a field of investigation that is currently unexplored. The 'field effect' that is thus produced forge new conceptualizations that cannot be isolated from their empirical application, nor from their ethical implications.'
Francesca Vianello, Professor, University of Padua, Italy
'With this Handbook, Jeffrey Ian Ross and contributors from a wide variety of countries and academic disciplines, bring together a range of important perspectives to understand life on city streets and in the urban margins. With topics that traverse issues of crime and policing; culture, media and everyday life; and structure, spatiality and identity, the chapters offer much to curious students and scholars. Imbued with character, imagination and originality, this book serves as a milestone in the development of a Street Cultural Studies.'
Jonathan Ilan, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, City, University of London, UK
'Jeffrey Ian Ross has produced an important new book. The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture is a unique contribution to many inter-related literatures. These include the many representations, actors, activities, and crime associated with street culture. The book offers fresh perspectives from leading scholars of "cultural criminology" who demonstrate the central role that street culture plays in the daily lives of mainstream and marginalized individuals. The book will be important to the future of criminology.'
Scott H. Decker, Foundation Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University, USA
'The Handbook deals with distinct realities – most obvious in the subject matter it covers, but also in its epistemologies, ontologies, and methods.'
Ronald Kramer, Journal of Urban Design
'the Handbook of Street Culture brings disciplines into conversation with each other around a few central themes surrounding the street in a way only possible in such a wide volume. As a primer and discussion starter, it is a successful collection – the entry point towards much further exploration, which no doubt readers will value.'
Jason Luger, Human Geography
'The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture not only keeps a watchful eye on the street but, through its large looking glass, creates an amorphous infrastructure to organize and reveal what it sees.'
John Lennon, Journal of Urban Affairs
'All said, the social relations and cultural transmissions that produce the social space of street culture, constantly grows in counterpoint with influences from outside. The Handbook, therefore, avoids presupposing that the members and activities of the streets are cultural deficits as defined by policing and regu-lation. Instead, Ross and the authors present street culture as a much more essential array of assets of that produce a convivial, networked and vital ethos.'
Clayton Funk, Visual Inquiry
