Focusing on the liberating promise of public space, The Beach Beneath the Streets examines the activist struggles of communities in New York City-queer youth of color, gardeners, cyclists, and anti-gentrification activists-as they transform streets, piers, and vacant lots into everyday sites for autonomy, imagination, identity formation, creativity, problem solving, and even democratic renewal. Through ethnographic accounts of contests over New York City's public spaces that highlight the tension between resistance and repression, Shepard and Smithsimon identify how changes in the control of public spaces-parks, street corners, and plazas-have reliably foreshadowed elites' shifting designs on the city at large. With an innovative taxonomy of public space, the authors frame the ways spaces as diverse as gated enclaves, luxury shopping malls, collapsing piers and street protests can be understood in relation to one another. Synthesizing the fifty-year history of New York's neoliberal transformation and the social movements which have opposed the process, The Beach Beneath the Streets captures the dynamics at work in the ongoing shaping of urban spaces into places of repression, expression, control, and creativity.

Acknowledgments Part 1. Repression Introduction. Control, Exclusion, and Play in Today's Future City 1. Seeing Space through Exclusion and Control 2. Dispersing the Crowd. Bonus Plazas and the Creation of Public Space 3. The City as Seen from the Plaza. Changing Regimes of Private Control Part 2. Resistance Introductory Notes to Part 2 4. Fences and Piers. An Investigation of a Disappearing Queer Public Space 5. "If We Can't Dance It's Not Our Revolution".Reclaiming the Streets and Creating Autonomous Space 6. Gardens, Streets, and Convivial Places. The Struggle for a Ludic Counterpublic 7. From Contested to Popular Space. New York's Bike Lane Liberation Clowns 8. Conclusion. This Land is Your Land? Notes References