ABSTRACT
The material 2 on which this paper is based derives from an urban survey on which I was engaged from October 1962 to May 1963. During this time, one of the obvious features of the life of this city, which was undergoing sudden and uncontrolled change, was the proliferation of youth groups, many of them deliquent gangs. By ‘youth’ I mean the age-category ten to twenty, although it is hard to draw a clear-cut distinction dividing senior members of this group from junior members of the category referred to as adult. However I shall not be concerned with young children or with mature adults. My aim is to present some material for comparison with studies in English and American towns and also to estimate the degree to which the fluid social situation, which characterized the period of my fieldwork, affected the nature of the groups themselves.
