In the Third World, gangs changed in two directions. They immigrated to the US and captured local drug markets, often violently. Turkish immigrants to Germany and Moroccan immigrants to the Netherlands also became entwined with the drug cartels. Likewise in the US, some cities experienced vast reductions in homicide and crime as their economies boom, while others did not. The traditional spaces of gangs near central business districts became contested by gentrification and development, pushing the gang and drug networks outward toward the suburbs.
Gangs appear to be vacating some areas, some moving elsewhere, but others disbanding or fading away.
It is the contention of this volume and conference that gangs are conscious organizations within poor communitiesresponding the conditions of globalization, just as they had responded to the conditions of industrialization. To see gangs as just a form of organized crime is to tear the organization of people in poor communities from its economic and cultural context. Similarly, to see gangs across the globe as all close cousins of the wild peer groups of Thrasher's day, would be mistaken. What is called for is the attention of gang research to the investigations of urban political economy, and the impact of the new economy on the spaces of the city. The rise of some regions, cities, and areas within cities, and the decline of others, is an uninvestigated, but certainly significant, aspect of the global gang problem.