Pages: 24

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the development of urban anthropology. It starts with a section that discusses the background factors that influenced the growth of urban anthropology in the twentieth century and defines urban anthropology. The second section sketches the historical development of the field, starting from nineteenth-century predecessors and describing a number of ‘schools’ and trends or ‘turns’ that characterized urban anthropology in the twentieth century, and explores the themes and approaches that are specific to anthropological research on the twenty-first century city. The third section discusses the specificities of doing anthropological research in and on urban settings, elaborating how the concerns and methodologies of ethnographic research are adapted to urban contexts. The chapter ends with an overview of the structure of the book.

Pages: 53

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 20

This chapter discusses how urban places contribute to urban belonging and everyday experiences of the city. It focuses on place-making: the process of transforming abstract space into concrete, meaningful place. The first section provides a theoretical discussion on the concepts of place-making, home and belonging, focusing on discursive, sensory and affective dimensions and using sacred place-making as an important example. The second section examines the role of buildings as urban places, with specific attention to architecture and domestic space. Built structures gain specific meanings through the combination of material forms with ceremonial and everyday uses. This section examines different types of architecture, including religious and colonial structures, and explains how the design and furnishing of domestic space reflect and inform changing family relations and ideologies. The third section focuses on neighborhoods, a popular site for urban anthropological research. While much of this work has concentrated on marginalized and informal settlements, more recent anthropological scholarship is also concerned with wealthier city dwellers and elite gated communities. The final section discusses how urban places are made relationally, through their connections to other places across the globe, for instance through the movement of people and goods associated with transnational migration and trade.

Pages: 16

This chapter focuses on people’s movements in and through cities. It discusses both physical mobility (how we get from point A to point B) and the ways that these movements are represented and made meaningful. The chapter also explores why individuals and groups of urban residents move in different ways and how this relates to inequality. The first section discusses mobility and identities. What are the different ways in which people move through cities and how are social categories and identifications formed around these various mobilities? The next section looks at how differentiated mobilities are connected to urban inequalities, focusing on disability and on traffic and public transport. A final section looks at the cultural politics of mobility, focusing on the meaning given to different forms of movement and the aesthetics and materiality associated with these mobilities. This section discusses how certain mobilities come to be seen as transgressive or emancipatory, from low-rider car culture amongst Mexican Americans in US cities such as Austin, to cycling in Bogotá.

Pages: 15

This chapter discusses how we can we understand social life in public space. The first section explores the cultural and historical diversity of public space, contextualizing the politics and imaginations that shape these spaces. The next section examines how different people are positioned in intersectional and embodied ways in public, focusing on the mutual constitution of the identities of people and places. It discusses how the urban landscape can be understood as a tapestry of everyday spatial regimes that regulate social life in public space, by differentiating social spaces as appropriate for particular publics and activities. The final section examines how the micro-encounters that constitute this social life often reflect, reproduce and transform larger social hierarchies and political contestations.

Pages: 56

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 20

This chapter approaches urban life through a focus on urban economies and specifically on production. The first section discusses the major shifts in economies worldwide since the Second World War, from national developmental models to neoliberal reforms and globalization, and from Fordism to post-Fordism. The second section describes how city life is shaped by specific urban industries, which may become more or less prominent in the context of these larger shifts. It zooms in on the mining town, a city type that has received considerable anthropological attention over the decades, and that has been linked in various contexts to the formation of the modern working class and labor movement. The third section asks how shifting class formations in post-industrial cities impact their urban landscapes, including the rise of new middle classes and the precariat. It also discusses how the emergence of the gig economy and platform labor contribute to increasingly flexible and insecure jobs. The fourth section discusses the contested concept of the informal sector, which has been an important theme in anthropological studies of urban economies. The final section shows how anthropological studies have analyzed specific economic places in cities, from the factory and the market, to the street and often overlooked domestic spaces.

Pages: 16

This chapter discusses how urban anthropologists have studied urban consumption and to the ways that consumption figures in city-based leisure and lifestyles. It examines how people enjoy and consume the city, and how such choices reflect, and may subvert, social hierarchies. The first section explains that consumption is an important aspect of cultural capital: it is central in creating and maintaining social distinction in the context of class hierarchies and broader identity politics. It plays an important role in the reproduction of social and spatial divisions and, in many contexts, citizenship is increasingly defined in terms of consumption rather than democratic participation. The second section discusses the connections between consumption and urban space. Shifts in consumption contribute to transformations of the urban landscape, creating specific types of places for particular kinds of consumers. In addition, urban space itself has become an important object of consumption, as is evident in phenomena such as urban tourism and city branding. The chapter’s final section discusses scenes, lifestyles and subcultures, pointing to the role of youth styles and popular culture in the creation of new urban identities. It highlights the many creative and potentially subversive possibilities for self-fashioning that cities offer.

Pages: 18

This chapter discusses how neoliberal ideologies and policies have reshaped cities around the world. The first section sketches how post-Second World War political-economic logics and state–citizen relations became the target of neoliberal ideologies and reforms. The following sections consider how neoliberal policies have impacted urban landscapes. This second section discusses neoliberal cities, focusing on the global city and the entrepreneurial city. The third section examines the impact of neoliberal policies on low-income populations, including the stigmatization of public housing, and discusses the effects of the global financial crisis of the early twenty-first century, which include massive evictions. The final section zooms in on the austerity policies that have upset many urban lives, particularly in Southern Europe, but which also inspired social experiments and new commons.

Pages: 60

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 17

This chapter examines the top-down structuring of the social life of cities through urban planning, and the way ordinary people engage with such top-down efforts to shape the city. The first section of the chapter discusses how urban planning and design functioned as technologies of rule in colonial cities. It explains how the racial segregation of neighborhoods and other planning interventions, often in the name of public health, contributed to the legitimization and reproduction of colonial hierarchies. The second section focuses on anthropological studies of planning in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cities. It details how more progressive urban imaginations inspire planning, the social engineering that such blueprints involve and how local populations engage with and rework such urban plans. It discusses postcolonial modernist utopias such as Brasília and Chandigarh, and post-war and post-disaster reconstruction in cities such as Juba and New Orleans. ‘Slum-upgrading projects’ present another common form of social engineering through urban planning. The final section discusses urban infrastructure. It emphasizes that urban infrastructures are often constructed in order to consolidate state power and that they can play a central role in the formation of political subjects.

Pages: 18

Cities are often extremely important political arenas and sites for the expression and experience of citizenship. This first section of this chapter examines the role of cities in shaping political communities and facilitating particularly urban forms of citizenship, including differentiated and insurgent citizenship. The second section discusses how anthropologists have studied urban politics, which includes both electoral politics and urban politics beyond the electoral system. This section also discusses less formalized power struggles in the form of the quiet encroachment of the urban poor. The final section discusses explicitly political movements, from the grassroots movements that emerge in low-income areas and on urban peripheries, to cross-class social movements that mobilize around state violence and civil rights issues. In all these forms of politics, public space plays an important role. The collective character of public space lends it its political character and facilitates its functioning as a political forum.

Pages: 18

Violence, security and social control are three interconnected concepts that play an important role in the negotiation of urban order. The first section of this chapter introduces anthropological approaches to violence, including reflections on the dilemmas associated with this type of ethnographic research. It discusses different typologies of violence, focusing on criminal, ethno-religious and political violence in cities. The second section concentrates on how violence and fear of violence affect urban life, by shaping spatial narratives, mobilities and the material form of cities. The third section discusses the various strategies of control applied under the rubric of urban security. It focuses on interventions by state actors such as the police, including their use of different security technologies. The final section details the shift from ‘police’ to ‘policing’: in addition to public security forces such as the police and the military, non-state policing actors including security guards and vigilantes play a growing role in providing security to urban populations. Urban anthropologists have explored how these various non-state violent actors can be understood as sovereigns beyond the state.

Pages: 4

This concluding chapter sketches three emergent trends and developments that the authors identify as increasingly important within urban anthropology. It points first to the impact of digital technologies on urban landscapes and lives and to the growing interest among urban anthropologists to address these effects. Second, it notes the increasing attention to urban ecologies and the climate crisis, and the development of a more-than-human perspective on the city. Finally, the chapter describes the growing emphasis on temporality in urban anthropology, and specifically the burgeoning interest in urban futures.