Introducing urban anthropology – written by R. Jaffe & A. de
Koning
Chapter 1: introduction
Urban anthropologists seek to understand the changing nature of urban social life, the influence of
urban space and place, and more broadly what constitutes a city in the context of global flows and
connections. This book takes as its starting point that, while urban anthropologists study a broad
range of social phenomena, what makes their work urban anthropology is their explicit reflection on
the implications of the urban context in which these phenomena occur. ‘
The first straightforward factor feeding into the growth of urban anthropology has been the
growth of cities. Urban anthropology also developed in the global South, where researchers studied
processes of urbanization in the colonial and postcolonial world, often in relationship to research in
development, modernity and decolonization. Anthropology’s earliest roots are entangled with the
history of colonialism. While not a straightforward ‘handmaiden of colonialism’, the discipline did
develop as a colonial science, stimulated by a demand for enhanced knowledge of ‘native
populations’. The decolonizing movement within anthropology emphasized the need to ‘bring
anthropology home’. Th move to study countries ‘at home’ in many cases also meant turning to urban
anthropology.
In this book, ‘urban anthropology’ is defined as anthropology that engages explicitly with the
question of how social life is structured by and experienced within urban contexts. Such urban
contexts are characterised by specific features such as size, density, heterogeneity, anonymity and
inequality. The size and diversity of cities facilitate the emergence of particular scenes or subcultures,
for example based on lifestyle choices or popular culture preferences, leading to an association of the
urban context with cultural creativity and aesthetic innovation. Urban anthropology has distinguished
itself from adjacent fields in a number of important ways. It has a more global character than more
‘mainstream’ urban studies, which tended to focus exclusively on European and North American
cities. With the use of participant observation, urban anthropologists have also distinguished
themselves from other urban studies through their methods. The use of ethnographic methods also
connects to the distinctive anthropological focus on everyday life in the city, and on the less
quantifiable imaginaries and symbols through which people make sense of their urban surrounding.
Urban anthropology tries to capture the complex social and cultural lives that people develop in
cities, and documents how they negotiate heterogeneous, unequal and constantly changing urban
landscapes.
Louis Wirth included size, density and population heterogeneity as the three main
characteristics of a city: ‘for sociological purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense,
and permanent settlement of socially heterogenous individuals’. Wirth argued that what defined the
city were the impersonal, formal and business-oriented relationships between its residents, and their
blasé attitudes. More recently, scholars have begun to approach city not so much as a place but as a
social-material-technological process, or an assemblage. From this perspective, cities are the
intersection of multiple dynamic and unstable networks and flows of people, animals, money, things,
ideas and technology.
We can distinguish three broad groups of influential writers describing and analysing
urbanisation and industrialisation in European and North American cities: literary journalists,
academically minded reformers and empirically oriented sociologists studying Chicago. Many of these
journalistic and literary writings did have a political purpose: the authors wanted to highlight the
exploitation of the urban poor and used their ‘research’ to make a case for governmental and
charitable interventions. Moving into the 20 th century, an important body of urban research emerged
from the University of Chicago, at the first sociology department in the United States. The Chicago
,School was founded by two unconventional scholars: William I. Thomas and former journalist and
activist Robert Park.
The so-called Copperbelt studies, conducted from a ‘colonial liberal’ perspective, traced the
social transformations associated with rural-to-urban migration and industrialisation in the 1940s and
1950s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists working on cities increasingly drew on a political
economy perspective. In Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, this interest in political economy
was also evident in a focus on the urban informal economy, which developed in part through an
anthropological engagement with development studies. In the 1990s, urban anthropologists reflected
the influence of what has been called the spatial turn. Across disciplines, people began to focus on
the power inherent in configurations of space. This turn inaugurated a revitalization of urban
anthropology, with an increasing number of anthropological studies that explicitly focuses on the
relation between urban space and social and cultural life in cities. Foucault’s conceptualization of
power, as regimes of truth that shape the world around us and our understanding of it, has perhaps
been the most influential in urban anthropology.
Important themes within the field of urban anthropology in the 21 st century include urban
space, place and the built environment. More broadly, the majority of urban anthropologists pay
close attention to the workings of urban power, politics and governance. The past few decades have
seen the rise of what has come to be known as neoliberalism: a set of theories and policies that
promote market-based solutions to a broad range of problems, reconfiguring the relations between
the state, citizens and the private sector.
Researchers are likely to have to deal with a wide range of people who occupy diverse social
roles: from local politicians, wealthy merchants and directors of charity organisations to
neighbourhood strongmen, informal vendors and security guards. Urban anthropologists are more
likely to study people who are highly educated ad plugged into the same social media as themselves.
Most urban anthropology requires a combination of research techniques and a triangulation of
various kinds of data.
With the emergence or urban anthropology, it increasingly focused on groups that had hardly
been studied before: middle classes and elites. Study up is the classic statement on research on
relatively powerful actors. In order to understand processes of domination, anthropologists should
study powerful actors and institutions, rather than focus only on the underdogs of marginalized
groups. Studying through can be defined as ‘following the source of a policy – its discourses,
prescriptions, and programs – through to those affected by the policies. Mobile methods help to track
the movement of people, goods and ideas, but they can also enable us to understand the larger
structures that organize this movement.
Discussion questions
1. How would you define a city? What are the most important features of a city, in your
opinion?
2. What main background factors explain the emergence of urban anthropology as a subfield of
anthropology?
3. What do you consider the most important differences between urban anthropology and
related fields such as urban sociology and urban geography?
4. Comparing urban anthropology in the mid-twentieth century and urban anthropology in the
21st century, what different interests and emphases can be distinguished?
5. What are the methodological dilemmas you might encounter when doing urban
anthropological research?
6. What methods do you think are particularly productive for urban anthropological research?
, Chapter 2: Urban places
This chapter discusses different ways of thinking about the role of urban places I structuring urban
belonging and everyday experiences of the city. The focus is on the relationship between processes of
physical construction and meaning making. The process of transforming abstract space into concrete,
meaningful place is often referred to as place-making.
Urban place-making involves individual and collective acts of territorial meaning-making. This
process often starts with marking spatial boundaries, either physically or discursively. As we give
names to bounded places and use them – for living, working, studying or consuming – they become
imbued with positive or negative emotional associations, memories or aspirations. Through our
everyday uses and narratives, spaces gain meaning and become places. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
coined the term topophilia to refer to this type of positive affective bond.
The process of place-making always entails the construction of meaning in relationship to the
physical environment, a process that can take both discursive and sensory forms. Experiences of place
are multi-sensory: in addition to sight, these experiences involve smell, sound, touch and taste.
Structural forces and powerful actors often shape processes of place-making, limiting the range of
meanings one can attach to a particular place. Focusing on urban places, not only sheds light on
feelings of home and belonging, it also directs our attention to socio-spatial structures of inequality
and exclusion, and to contestations over definitions of urban space.
Religious place-making has discursive and experiental dimensions, and often relies on
important markers (such as monuments or places of worship) in the built environment. Cities that
contain important pilgrimage sites are often strongly connected to similar places, through the
movement of people who travel between them, by the exchange of ideas and goods, and sometimes
even by institutional arrangements.
Buildings only really become places when people begin to use them, discuss them and
develop emotional attachments to them. Different types of political, religious or social authorities
often use symbolic features to assert their power. However, built structures also acquire meaning in
ways that have nothing to do with official government strategies. In fact, everyday place-making may
run counter to official goals. Religious spaces have a kind of agency. They are manmade products that
have an impact on human experience. From an anthropological perspective, the way we use and
adorn our residences is not only a matter of individual likes and dislikes. We are also interested in
how such decisions and preferences are shaped socially and culturally, in different time periods and in
different places. Interior design tells us something about people’s identities, how they see themselves
and how they want to be seen by visitors.
Neighbourhoods are prime sites for the normative and emotional response we develop to
urban places, and for thinking about place-making more broadly. Arjun Appadurai argues that we can
never understand neighbourhoods as an existing separate from other places: ‘neighbourhoods are
inherently what they are because they are opposed to something else and derive from other, already
produced neighbourhoods’. From one perspective, neighbourhoods involves understanding them as
administrative units, with names and boundaries determined by municipal governments in order to
facilitate urban governance.
Lewis developed the ‘culture of poverty’ thesis, which argues that people living under
structural conditions of long-term poverty may develop a particular set of cultural attitudes, beliefs
and practices that work to perpetuate their marginal position, even their structural conditions
change. Janice Perlman argued against the ‘marginality model’, a model that paralleled Lewis’s
‘culture of poverty’ theory in its depiction of favela residents as culturally deviant and peripheral to
the city and society. While Rio’s poor suffered social exclusion, Perlman showed that they were very
