I – Introduction to Urban Anthropology

Urban Anthropology

- Seeks to understand the changing nature of urban social life, the influence of urban
space and place; what constitutes a city in the context of global flows and connections.
- Traditional anthropology – focus on small-scale communities in non-urban settings.
o Anthro conducted in cities =/ = urban anthropology

Chapter overview:

- Introduction: Overview of the development of urban anthropology

o Background factors that influenced the growth of urban anthropology in the
twentieth century
o Distinctions between urban anthropology, general anthropology, and other
disciplinary approaches to urban life
- Historical development of the field (19 th century predecessors, describing a number of
‘schools’ and trends or ‘turns’ that characterized urban anthropology in the 20 th century)
o Themes and approaches that are specific to anthropological research on the 21 st
century city
- Specifities of doing anthropological research in and on urban settings
o Elaborating how the concerns and methodologies of ethnographic research are
adapted to urban contexts
o Approaches and methods (‘studying up’ and ‘studying through’, mobile methods,
cognitive and participatory mapping, and the study of popular culture)

Why urban anthropology?

- Emergence and growth of urban anthropology – factors:

o Two Main Factors:
 Global processes of rapid urbanization
 Shifts within broader anthropology.
o First straightforward factor: growth of cities
o Rapid, large-scale urbanization in 19th century Europe’s Industrial Revolution
 Masses of factory laborers were concentrated in overcrowded shanty
towns
th
o 20 century industrialization and urbanization – cities of countries across the
world
o 21st century – more than half of humanity living in urban areas.
 Social, cultural, political, and economic changes accompanied this
massive demographic shift – interested anthropologists.
- Process of urbanization associated with major social, cultural, and economic
transformations often grouped under the rubric of globalization.

City typologies – p. 2
Situating urban anthropology—What do urban anthropologists ask?

- Urban anthropology – anthropology that engages explicitly with the question of how
social life is structured by and experienced within urban contexts—characterized by
specific features (size, density, heterogeneity, anonymity, and inequality).
- In urban settings, people tend to engage in a variety of social relations, ranging from
intimate and personal relations (household members, close friends, and kin) to more
segmented relations structured by clearly delimited roles (economic relations), to very
fleeting, anonymous encounters (ex. traffic).
o Heterogeneity of urban populations + prevalence of public spaces (sidewalks,
plazas) = cities as site of unexpected encounters between people with diverse
socio-economic and cultural backgrounds
- Size and diversities of cities facilitate the emergence of scenes or subcultures (ex. based
on lifestyle choices, popular culture preferences  association of the urban context with
cultural creativity and aesthetic innovation
o Demographic density – enables the urban phenomenon of the crowd
 Social and political implications – crowds shape sensations of anonymity,
loneliness or freedom, collective violence, and political action
o Symbolically important public spaces
 Ground for both state spectacle and political contestation
- How do cities shape forms of identification and social relations?
- What cultural repertoires and imaginaries emerge in urban contexts of anonymity,
diversity, and inequality?
- How do urban paces shape power relations between groups or institutions, and,
conversely, how do power relations shape urban spaces?
- How urban anthropology distinguishes itself:
o More global character than more ‘mainstream’ urban studies

What is a city? – p. 4

- Early definitions – function in relation to surrounding ‘hinterland.’

o Local centers of power—political, economic, cultural and religious activities
converged, and are concentrated.
- Other definitions – physical form and demographic characteristics
o Crowded built environment, dense population.
- Main characteristics by Chicago School sociologist Louis Wirth (1938: 8) - influential
o Size, density, and population heterogeneity
o ‘For sociological purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and
permanent settlement of socially heterogenous individuals.’
o Different types of social relationships and attitudes to define urbanism as a way
of life:
  Rural: Face-to-face, intimate social relations between family, friends and
community members
 Urban: Impersonal, formal, and business-oriented relationships between
its residents, and their blasé attitudes
 Cities: associated with anonymity and heterogeneity—influential to
viewing urban space as a public realm
 Richard Sennett: “a place where strangers meet” (2010: 261)
- Constructivist definitions – City as a social construct
o A city is a city if people believe that it is one.
o To study who holds the power to define a city as such.
 Political and administrative definitions – fiscal, economic and legal
implications
o Tax independent from national governments in municipalities; prices varying
based on whether a site is inside or outside the city limits
- Social-material-technological process (Brenner et al. 2011)
o Cities as intersection of multiple dynamic and unstable networks and flows of
people, animal, money, things, ideas and technology.
o Emphasis on the interwovenness of cities and nature, urban political ecologists
frame the city as the process of the urbanization of nature

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Feb. 21-23, 2023 – Readings –

II. What is a City?

02 Childe, V. G. (1950). The urban revolution. The town planning review, 21(1), 3-
17

Reading goal:

- To present the city (pre)historically as a resultant and symbol of a ‘revolution’

that initiated a new economic stage in the evolution of society.
- ‘Revolution’ – not a sudden violent catastrophe.
o as a culmination of progressive change in the economic structure and social
organization of communities through dramatic increase in the population
affected.

Sociologists and ethnographers last century on existing pre-industrial societies:

- Classified through the hierarchy of three evolutionary stages:

o Savagery – lives on wild food by collecting, hunting, or fishing.
o Barbarism – supplements natural resources through cultivating edible plants.
o Civilization – succeeded barbarism.

Essential features of a Civilization/City

 - ambiguous, thus archaeologists resorted to ‘writing’ as a criterion of civilization.
o Does not mean all inhabitants can read and write, nor lived in cities.
- Size of settlement, and density of population
o Determined by food supply which is limited by natural resources, techniques for
exploitation, and means of transport, and food preservation available.
o Neolithic Revolution – allowed an expansion of population and carrying capacity
of suitable land.
 Neolithic farmers – lived together in permanent villages—but shifted at
least every twenty years if crops were not watered by irrigation
 Low population due to technical limitations—absence of vehicles
and roads for crop transport
 Social division of labor (except imposed by age and sex) is impossible:
 Common absorption in obtaining food by similar devices
guarantees certain solidarity to the group.
o Co-operation is essential to secure food and shelter, and
defense against foes.
 Identity of economic interests and pursuits is echoed and
magnified by identity of language, custom, and belief:
 Rigid conformity – enforced as effectively as industry in the
common quest for food.
 Conformity and industrious cooperation – need no State
organization to be maintained
 Local group:
o Single clan (common ancestor/descent through adoption)
or a group of clans through habitual intermarriage.
o Kinship – reinforced or supplement by common rites on an
ancestral shrine/sacred place.

Ten Criteria to distinguish cities from any older or contemporary village:

1. Population
2. Food production – different composition and function than that of any village.
o Classes accommodated for specific food production—agriculture, stock-breeding,
fishing, or collection—full-time specialist craftsmen, transport workers,
merchants, officials, and priests.
o Supported by surplus produced by peasants in the city, and in dependent
villages.
 But didn’t secure their share directly by exchanging their products or
services for grains or fish with individual peasants.
3. Taxes – primary producers paid over the tiny surplus from his soil to an imaginary deity
or a divine king who concentrated the surplus.
4. Social Surplus – through monumental public buildings that distinguish cities from any
village.
o First effectively concentrated in the hands of a god and stored in his granary
 Ex. Pharaoh (king) as a god in Egypt
5. Class division
o Surplus accumulated in temples or royal granaries  dependence  Priests, civil
and military leaders and officials  ‘Ruling class’.
 Egyptian scribe: “Exempt from all manual tasks.”
 Planning and organization
o Lower classes – not guaranteed peace and security, and relieved from
intellectual tasks.
6. The invention of recording, and exact, but practically useful, sciences
o Writing/scripts – convenient and significant mark of civilization
 Documents, engraved seals or stelae as evidence
7. Specialization – elaboration of exact and predictive sciences—arithmetic, geometry,
and astronomy (aided by the invention of writing/scripts)
o Calendrical and mathematical sciences
o Egyptian and Maya documents – correct determination of the tropic year,
creation of a calendar
8. New direction to artistic expression
o Rather than concrete and naturalistic depiction as those in paleolithic times,
neolithic peasants symbolized objects by abstract geometrical patterns as traits
of a fantastical man, beast, or plant.
o Egyptian, Sumerian, Indus, and Maya artist-craftsmen – full-time sculptors,
painters, or seal-engravers
 Craved, modeled, or drew likenesses of person or things—not in the naïve
naturalism of a hunter, but through conceptualized and sophisticated
styles w/c differ in each of the four urban centers.
9. Regular ‘foreign’ trade over long distances
o Social surplus for importation fees
o Were first mainly ‘luxuries’ but later led to essential materials (ex. industrial
materials) in which cities became dependent for these materials on long distance
trade as no neolithic village ever was.
10. State – State organization is based on residence than kinship.
o specialist craftsmen were guaranteed security and raw materials.
o Itinerancy is no longer obligatory—city as a community to which a craftsman
could belong politically and economically
 In return for security—dependence on temple or court, and were
relegated to the lower classes
 02 Engels - The Great Town

Summary:

- Great towns are chiefly inhabited by working-people

- Interior arrangement of the dwellings – poverty-stricken in various degrees
o Absence of even the most necessary furniture
o Clothing of workers are generally scanty, and that of multitudes is in rags.
o Food is, in general bad—almost unfit for use.
o Inhabitants are confined to the smallest possible space—one family sleeps for
each room.
o Lack of ventilation.
o Stray animals

03 Brenner, N., & Schmid, C. (2015). Towards a new epistemology of the urban_.
City, 19(2-3), 151-182.

Three Macro-trends that challenges long-entrenched assumptions regarding the

nature of the urban:

1. Mosaic of spatial unevenness

o New geographies of uneven spatial development have been emerging through a

contradictory interplay between rapid, explosive processes of urbanization, and
various forms of stagnation, shrinkage and marginalization, often in close
proximity to one another.

2. Complex nature and changing definitions of the urban phenomenon

o The basic nature of urban realities—understood under the singular,

encompassing rubric of ‘cityness’—has become differentiated, polymorphic,
variegated and multiscalar than in previous cycles of capitalist urbanization.

o Cannot be understood as a singular condition derived from:

 The serial replication of a specific spatial condition (e.g., agglomeration)

 Settlement type (e.g., places with large, dense and/or heterogenous

populations) across the territory

- Key expressions in the reconstitution of urbanizing landscapes:

o Formation of large-scale megacities and polynucleated metropolitan

regions
 o Unprecedented densification of inter-metropolitan networks—requiring
colossally scaled infrastructural investments (highways, canals, railways,
container ports, airports, and hydroelectric dams) stretching across territories
and continents.

o Restructuring and repositioning of traditional ‘hinterlands’ through the

installation of new export processing zones, global sweatshop regions, back
office locations, data processing facilities, and intermodal logistic terminals

o Remaking and spatial extension of large-scale land-use systems

devoted to resource extraction, the production and circulation of energy, and
water and waste management.

o Profound social and environmental transformation of vast, ‘rural’ areas

through the expansion of large-scale industrial agriculture, extension of global
agro-business networks, and imposition of associated forms of land grabbing and
territorial enclosure.

o Operationalization of ‘wilderness’ spaces (rainforests, deserts, alpine

regions, polar zones, ocean, and even the atmosphere itself) to serve the
relentless growth imperatives of an accelerating, increasingly planetary formation
of capitalist urbanization.

3. Rapid mutations of regulatory geographies of capitalist urbanization

Urban ideologies, old and new

- Lefebvre (1970) – argued that a new understanding of the urban was required, as the
urban itself was becoming the episteme of our time.

o Reconceptualization of the urban as an essential epistemological and political

pre-condition for understanding the nature of society itself.

- Notion of an ‘urban age’ – most influential contemporary metanarrative of the global

urban condition

o Introduced by United Nations (UN) demographers, then popularized in public and

scholarly discourses on the growth of urban settlements and associated social,
regulatory and environmental hazards.

o City-centric perspective – more than half the world’s populations now lives
within cities.

 City became generalized into the universal form of human settlement—

represents the most elemental spatial unit for humanity’s future.
- Variations on urban age discourse involve a variety of normative,
methodological, strategic, and substantive concerns: including the following
main streams:

o Urban triumphalism

 Presents cities as engines of innovation, civilization, prosperity and

democracy across historical and regional contexts.

 Contemporary cities represent latest expressions of a time-tested

sociospatial formula that has enabled the progressive historical
development of human society, technology, and governance.

 It connects the UN’s basic demographic propositions to broader,

qualitatively elaborated arguments concerning the role of cities in
unleashing humanity’s economic, social and cultural potentials.

o Technoscientific urbanism

 Mobilizes the tools of natural science, mathematics, and ‘big data’

analysis to analyze and predict inter- and intra-urban spatial
arrangements.

 Neo-positivist, neo-naturalist approach – represent a revival of

important strands of postwar systems thinking in geography, planning,
and design discourse

 Contemporary discourse on ‘smart cities’ – represent an important

parallel strand of technoscientific urbanism—in which information
technology corporations are aggressively marketing new modes of spatial
monitoring, information processing and data visualization to embattled
municipal and metropolitan governments around the world as a technical
‘fix’ for intractable governance problems.

 Technoscientific aspirations to reveal law-like regularities within and

among the world’s major cities – serve to naturalize the forms of socio-
spatial disorder, enclosure, and displacement induced through the last
several decades of neoliberal regulatory restricting and recurrent
geoeconomic crisis.

o Debates on urban sustainability

 Key role of cities in the deepening planetary ecological crisis

 Cities as the ‘front lines’ where environmental crises are most

dramatically experienced, and as techno-social arenas in which potential
responses are being pioneered.
  Celebrate cities as the most ecologically viable arrangements for
human settlement, and/or propose new technoscientific ‘solutions’
for re-engineering urban metabolic processes (architectural and
design interventions under the rubric of an ‘ecological urbanism’)

 Main thrust of recent debates on urban sustainability—to promote a

vision of cities as bounded, technologically controlled islands of eco-
rationality that are largely delinked from the broader territorial formations
in which they are currently embedded.

 Translates urban age discourse into a city-centric techno-

environmentalism that often justified and even celebrates the
enclavization of settlement space as the optimal means to ensure
human survival under conditions of deepening planetary ecological
crisis.

o Debates on megacities

 Megacities as a specific settlement type that has been consolidated

across the ‘Third World’ or the ‘global South’ under conditions of rapid
urbanization, hyper congestion, and resource scarcity.

Thesis 1: The urban and urbanization are theoretical categories, not empirical objects.

Thesis 2: The urban is a process, not a universal form, settlement type of bounded unit.