A Companion to Urban Anthropology

By Donald M. Nonini

A Companion to Urban Anthropology presents a collection of original essays from international scholars on key issues in urban anthropology and broader cross-disciplinary urban studies.

• Features newly commissioned essays from 35 leading international scholars in urban and global studies
• Includes essays in classic areas of concern to urban anthropologists such as built structures and urban planning, community, security, markets, and race
• Covers emergent areas  in the field including: 21st-century cities borders, citizenship, sustainability, and urban sexualities

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118378656

Book preview

Introduction

Donald M. Nonini

It is customary to begin any introduction to a major reader in cultural anthropology with a required ritual genuflection in the direction of the importance of ethnography. In order to observe good form, I invite the reader to envision my making that bow of deep respect and deference: now. But then I must go on to immediately remind you that ethnography is not so much a solution to the theoretical questions posed by anthropology – whether these are connected to globalization, identity, social interactions, or whatever – as it is a critical tool and a set of methodologies which must be problematized and reformulated even as we put it to work.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the anthropology of cities and in urban ethnography. One cannot productively just hang out in large cities, as if the city, or even a neighborhood, were an amplified replication of Malinowski's Trobriand village, and expect to do theoretically meaningful and ethically engaged research on the lives of urban people, their cultural practices, or social relationships. Before one can even begin an ethnographic research project in an urban area, one must confront frankly positional and reflexive issues: where does the anthropologist stand and rest, and how does she conceive of her relationship to those she seeks to study? Are they, for example, nearby or citywide; do they have a publicly enunciable identity and are thus readily located, or are they stigmatized by the majority and spatially marginalized in fugitive spaces; can they be contacted readily or is their very location and willingness to be contacted the first order of concern; are they residing in relatively stable ways in the city, or are they in constant motion between one city and another, perhaps thousands of miles away and across state borders?

Much of the intellectually challenging work of urban anthropology is to incorporate aspects of critically important social and cultural processes into the research design, when they apply at different scales of analysis, so that it becomes productive when one successfully seeks to know the conditions under which one knows what one knows about such urban subjects – persons engaged in culturally meaningful actions in social conditions of unequal power. Questions of epistemology, reflexivity, and scale abound. For instance, I found it impossible to execute a research design on citizenship among Chinese Malaysians in a city of now 100,000 people in northwestern Malaysia where I have done ethnography from 1978–2007, until over time I became able to understand what the concept Chinese society meant for the city's residents and the tensions around its meanings for elites versus non-elites; to reconfigure my ethnographic methods for delimiting it; to ascertain my ethical stance with respect to it given that it served as the object of oppressive state policies; and from these findings, to come to a critique of the theoretical assumptions of the anthropological literature on overseas Chinese political organization from the 1960s onward (Nonini in press). This literature conceived of overseas Chinese as first and foremost quintessential sojourners who treated the postcolonial nation-states of Southeast Asia and their indigenous peoples as no more than the sites and objects of exploitation on their paths of capital accumulation and transnational movement into and out of the region, including their imagined return to China. What then was Chinese society in Malaysia – a spatialized social structure of political nomads and exploitative middleman minorities, a geographic imaginary promoted by Chinese Malaysian elites as a form of class rule, a theoretical concept grounded in a body of anthropological knowledge that I had previously accepted uncritically, or something else entirely? In what sense did Chinese society in Malaysia exist, when ethnic Chinese citizens were under constant attack as disloyal or even criminal by Malaysian state officials, and how under these circumstances was I to be accountable to my informants by challenging a body of anthropological knowledge complicit with such state mythologies and oppressions?

This example, with its constant tensions for the urban anthropologist between empirical referents to concepts, the cultural politics around these concepts arising from ethnographic research over time in an unstable setting grounded in social and political antagonisms, and the continuing processes of analytical abstraction and reflection, including self-reflexivity and quandaries of positionality, is by no means unique. To the contrary, I would argue that such tensions are at the heart of the ethnographic work that most urban anthropologists find themselves engaged in today. It is time for urban anthropologists to frankly acknowledge such tensions, and come to terms with them intellectually and ethically if, that is, urban anthropology is to survive as a discipline into the twenty-first century. The bringing together of these essays in the Companion represents my response to the dilemmas these tensions pose to our intellectual, ethical, and political work.

What Are the Essays About?

In Part I, Foundational Concepts: Affirmed and Contested, the essays simultaneously construct and deconstruct, and provide analytical insights into and logical critiques of the foundational concepts of spatialities, flows, community, and citizenship. Going beyond naïve positivism, one must ask questions (and ask questions about these questions) about how to incorporate space, the flows of people and goods, the social unit of analysis (community), and meanings of citizenship into the research design from the very beginning. Above all, the meta-theoretical message to the urban anthropologist is Attend! – These concepts are not foundational in the sense of being unquestioned, but instead in the sense of being building blocks which the discerning urban anthropologist simultaneously deploys and calls into question, because such strategic problematization is necessary for productive ethnographic work to proceed. For example, while the first two essays on spatialities (Chapter 1) and flows (Chapter 2) suggest the importance of both space and flows within one's research design in urban ethnography, they also insist on the importance of attending carefully to history (in the spatialities essay), and to place within the larger system constituted by flows (in the flows essay).

However, the essays on community (Chapter 3) and on citizenship (Chapter 4) remind us in complementary ways that focusing on spatialities and flows without attention to the cultural politics of their deployment by our informants and other actors can often place our analytical claims in jeopardy. What, after all does community mean when it is deployed to delimit specific groups of people in often quite underspecified relations of power with one another – while excluding other groups – in order to establish ontological claims for its legitimate existence? And how does the urban anthropologist react to the use of community when it shifts meanings as it crosses into and through vernacular, administrative, and academic registers for different rhetorical purposes? What does citizenship mean when its dominant and legalistic meanings of who is included and who is excluded from the political community are contested by city residents in the streets and in everyday life (e.g., in the building of residences), who are thereby reconstructing the very interface between civil society and the state? And yet, the question of how urban residents practice and embody the claims that they are citizens, and make as citizens, is at the very heart of defining the meaning of political life in the city, as the common root between cities and citizen reminds us.

Simultaneously fundamental yet unsettled/unsettling phenomena like spatiality and citizenship are manifest in the material order of cities and urban areas. In phenomenological terms, the city presents itself to the ethnographer as an assemblage of materializations linked one to another either sequentially or in nested ways: buildings, monuments, parks, people shopping, marketplaces, the trading desks of financial firms, shopping centers, people walking, automobiles, streets, boulevards, traffic jams, physical features that divide or unify (e.g., rivers and the bridges that cross them), street signs and other physical markers of borders between administrative districts, ethnic neighborhoods, and even different nation-states. The essays in Part II, Materializations and their Imaginaries examine these materializations as they take the form of the assemblage and reiteration of four phenomena – built structures (Chapter 5), borders (Chapter 6), markets (Chapter 7), and cars (Chapter 8) – whose presence entails the material transformation of the urban landscape.¹ At the same time, associated with these phenomena and the combinations they take, are cultural meanings, imaginaries, rationalities, affects, and knowledges exhibited through and by these materializations. Buildings of all kinds, monuments, open public spaces, but also architectural styles and the layout of cities and towns, are connected to state projects of planning and design and to capitalist finance, both of which vary historically. Markets always take a physical form in contemporary cities (marketplaces, shopping malls, commodity exchanges) – although in the case of electronically mediated markets, these are often not evident to the uninitiated – and are within contemporary capitalist societies markers of the economy par excellence, rational behavior, and the glorification of the self-interested individual and of class privilege. Cars, while hard and at times dangerous and uncontrollable objects for humans and animals in their vicinity, also represent the apotheosis of individual freedom and personal identity associated with late modernism and industrialization – as the recent migration of the mass habitus of automobile consumption to China and other newly industrialized economies indicates, representing the most recent manifestation of the imaginary of capitalist modernity as one without physical limits on a finite planet. Borders, articulated not only by physical features (e.g., rivers, harbors, airports), but also by offices, gates, turnstiles, police and immigration officials, military convoys, passports and passes, and much more, are materializations associated with nationalism, national communities, and the modern nation-state, and with relationships between nation-states, and often operate within cities as well as between them.

The essays of Part III, Dividing Processes, Bases of Solidarity examine processes that simultaneously divide populations and form the bases of solidarity within the divisions these processes create, and thereby organize cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, periurban areas, and metropolitan regions both internally and with respect to one another. These dividing/uniting processes are grounded in cultural meanings along foundational dimensions – around spaces, flows, community and citizenship – and are materialized in physical space through such phenomena as built structures, markets, and borders. Above all, class (Chapter 9), gender (Chapter 10), sexualities (chapter 11), race (Chapter 12), and state-defined legal status (Chapter 13) form the basis for relationships between groups that are simultaneously cooperative and exploitative or oppressive – between men and women, between working people and those who appropriate their surplus labor, between members of racial groups defined by essential and unequal difference, between heterosexual majorities and minority sexualities, and between those of unequal social status defined by state laws as legitimate and legal (police, respectable citizens, officials) or as illegitimate and/or illegal (criminals, certain ethnic minorities).

What is crucial for each of these forms of social division and inequality within cities are two issues. First, the lines between these opposed/complementary identities and their respective privileges are continually struggled over, negotiated, and redefined, while the struggles lead to new forms of solidarities within (and across) the groups being repositioned through these contentions. One thinks for example of the history of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s–1990s in many US and European cities, and the new social divisions and alliances that resulted. Second, these lines of social division around different forms of inequality necessarily intersect in complex combinations that are distilled into the everyday identities of members of groups in the city, and mark the social and cultural boundaries between groups. For example, working-class gays and lesbians live under radically different conditions (and in different areas) from gays and lesbians who belong to more affluent classes. Moreover, these intersectional divisions are often manifest most clearly in spatial barriers and borders that demarcate territories within cities and urban areas associated with each group's intersecting identity position – thus materialized ghettos, gated communities, downtowns, red light districts (differently associated with heterosexual and non-heterosexual identities), supposedly lawless no man's lands, spaces of conspicuous consumption (shopping emporia, playlands), economic extravagance (casinos) and of deprivation (prisons, abandoned houses), and so on.

The essays in Part IV, Abstractions of Consequence, interrogate and reconceptualize the abstractions of globalization (Chapter 14), governance/neoliberalism (Chapter 15), policing and security (Chapter 16), transnationality/transnationalism (Chapter 17), and cosmopolitanism (Chapter 18), as they apply to urban anthropology. These abstractions refer to multi-scalar social and cultural processes that order cities, urban cultures and urban lives under specific conditions, but are also the subject of fundamental theoretical debates within anthropology, with different positions within these debates having specific politics, epistemologies, and even ontologies.

Is globalization an evolutionarily new set of processes associated with capi­talist modernity, or has it been recurrent in the history of commercial civilizations – and what are the implications of either view for our understanding of urban processes and the ethnographic fieldwork we do? What are its connections to the dividing processes and bases of solidarity (class, gender, sexualities etc.) within urban life? What is neoliberalism – class project, dominant discourse, specific institutional assemblage, or something else – and to what extent is it the dominant, settled, form of governance under the conditions of contemporary capitalist urbanism, or one that is passing, in decline, or recombinant with other discourses and ideologies? Are transnationality and the movement and sojourning of transnational migrants into/within/through/from/between cities primarily functional aspects of how contemporary cities are organized under the conditions of neoliberal globalization (as some theorists of globalization have it), or do these play a more active causal role in the rescaling processes of cities within global competition between urban areas? Are policing and security fundamentally integrative processes to ensure the common peace, or are they instruments of class rule and exploitation, or both, and in what ways? Why has security become so closely coupled to policing and so salient a concept for urban orders since the beginning of the twenty-first century, if we go beyond the obvious catalyst of 9/11? Indeed, what are the implications of this new coupling, which has led to trends of intensified securitization for foundational processes like flows, space and citizenship, for materializations like built structures and city planning, and for generating social divisions and alliances around distinctions such as legal/illegal, licit/illicit, and formal/informal in cities throughout the world?

Part V, Experiencing/Knowing the City in Everyday Life, deals with dimensions of everyday life studied ethnographically, dimensions whose treatment often forms the core of other readers in urban anthropology. Here, the three essays deal with everyday practices of sociality (Chapter 19), with memory and narrative (Chapter 20), and with religious experience (Chapter 21) – as these are rooted in and condition everyday urban lives. However, these essays are exceptional in that each in a different way represents a reflection of the connections between experience near concerns with individual and group meanings, and experience far conceptualizations crucial to the understanding and contextualization of these meanings. Again, the focus is on self-consciously considering the methods of urban ethnography – applying them as we question them, reorient them, and develop them further. In the essay on practices of sociality, we read of innovative ethnography for the study of the embodied and spatialized practices of groups as they come together, affirm group and individual identities, and make their mark on highly heterogeneous urban landscapes. In the essay on memory and narrative, the connections between these as processes of meaning making, and the making of history – indeed how urban ethnographers can come to terms with the historical dimensions of experience – come into question. The essay on religion brings together two orders of experience – the modern industrial and postindustrial city and universalizing religions – which most classical social theories have kept separate through binaries such as tradition/modernity and secular/religious – and in a highly original way shows the close imbrication of these orders in everyday life through the deployment of religious discourses, practices, and spaces in large contemporary cities.

The essays in Part VI, Nature and the City, explore contemporary theoretical, empirical, and political concerns about the cultural politics and political economy of the sustenance and sustainability of cities and urban areas under neoliberal globalization: specifically, the threats to urban sustenance and sustainability created by environmental and social instabilities brought about by the logic of indefinite expansion of global capitalism run wild on a planet whose resources needed for human life are finite, depleting, and irreplaceable. The outcome of this logic taken to its current extreme is global climate change, which manifests itself not as a hypothetical possibility, but as multiple, obdurate, and omnipresent material realities (and perhaps as actors, in some theorizations²). As theoretical insights from disciplines as diverse as climatology, political ecology, and environmental policy studies make clear, the contemporary is a period for reflecting on the costs and future limits of capitalist modernity – and of the cities in which the majority of humanity now reside. The essays in this Part of the Companion selectively address the implications of this transformation for urban anthropology. They take up the theme of how urban anthropologists have defined nature and the nature/culture binary as it has been remade within urban landscapes within Euro-America (Chapter 22); the ways in which they theorize the provisioning of food, including urban agriculture, for the popu­lations of the world's burgeoning cities and towns (Chapter 23); the approaches that anthropologists take to the study of urban pollution and waste (Chapter 24); and the approach to the study of resilience of past and contemporary cities within urban ecology (Chapter 25). Taken together, the essays of this section provide an unsettling set of analytical concepts to reconceptualize processes through which contemporary cities are related to the natural world on which humans depend, even as they transform it and make meanings about it. Yet the analyses of the essays also resonate with the issues of foundational processes, materializations, divisions and solidarities, critiques of abstractions of consequence, and modes of experiencing cities, dealt with in previous Parts of the Companion.

Part VII, Challenging the Present, Anticipating Urban Futures deals with the transformative possibilities for shaping urban futures in the world delineated in the essays in the foregoing Parts of the Companion. The essays in this section examine past, present, and future meanings of the urban commons (Chapter 26); contemporary urban social movements (Chapter 27); and the question of sustainable futures of the world's cities (Chapter 28). These essays not only resonate with the theoretical issues dealt by the authors of Parts I–V, but also pick up and extend the discussions of the essays in Part VI about the sustaina­bility of cities, the place of nature in cities (and the cultural politics of its discursive placement), and matters of urban viability (e.g. food provisioning, waste disposal).

But each of the essays in this final Part is also oriented within a proactive, open-ended, anticipatory ethical and political framework, to addressing the question: what is to be done about the profound economic and social ine­qualities, environmental injustices, and increasingly salient ecological limits connected to contemporary urban life? As neoliberal capitalism, globally instantiated in urban spaces in materializations, reinforces social divisions and seeks to commodify and privatize prior commonly shared forms of life, resources, knowledges, and other collective goods, the essay on the commons points to this concept as the axis not of radical change, but rather of an anticipatory impetus to conserve the prior achievements of urban commoning in Europe associated with the struggles for social democracy (see also Chapter 9 on Class). The essay on social movements makes an important theoretical claim for the innovative focus by anthropologists on meaning making within contemporary movements, something which the dominant approaches (e.g. in sociology) to social movement studies largely marginalize, and moreover assesses the urban-based technologically mediated new knowledges, practices, and strategies of contemporary social movements such as the anti-corporate globalization movement, and Occupy, thus firmly situating urban ethnography as a crucial resource for the understanding of these movements. Finally, in a theoretical departure, the essay on urban futures challenges anthropologists of cities in this new Anthropocene age to rethink the urban/rural divide, thoroughly incorporate political ecological approaches into urban anthropology as a way to overcome this conceptual binary, and to pay more attention to the cosmological dimensions of the relationship between humans in cities and nonhuman lifeforms, in a specific ethical challenge to anthropocentric thinking within the work of urban anthropologists.

In Search of Meta-Knowledge in Urban Anthropology: Dissonant and Generative Connections

Readers will quickly notice that inserted in each essay are cross-references to other concepts treated in essays elsewhere in the volume. This is not only for the convenience of readers at a variety of levels. The presence and placement of these cross-references also serve to create a rich conceptual mapping of connections formed among and across these essays – connections which I hope are generative yet at times dissonant. Through the presence of these cross-references, one concept essay refers to concepts treated in a second essay, or even a third or fourth essay, engagements which will extend the argument or inquiries of the first essay into new areas of interest, challenge or modify its findings; or suggest new areas of connection as, in effect, the essays cross-interrogate and enter into dialogue with each other, through the reader's mediation.

A few examples of such cross-talk will have to suffice here. One might ask of the practices and discourses through which the contemporary movements described in the essay on The Commons(Chapter 26) are making new claims over public space and private property in European cities in the face of austerity policies today: how are these similar to and different from those of the movements reconstructed in the essay on Class (Chapter 9) that describes decades-long struggles around urban commoning in Europe and the United States, as these transcended numerous cultural, national, occupational and other differences to form the working class as a triumphant, if passing presence from the 1960s–1990s?

One might also ask: How are the commoning practices and discourses (e.g., around flexicurity and commonfare) being deployed by anti-austerity movements in Europe today relevant to the politics of labor through which a new urban working class in China is coming into existence, as noted in the essay on Class? In both regions, popular memories of state-ensured rights to secure social reproduction have animated different yet related protest movements around the environment and labor, a point also made in the essay on Memory and Narrative (Chapter 20). In this connection, how are the contemporary movements discussed in the essay on Social Movements (Chapter 27) with their anticipatory strategies of making a world here, now engaged in a different form of politics from that which deploys such memories of a golden age based on state guarantees of adequate social reproduction?

One might also put the essay on Gender (Chapter 10) with its focus on the crucial importance of women organizing collectively around issues of social reproduction, such as their participation in protests against food scarcity and rising food prices, into conversation with the essay on Citizenship (Chapter 4), which points in passing to the role of women in forming new settlements in Latin American cities and thereby establishing de facto rights of citizenship. One might ask: To what extent do the moral economies around food and other material goods deemed essential to social existence matter in collective mobilizations around citizenship? In this connection, as well, the essay on Food and Farming (Chapter 23) points to the crucial place of food provisioning in the social survival of millions of urban residents, and again to the moral economies around food that thereby arise in cities and urban areas. One conclusion: the cynosure of gender troubles, the challenges of material subsistence, the labors of social reproduction, and the politics of citizenship manifested in cities is central to much of popular urban politics, and needs further investigation by anthropologists.

Again, one might ask how the cosmopolitan canopies described in the essay on Global Systems and Globalization (Chapter 14) might be relevant to the commercial sexual exchanges across class and race boundaries described in the essay on Sexualities (Chapter 11). While the essay on global systems strongly argues that the cosmopolitan canopy in cities acts as a form of no man's land in which the members of antagonistic ethnic and diasporic groups occupy common space in order to consume food (and presumably other pleasures), but otherwise either engage in tense interactions or ignore one another, the essay on Sexualities claims that the commercial sexual exchanges that arise in sexualized spaces of cities display relatively democratic, egalitarian, and amicable interactions between men, and between men and women, of different classes and ethnic groups. One might ask: how are the social exchanges of the cosmopolitan canopy among members of different groups actually structured, and culturally constructed?

Here, as well, we could ask from the essay on Cosmopolitanism (Chapter 18) whether the conditions that lead to what the essay's author calls a critical cosmopolitanism – one of tolerance of and respect for the stranger in the city – can develop under the contemporary conditions of globalization, while the essay on Global Systems and Globalization (Chapter 14) argues that relationships of fragmentation, inequality, and antagonism are being generated between groups and classes in existing centers of the global economy. More broadly: given the statement by the author of the Cosmopolitanism essay that it is always a fragile achievement, what are the characteristics of contemporary global systems of interaction that promote or impede it?

To give another example: the essay on Memory and Narrative (Chapter 20) and the essay on Resilience (Chapter 25) have quite different conceptions of memory. In the former essay, memories are constituted around human biographies, here, the stories of experiences of work and political party activities as lived by aged political dissidents. However, in the case of the latter essay, memory takes the form of embodied knowledges – adaptive strategies that preserve successful productive gardens, cultigens, and technologies of cultivation – whose preservation is central to the resilience of cities. Might we not then ask about the essay on Resilience more complex questions than it does about the connection between such embodied knowledges and the narratives that form the basis for collective memory among urban residents, and might we ask about the role of embodied knowledges in individual and collective memory and narratives – and more provocatively – in the making of history?

Finally, and perhaps most radically, the essay on Futures (Chapter 28) asks anthropologists to rethink the foundational question of what the role of humans is in the world with respect to non-human lifeforms. In effect its authors call for a more cosmological and less anthropocentric vision of the human role in nature. If anthropologists were to take this challenge seriously, then would it not be necessary as proper to the domain of urban anthropology to reconsider foundational processes (e.g., are there urban communities of the human and non-human?, or can non-humans be citizens?); materializations (e.g., what are the ecologies of cars as they affect non-human biomes?); of social divisions and solidarities (e.g., where are non-human mammals in the urban class system?); abstractions of consequence (e.g., what does it mean for an urban biome consisting of interacting humans and non-humans to participate in globalization?); and the meaning of nature in cities (e.g., what does meaning-making around food provisioning for non-human lifeforms in cities sound like?)?

In the case of this last example, depending upon one's philosophical assumptions and predilections, such questions could be regarded as either whimsical on the one hand, or perhaps as the basis for a profoundly new heuristic for urban anthropology on the other. However, more generally, it is my hope that through these cross-references the reader will be moved to participate as a critical interlocutor in cross-dialogue and intellectual exchange among the essays, and that this will serve as a major provocation to the reader's anthropological imagination, the basis of innovation in urban anthropology.

Notes

1    There are of course other such materializations that one might consider separately, e.g., spaces and structures associated with recreation, religion, state administration and policing, which I subsume here under built structures or borders.

2    For instance, in the actor–network theory of Latour (1993, 2005) and others.

References

Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nonini, D. (in press) Getting By among Chinese in Malaysia: An Historical Ethnography of Class and State Formation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

PART I

Foundational Concepts: Affirmed and Contested

CHAPTER 1

Spatialities: The Rebirth of Urban Anthropology through Studies of Urban Space

Setha M. Low

Introduction

This chapter addresses the death and rebirth of urban anthropology in the 1990s and 2000s through the addition of spatial theories drawn from geography and a fuller understanding of the political economy of place. This transition, often referred to as the spatial turn or in this volume spatialities, is discussed by tracing the methodology, history, and substance of urban anthropology with an emphasis on works that employed spatial theory and privileged the built environment. With its origins in traditional ethnography, urban anthropology initially focused on small groups of culturally distinct people living in urban enclaves, leaving the study of urban space to geographers, sociologists, and urban planning. However, during the 1980s a transition occurred, the so-called death and rebirth of urban anthropology based on linking macro and micro analyses of urban processes through re-thinking the city as a space of flows (see Chapter 2, Flows), that is, circuits of labor, capital, goods, and services moving ever more rapidly through space, time, and the internet; and a space of places, that is, the physical locations of social reproduction, recreation, and the home. This discussion reviews both the components of the spatialities approach and highlights how this important change in theory and method occurred within urban anthropology.

Briefly, the death of urban anthropology was occasioned by a rejection of traditional ethnography strategies as inadequate for dealing with the complexities of modern cities. The so-called rebirth was then stimulated by theoretical work on urban systems, labor flows, and social networks by Anthony Leeds (1973), the incorporation of political economic approaches drawn from geography, sociology, and political science (Mullings 1987; Susser 1982), and the emergence of the anthropology of space and place that examined the city as a material and spatial as well as cultural form (Low 1999; Pellow 1996; Rotenberg and McDonogh 1993). Theories of transnational and translocal anthropology, also emerging at that time, played a dominant role in conceptualization of the city as a nexus of local and global relationships (see Chapter 17, Transnationality).

Methodology

The most distinctive aspect of an anthropological approach to the study of the city is the centrality of ethnography and the production of urban ethnographies of groups of people in urban settings, called anthropology in the city. An ethnography is a methodology for describing, analyzing, and theorizing about a group of people from a sociocultural perspective as well as the written text of the results produced by this methodology. There has been lengthy discussion as to what constitutes an adequate ethnography, but for the purpose of this chapter, I refer to urban ethnography as the cultural anthropological study of cities, urban peoples, networks, systems, and environments. Ethnographies are generally characterized by participant observation, a qualitative method that relies on the anthropologist as a recorder and interpreter living among the people studied within their cultural setting, and the process by which he/she learns about local social, political, and economic life. Most ethnographers, however, use a wide range of methods, including quantitative surveys and maps as well as qualitative interviews, life histories, and personal documents. An urban ethnography offers an intimate glimpse of city life through the eyes of its residents as seen and understood by the anthropologist. It differs from other methodologies because of its emphasis on what has been called thick description and narrative explanation of the rich details of everyday social life.

Yet the death of urban anthropology occurred because of a widespread disenchantment with some aspects of small-scale urban ethnography and the anthropology in the city model. The critique was based on the inability of traditional ethnographic methods to conceptualize the city as a whole – as a system of symbols, process, networks, or relationships – that was necessary to understand rapid transformations in the global economy and urban landscape. Urban anthropologists retained the use of culture as a theoretical construct, but at the same time challenged its essentialized nature and deconstructed the concept to produce a more fluid and complex notion. At the same time, urban ethnography expanded to encompass historical, political, and economic as well as spatial analyses advocating an anthropology of the city, rather than in the city. The urban, then, became re-conceived of as a set of processes rather than a setting, and its material and spatial form integrated into the study of social relationships.

While ethnography still plays an important role in defining an urban anthropological approach, it is more likely to be a multi-sited ethnography. Bestor's (2001) study of tuna trade traces the circuits of fishing, marketing, trading, and consuming of tuna as it occurs throughout the world. The ethnography includes data collected at all of these sites, including a fishing village in Spain, the central Tokyo fish market, and a high-end sushi restaurant in New York City. He argues that to understand the tuna trade the flow of capital, labor, and commodities needs to be examined and researched. Low, Taplin, and Scheld (2005) argue in a similar vein that to produce an adequate park ethnography, a variety of sites, activities, parks, and neighborhoods must be considered. The point of multi-sited ethnography is that the phenomena studied should be tracked through its local and/or global landscape, following the actors and social processes involved without artificially capturing them within a predetermined location.

The production of urban space and the social construction of urban places and their contestation also have become central in anthropological, not just geographical, analyses. Space has become an analytic tool that complements traditional ethnography, particularly in studies of the consequences of architectural and urban planning projects and embodied analyses of the use of urban space. These spatial analyses require new techniques such as behavioral mapping, transect walks (journeys or tours with informants), physical traces mapping, movement maps, and population counts that complement traditional ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviewing.

The overall strength of urban anthropology methodologies lies in their ability to provide empirical in-depth and embodied understandings of everyday life and individual practices inextricably embedded in and contingent to global socioeconomic and political forces. The link between social forces and global capital with local politics and practices is especially clear in studies that examine grassroots organizing in response to urban transformations, and power dynamics, both local and global, in a variety of community contexts. The linking of the macro political economic analysis with the micro ethnographic reality of individuals provides an integrated social science and humanistic perspective for urban design, planning and policy decisions, and a solid intellectual framework for future urban anthropological endeavors.

History and Theoretical Background

The roots of traditional urban anthropology grew out of what has been called the rural–urban transition of peasant cultures when agriculturalists leaving rural villages encounter the city and adapt to urban life. This history continues to influence anthropologists who study migrants and migration, secondary cities, and transnational communities although now reconfigured as revolving circuits of migration and capital flow. Many urban ethnographers, however, have struggled to free themselves from the confines of this rural to urban development model and focus on translocality as a way of understanding an urbanism where residents and migrants live simultaneously in multiple urban and rural worlds (Low forthcoming).

The theoretical trajectory of urban anthropology drew upon the work of the Chicago School in the 1920s and 1930s and the development of an urban ecological perspective. The city was theorized as made up of adjacent ecological niches occupied by human groups in a series of concentric rings surrounding the central core. Class, occupation, world view, and life experiences are coterminous with an inhabitant's location within this human ecology (see Chapter 9, Class). Social change was thought to occur through socioeconomic transitions of these areas in an ever downward spiral toward the inner city. Research strategies focused on participant observation as a method of uncovering and explaining the adaptations and accommodations of urban populations to these micro-environments.

Another major influence was a series of community studies undertaken as part of the Institute of Community Studies program of policy and planning research on the slum clearance and replacement of housing in London, England and Lagos, Nigeria. These studies, beginning in the 1950s, theorized the city as made up of a series of urban communities, based on extended family relations and kinship networks (see Chapter 3, Community). Coincidentally, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations published Bott's (1957) study of the social networks of middle-class English families that drew upon discussions with anthropologists at the University of Manchester. The methodological contribution of network analysis as the basis for studying the social organization of city residents was widely used to understand the rapidly urbanizing populations of Latin America, as well as by North American researchers interested in the interconnections and interdependencies of family and household relationships among the urban poor. Network studies have become more elaborate and quantitative, but still provide an important methodological strategy and paradigm for urban anthropological researchers.

Early studies of planned physical and social change in Latin American low-income residential neighborhoods, as well as studies of the planning and design of new towns such as Ciudad Guayana (Peattie 1972) provided further ethnographic examples of local conflict over national and international planning goals. These studies identified foreign capital investment and the power/knowledge of the technologies of planning and architecture (Rabinow 1989) as antithetical to producing a humane environment for local populations and workers (see Chapter 5, Built Structures and Planning). Studies of urban renewal and community rebuilding after natural disasters further contributed to understanding how the dynamics of redevelopment processes often exclude the needs and meanings of residents. These studies, although focused on the local, set the stage for later poststructuralist studies of urban struggle for land tenure rights and adequate housing, as well as for studies of planning and architecture as instruments of social control.

The cumulative theoretical writings of Anthony Leeds (1973) were the beginning of a major shift in theoretical focus and methodological complexity. Up until this point, urban ethnographies rarely articulated with national and global circuits of capital and labor. Leeds' work concentrated on supra-local and local linkages and the nation/state level of analysis; the majority of his fieldwork dealt with the city as the point of articulation of these complex relationships. Although he was not able to change the course of urban anthropology in his lifetime, his model of the flow of goods, cash, labor, and services between metropole and countryside provided the theoretical underpinnings of what would stimulate the rebirth of the field.

Another aspect of this transition also occurred in the 1980s, with Ida Susser's (1982) ethnography of a Brooklyn working-class neighborhood, and Leith Mullings' (1987) critique of the study of cities in the United States that ushered in a decade of critical studies of the structural forces that shape urban experience. The social organizational paradigm that dominated earlier studies was superseded by a political economy paradigm. These studies theorize the city by examining the social effects of industrial capitalism and deconstructing the confusion of urbanism with inequality and alienation.

The Spatial Turn

The methodological and theoretical use of spatiality within anthropology began with ethnographies that examined the relationship of architecture and culture. The concepts of space and place emerged in urban ethnographies through the collective work of anthropologists who employed material space as a strategy for interrogating the city (Bestor 2004; Cooper 1994; Holston 1989; Low 1999, 2000; Pellow 1996; Rotenberg and McDonogh 1993). Their work was directly influenced by French social theorists who theorized space in terms of the power dynamics of spatial relations and the meaning of everyday places and practices.

For example, drawing upon Foucault (1977), Paul Rabinow (1989) was one of the first anthropologists to link the growth of modern forms of political power with the evolution of aesthetic theories, and to analyze how French colonists in North Africa exploited architectural and urban planning principles to reflect their cultural superiority. James Holston (1989) also examined the state-sponsored architecture and master planning of Brasilia as a new form of spatial domination through which daily life became the target for state intervention.

Lefebvre's (1991) well-known argument that space is never transparent, but must be queried through an analysis of spatial representations, spatial practices, and spaces of representation also became the basis of many anthropological analyses. Nancy Munn (1996), and Stuart Rockefeller (2010) draw upon Lefebvre to link conceptual space to the tangible by arguing that social space is both a field of action and a basis for action.

Other anthropological efforts started with Bourdieu (1977) and focused on how meaning and action interact in interdependent ways to inculcate and reinforce cultural knowledge and behavior. Bourdieu's theory of practice provides the point of departure for Henrietta Moore (1986) who concurs that space only acquires meaning when actors invoke it. She argues that spaces are subject to multiple interpretations, such that Endo men and women may share the same conceptual structure but enter into it in different positions and therefore subject it to different interpretations (Moore 1986: 163).

Margaret Rodman (1992) and Miles Richardson (1982), on the other hand, relied on Merleau-Ponty's theories of phenomenology and lived space to focus attention on how different actors construct, contest, and ground their personal experience. Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2003) goes even further and insists that space is no longer a category of fixed and ontological attributes, but a becoming, an emergent property of social relationship. Put somewhat differently, social relationships are inherently spatial, and space an instrument and dimension of space's sociality (2003: 140).

In my own ethnographic work, I initially proposed a dialogical process made up of the social production of space and the social construction of space to explain how culture is spatialized. In this analysis, the social production of space includes all those factors – social, economic, ideological, and technological – that result, or seek to result, in the physical creation of the material setting. The materialist emphasis of the term social production was useful in defining the historical emergence and political economic formation of urban space. The term social construction was reserved for the phenomenological and symbolic experience of space as mediated by social processes such as exchange, conflict, and control. Thus, the social construction of space is the social, psychologi­cal, and functional transformation of space – through peoples′ social exchanges, memories, images, and daily use of the material setting – into scenes and actions that convey symbolic meaning. Both processes are social in the sense that both the production and the construction of space are mediated by social processes, especially being contested and fought over for economic and ideological reasons. Understanding them can help us see how local conflicts over space can be used to uncover and illuminate larger issues (Low 2000).

Unfortunately this co-production model was limited by its two-dimensional structure. It did not consider two other important spatial dimensions, that of the body and group – the embodied spaces of the self/person/family in the Western intellectual tradition, and the transnational and translocal spaces of the modern world and global economy. Further, the co-production model did not address how language and discourse influence the meaning and politics of the built environment. To develop a more powerful notion of spatializing culture it became necessary to incorporate these additional understandings of spatial practices and meanings.

Adding embodied space to the social construction and social production of space solves much of this problem. The person as a mobile spatial field – a spatiotemporal unit with feelings, thoughts, preferences, and intentions as well as out-of-awareness cultural beliefs and practices – creates space as a potentiality for social relations, giving it meaning, form, and, ultimately through the patterning of everyday movements, produces place and landscape. The social construction of space is accorded material expression as a person/spatiotemporal unit, while social production is understood as both the practices of the person/spatiotemporal unit and global and collective forces. Further, the addition of language and discourse theories expand the conceptualization of spatializing culture by examining how talk and media are deployed to transform the meaning of practices and spaces. For example, gated community residents' discourse of fear plays a critical role in sustaining the spatial preference for and cultural acceptance of walled and guarded developments (see Chapter 16, Policing and Security). The concept of spatializing culture employed in the reformulation of urban anthropology, thus, encompasses these multiple processes – social production, social construction, embodiment, and discursive practices – to develop an anthropological analysis of urban spatialities (Low forthcoming).

Contested Urban Space

Ethnographic approaches to urban space are an important strategy for studying contestation and resistance in the city. When the appropriation of land for urban redevelopment threatens to limit access to or exclude certain groups from using public spaces, these plans may be contested by local segments of the population whose identity is variously bound to the site. Matthew Cooper (1994) describes how the city of Toronto initially planned to create an urban meeting place on its waterfront where the culturally diverse vitality of the city could be realized, but was threatened by occupants of the development's office buildings, luxury condominiums, and upscale stores who quickly organized to exclude access to others. Timothy Sieber (1993) also argues that as working waterfronts have waned in the United States, bourgeois and professional classes have sought these spaces near the water as a recreational or leisure resource, to be consumed by viewing (see Chapter 22, Nature). Using design guidelines that promote visual consumption, the Boston waterfront can be experienced by taking walks, bicycling and dining with a view of the water, but excludes facilities favored by the working classes. This stream of research also draws upon theories of spectacle and the role of spectacle as it is vital to a city's accumulative capital.

Although liberal democracies ideally guarantee their citizens access to and unimpeded use of public spaces, contested forms of use are challenged and limited by the government and political elites through permits and police activity (see Chapter 26, The Commons). New York City's attempt to close down an African and African American street market became a war against the disorderly informal economy of ambulatory vendors and the failure to control street vending. Dar es Salaam has pitted working professionals against the urban poor in perpetual conflict. Suzanne Scheld (2003) suggests that it is through urban markets and the commodification of style and clothing remade into instruments of prestige and fashion that this contestation occurs on streets, schools, and sidewalks (see Chapters 7 and 13, Markets and Extralegality).

Specific locations in which local conflicts play out are increasingly seen as involving something more than just neighborhood or civic issues; contested sites are often the stage upon which social memory is constructed (Sawalha 2010). The production and reproduction of hegemonic schemes require the monopolization of public spaces in order to dominate memories. Popular and official memories co-define each other, often in shifting relations, but the state controls public spaces critical to the reproduction of a dominant memory while marginalizing the counter-histories of peasants, women, working classes, and others (see Chapter 20, Memory and Narrative).

Some of these processes are seen most dramatically in urban sites located in the former Soviet Union which are just now reconstructing their urban landscapes and collective memories. In Warsaw, Poland, attempts to rename a street in honor of a local priest, an early Solidarity martyr, were considered too controversial by some residents who opposed the compromises the political movement had made with the Catholic Church that had become too powerful in dictating state social policies (Tucker 1998). In the Jewish Kazimierz district in Krakow, redevelopment plans sought to restore the past by erasing the Nazi occupation and 40 years of communism (Kugelmass and Bukowska 1998). Government-mandated street renaming in East Berlin after reunification also brought about objections by residents who rejected the state's attempt to create a new vision of the German state. The state selectively eliminated names with historical references to local twentieth-century socialist figures, which were vaguely equated with the Third Reich, in favor of those representing the nineteenth-century Prussian state. Monuments in Moscow have become vehicles by which politicians project their own images onto the empty spaces of the state. Monuments and their mythical properties in post socialist contexts are producing a new form of political practice which anesthetizes and tranquilizes the public and serves to detract citizens from asking questions about political accountability while discouraging expectations for economic improvement.

Racialized Space

The processes of racialization have been studied primarily in US and South African cites, focused on different aspects of racism and racial segregation (see Chapter 12, Race). In the United States, the displacement of Blacks through redlining and other real estate activities, analyses of gentrification in African American neighborhoods, and studies of housing abandonment by the city and federal government provide ethnographic explanations of American residential apartheid. And the continued high level of residential segregation experienced by Blacks in American cities is a classic example of how racial prejudice and discriminatory real estate practices and mortgage structures insulate Whites from Blacks. Gregory (1998) notes that a shift from race-based to class-based politics is even separating the residences of low-income Blacks in Queens from middle-class Blacks who are increasingly adopting the political values of White homeowners. In South Africa, on the other hand, the emphasis has been on how housing and race segregation has changed the built environment as well as the transportation system. The politics of the segregation have been subordinated to studies of gated communities and other forms of restricted class and racial access (see Chapter 9, Class).

As in the South African examples, racialization studies also examine fortified residential enclaves found in the cities where walls, surveillance technologies, and armed guards separate the upper and middle classes from the poor (Low 2003). These secured enclaves play a role in the spatial segregation and transformation of the quality of public life globally. Justified by increasing fear of violence and street crime, fortified enclaves have become status symbols and instruments of social separation dividing cities into areas of ostentatious wealth and extreme poverty.

Comparing gated communities in the United States, Latin America, and China, I found that the only common reason that residents used to explain their decision to move to a gated community, was fear of crime and others, regardless of the level of crime in the region or neighborhood (see Chapter 16, Policing and Security). I argue that fear is a reflection of the impact of globalization and increased heterogeneity on the local population. Unlike crime, heterogeneity is increasing in all three regions, although the kind of heterogeneity (racial, ethnic, class or urban/rural) is different in each. The fear of crime – common in local discussions by gated community residents – is a rationalization for another kind of conversation about the influx of new people who are different, who do not hold the same values, and behave in unpredictable, often unacceptable, ways. It does not matter whether the heterogeneity is about newcomers moving into a neighborhood, rural people coming to the city, or the urban poor moving to the suburbs, it has the same result. In many cases, especially in the United States and Latin America, this discussion also is encoded in the talk about nostalgia for the past, and finding a place one feels comfortable (see Chapter 20, Memory and Narrative). With the widening gap between rich and poor, everyone feels more insecure, and as status and class anxiety escalates, so does the desire for living in a homogeneous and socially predictable place, reinforcing the racialization and segregation of urban space.

Landscapes of Fear

Landscapes of fear have become a central focus in the spatialities research within urban anthropology, producing considerable debate about the nature of the fear and how it is produced. For example, Washington, DC's and New York City's emerging landscapes of fear are being produced by new defensive spatial designs, the erosion of public space through privatization and securitization, and memorials that constitute and reinforce affective responses to the built environment. Hoffman goes so far as to suggest that post-colonial African cities such as Freetown or Monrovia are organized according to a logic of barracks creating spaces of the organization and deployment of violent labor (2007: 422–423).

Anthropological studies of violence also examine the deeper substrate of the human psyche and behavior by examining the relationship between narratives, violence, and urban places, where those narratives sustain and rationalize violence and terror. For example, Bourgois (1995) describes the fear and sense of vulnerability experienced by El Barrio residents and by anthropologists faced with the everyday violence of those who sell crack in East Harlem, New York City. African American adolescents in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City perceive racial violence as both within and against their spatial communities and deploy strategies of resistance, from gangs to graffiti to counter its corrosive influence. Even in the realm of the home, narratives of fear and insecurity are undermining the way that home places are perceived, linking 9/11, terrorism, fear of others, and criminal activity in such a way that many Americans feel the need to secure their homes, build safe rooms, and keep evacuation kits available at all times.

Global, Transnational and Translocal Spaces

Within urban anthropology, transnational processes are defined by Ulf Hannerz (1992) based on cultural flows organized by nations, markets, and movements (see Chapter 2, Flows). He criticizes world-systems analyses as being too simplified to reflect the complexity and fluidity of the creolization of post-colonial culture. From this perspective, global space is conceived of as the flow of goods, people, and services – as well as capital, technology, and ideas – across national borders and geographic regions, resulting in the deterritorialization of space; that is space detached from local places.

The notion of global deterritorialization, however, has come under considerable criticism by anthropologists in that the role of capital in changing place notions of a borderless world misses much of the reality of capitalism (Smart 1999: 380). Although capital has become more mobile and thus placeless to some extent, it has become more territorial in other places as a result of uneven development. Global flows bypass some poor residents without access to capital, entrapping them in disintegrating communities while entangling others. This spatial fragmentation of the city uses the decoupling of spaces and places as a framework for understanding the re-linking of elite spaces by infrastructure, the internet, and capital flows.

Anthropologists challenge a view of globalization as all encompassing and pervading every sector of society, by studying the local and examining the articulations of the global and the local (see Chapter 14, Global Systems and Globalization). For instance, global industrialization restructures the everyday lives and localities of factory workers, and the means by which new workers recreate meaning and community in the context of their transformed lives. Other examples of localizing or indigenizing the global include Ted Bestor's (2004) ethnography of the Tsukiji wholesale fish market in Tokyo and Alan Smart's (1999) study of local capitalism spaces created by foreign investment in China. Ethnographic studies of the displacing effects of global forces also reveal the power of individuals to reterritorialize the landscapes through pilgrimage and territorial claims based on memory.

Within anthropology, the term transnational, was first used to describe the way that immigrants live their lives across borders and maintain their ties to home, even when their countries of origin and settlement are geographically distant (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992: ix) (see Chapter 17, Trans­nationality). Part of this effort was to understand the implications of a multiplicity of social relations and involvements that span borders. Eric Wolf (1982) laid the theoretical groundwork in his landmark history of how the movement of capital and labor has transformed global relations since the 1400s, dispelling the myth that globalization is a recent phenomenon. However, while Wolf's approach to the issue of global connections is seminal, it deals primarily with issues of power and its allocation, and only indirectly with the spaces of daily life. It is much later, through the detailed ethnographies of the rhythms of daily life in transnational migrant communities, that a sense of transnational urban space emerges.

Translocal spaces are also produced by other forms of cultural deterritorialization such as travel, tourism, and religious diaspora. Marc Augé (1995) considers the airport a non-place, a space of supermodernity, where customers, passengers, and other users are identified by names, occupation, place of birth, and address, but only upon entering and leaving. Airports along with superstores and railways stations are non-places that do not contain any organic society (1995: 112); social relations are suspended and this non-place becomes a site of coming and going.

Studies of migration and translocality emphasize the role of diaspora communities within the new geography of globalization. The technologies of time–space compression – such as the use of international cellphones, the internet, and bargain airfares – enable diaspora communities to survive, even at the margins of the global economy. The power of the internet to mediate transnational urbanism is a key element in the continuity of culture and social relationships between less developed parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with developed regions of North America and Asia, but also between the metropole and the periphery. Secondary and mid-size cities are becoming more important as urban processes are seen as spaces of flows of information, labor, and capital. It is in these studies that urban anthropology returns to some of its earliest concerns with the urban to rural and migration circuits, but now drawing upon a new arsenal of theory and bolstered by a critical perspective based on political economic analysis and a spatialities framework as well as ethnographic sophistication.

Conclusion

Urban anthropology has undergone a major transition over the last 30 years, changing from a field that focused solely on small-scale societies and groups living in cities, to multilevel and spatial analyses of the urban processes and social relationships. Rather than viewing the city as a static context or setting, it is conceived of as an urban region made up of complex interrelationships of places and a space of flows dependent on the whims of global capital. This transformation included changes in methodology (multi-sited ethnography and spatial analysis), history (incorporating a broader social science perspective), and substance (new objects and processes of study). The result is a vibrant field ready to take a fuller role in urban policy and planning debates armed with the unique ability to view the city from the insiders' and the outsiders' perspectives integrating both macro and micro understandings of urban processes.

References

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