Urbanism

Abstract

Urban anthropology uses ethnography to explore the city and its relationship to culture, power, and political economy. Since the field emerged in the late twentieth century, its practitioners have sought to link the “micro” realities of local, lived experience to the “macro” structural forces of state, capitalism, and industry. In defining its core problematics, urban anthropology has looked to neighboring disciplines—notably political economy, Marxist geography, and, increasingly, planetary ecology. Research agendas have also been shaped by ethnography's traditional alignment with the socially marginalized—from the spatialization of racial and class inequalities in the West to the social costs of modernization and structural readjustment in the postcolonial world. Today, urban ethnographies are largely concerned with charting the contradictions of global capitalism: tensions between cosmopolitan flows and the retrenchment of local nationalisms, the excesses of finance and the precarity of labor, the extractive force of industry, and rising demands for conservation and sustainability.