Urban Anthropology
Authors: Kuppinger Petra 
Published: October 2020

Urban anthropologists study cities and spaces. They analyze urban lives, cultures, communities, place-making, and transformations and explore urban inequalities that are the result of uneven class, race, ethnic or gender dynamics, im/migration, labor conflicts, or political oppression. They investigate urban segregation, displacement, disenfranchisement, discrimination, poverty, exclusion, gentrification, environmental justice, neoliberal economies, labor relations, markets, street-vending, housing, civic organization and participation, minority/immigrant cultures, crime, or violence. Using anthropology’s central method of participant observation (mostly in combination with other methods), urban anthropologists are well placed to analyze and theorize the minutiae of diverse urban dwellers’ everyday lives, work, dwelling situations, struggles, cultural and social experiences, and creative culture-producing activities. At the dawn of the 21st century, urban anthropologists examine the devastating impact of neoliberal policies and economies that caused the influx of millions of displaced peasants, and environmental and war refugees into cities in the Global South and North where these newcomers, often in competition with other poor urbanites, struggle to find accommodations and make a living. Urban anthropologists investigate the lives and struggles of disenfranchised individuals, groups, and residential communities, which for example provide their own housing, maneuver aspects of exclusion or structural violence, try to make a better future for their children, and work hard to make a living often in vast “informal” markets that characterize many cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Urban ethnographies describe how the poor, migrants, or refugees to the city create meaningful lives for themselves, their families, and their communities in the face of discrimination or exclusion. In recent years, debates in the field have turned to questions of urban structural injustice, infrastructural issues, and manifestations of environmental injustice. Studies examine topics like the provision of water (or the absence thereof), other amenities and services, or the presence, absence, or quality of public transportation, the presence of toxic industries or waste, and the latter’s effects on poorer urban dwellers especially. To conduct their research, urban anthropologists often live in the communities they study in order to experience the daily struggles of their interlocutors. Some also work in the jobs their research participants hold. Being present in their field sites/communities at all times of the day and night, all days of the week, and throughout the seasons of the year, anthropologists produce nuanced description and informed analyses of urban citizens’ everyday lives, work, and struggles. Ethnographic accounts of the minutiae of urban dwellers’ lives provide analytical insights into how individual and communal lives articulate at the complex intersection of urban social, cultural, economic, and spatial dynamics. They theorize multilayered interactions between individual actors, communal frameworks, local social and municipal institutions, national and international politics, and urban, national, and global economies.