In the past few decades, an unprecedented demographic change has taken place. For most of human history, the vast majority of the world`s population lived in rural areas. Now, over half of the world’s population lives in cities, and the United Nations predicts that this proportion will increase to over 70% by 2050. This development raises a fundamental challenge to ethnographic practice and anthropological theory, which has historically focused on the life ways and societies of rural areas. Increasingly anthropologists have to come to terms with highly complex urban assemblages that are, paradoxically both longstanding and deeply unstable. Cities are contested spaces. They are sites of intense social, political, and economic struggles, which are waged by coalitions of actors representing a wide variety of sometimes complimentary and sometimes contradictory set of interests, with battle lines being continually drawn and redrawn in relation to a shifting social terrain.
By utilising a wide range of readings and examples including both the global north and the global south, this module will ask how we are to understand these developments anthropologically. We will pay particular attention to 1) the ways in which cities have been understood as ethnographic sites, 2) the past, present, and future of cities, and 3) the social, political, and economic role of cities and how this shapes emerging forms of inequality. Students will come to understand how anthropologists see the city, the methods they use, the data they cultivate, the topics they address, the hopes and possibilities they see contained there, and the ways that condensations of culture and power are visible in both infrastructural, representational, and social practices.