Urban studies - lectures
Inhoud
Lecture 01 – the spatial turn ......................................................................................................... 8
The spatial turn: the production of urban space ................................................................................ 8
Definition urban anthropology ........................................................................................................ 8
Anthropology in and of the city....................................................................................................... 9
What counts as anthropology of the city? ...................................................................................... 9
Proposition .......................................................................................................................................... 9
Difference between urban anthropology and other urban studies .................................................... 9
Chapter 1,2,3 Late twentieth century developments in urban anthropology .................................... 9
Kinds of space, with different degrees of solidity ............................................................................. 10
Focus on spatial turn ......................................................................................................................... 10
Foucault ......................................................................................................................................... 10
Proposition .................................................................................................................................... 10
Anthropology in the twenty-first century city (Jaffe & De Koning)................................................... 10
What is really new in the twenty-first century.................................................................................. 10
Distinctive methods........................................................................................................................... 10
Place-making ..................................................................................................................................... 11
Space and place ................................................................................................................................. 11
Methods of place making .................................................................................................................. 11
Some forms of and consequences of place making .......................................................................... 11
Henri Lefebvre – the production of urban space .............................................................................. 11
Henri Lefebvre, la production de l’espace 1968 ............................................................................... 11
‘a conceptual triad has now emerged […] to which we shall be returning over and over again’ ..... 12
‘the three concepts introduced earlier. ............................................................................................ 12
Erroneous mixing of physical spaces and social processes / Nexus between place and behavior ... 13
Disentangling physical spaces and social processes ......................................................................... 13
Points of critique to Lefebvre ............................................................................................................ 13
What have we learnt today? ............................................................................................................. 13
Reading questions on the spatial turn........................................................................................... 13
Lecture 2 – mobilities: the practice of everyday life ..................................................................... 14
Recapitulation ................................................................................................................................... 14
De Certeau, The practice of everyday life ..................................................................................... 15
New mobility paradigm ................................................................................................................. 16
, Cresswell........................................................................................................................................ 16
Mobility and inequality ................................................................................................................. 16
The flâneur (Walter Benjamin) ...................................................................................................... 16
Kevin Lynch, The image of the city (1960)..................................................................................... 17
Jani Tartia, Examining the rhythms of ‘urban elements’ on walking and driving routes in the city
....................................................................................................................................................... 17
Dag Balkmar, Violent mobilities; men, masculinities and road conflicts in Sweden..................... 18
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 18
PART 2- Public Space .................................................................................................................. 18
Liveable space................................................................................................................................ 18
Definition of public space .............................................................................................................. 18
Ideal and reality ............................................................................................................................. 18
Public space regulated by rules ..................................................................................................... 19
Unequal access to public spaces ................................................................................................... 19
Jane Jacobs, ‘eyes on the street’ ................................................................................................... 19
Don Mitchell, The SUV model of citizenship; Floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the
“purely atomic” individual............................................................................................................. 19
Chance meetings as freedom ........................................................................................................ 20
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 20
Reading assignment for lecture on Mobilities, the practice of everyday life ............................... 20
Lecture 3 - Urban politics and planning ....................................................................................... 21
Recap and introduction ..................................................................................................................... 21
Two broad approaches to urban politics........................................................................................... 22
Main actors in urban planning .......................................................................................................... 22
Functions of urban planning: ............................................................................................................ 23
Planning as rational improvement .................................................................................................... 23
Planning as social control .................................................................................................................. 23
Governmentality (governmentalité, Foucault) ............................................................................. 23
Panopticon..................................................................................................................................... 24
Casablanca: cordon sanitaire ........................................................................................................ 24
Reasons for colonial efforts to improve indigenous housing ............................................................ 24
Planning to create new citizens......................................................................................................... 24
Elements of modernization ............................................................................................................... 25
Ways of creating a modern citizen .................................................................................................... 25
Brasília ........................................................................................................................................... 26
Planning as support for the private sector ........................................................................................ 26
, Jonathan Silver, disrupted infrastructures ........................................................................................ 26
ANT (Actor Network Theory) ............................................................................................................. 26
Splintering urbanism ......................................................................................................................... 26
Planning as self-interest of the planners ........................................................................................... 27
Questions....................................................................................................................................... 27
Lecture 4 – the right to the city and revanchism .......................................................................... 28
The right to the city ........................................................................................................................... 28
The right to the city – citadins ........................................................................................................... 28
Kurt Iveson, Do-it-yourself Urbanism ................................................................................................ 29
Definition DIY urbanism .................................................................................................................... 29
Urban symbolism of the suppressed ................................................................................................. 30
Teresa P.R. Caldeira, ‘Imprinting and moving around’...................................................................... 30
Right to the city of right-wing groups ............................................................................................... 31
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 31
Second part of the lecture: The revanchist city ............................................................................ 31
Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 31
Neil Smith, Tompkins Square Park in NY ........................................................................................... 31
Mike Davis (1990), City of quartz ...................................................................................................... 32
Emma Jackson, fixed in mobility ....................................................................................................... 32
Gated communities ........................................................................................................................... 32
What have we learnt today? ............................................................................................................. 33
Lecture 5: Cities as nodes in the global economy ......................................................................... 33
Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 33
Macro-economic development of cities ........................................................................................... 34
Definition of globalization ............................................................................................................. 34
Sharon Zukin, Disneyfication of cities ............................................................................................... 34
Economic development at city level according to Zukin ............................................................... 34
Zukin terminology.......................................................................................................................... 35
Assembly line in post-fordist era ....................................................................................................... 35
The vernacular in urban space .......................................................................................................... 36
Cities as producers of the global ....................................................................................................... 37
Globalization and neoliberalism in the city ....................................................................................... 37
The global city ................................................................................................................................... 37
C40 ................................................................................................................................................. 37
Global inter-city competition and city branding ............................................................................... 37
Responses of people that cannot adjust to new circumstances ................................................... 38
, Maura Finkelstein, allochronous spaces ........................................................................................... 38
What have we learnt today? ............................................................................................................. 38
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 38
Lecture 6: Lifestyles and the creative class .................................................................................. 39
Introduction last lecture .................................................................................................................... 39
The creative class (Richard Florida) ................................................................................................... 39
Consumption and citizenship ............................................................................................................ 40
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Collateral casualties of consumerism’, Journal of consumer culture 7 (2007):
25-56.............................................................................................................................................. 40
Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a way of life ............................................................................................ 42
Louis Wirth .................................................................................................................................... 42
Lifestyles ............................................................................................................................................ 42
Definition lifestyles ........................................................................................................................ 42
Leisure places ................................................................................................................................ 43
Recap: what have we learnt this course?.......................................................................................... 43
Concepts we used.............................................................................................................................. 43
,Idea of the course is: two things together
- Introduction into theories of urban studies, urban anthropology – texts
- Practice urban anthropology, fieldwork in Amsterdam or other place
Theoretical and practice together. Linking it together.
Research posters to make it doable so not papers.
Bachelor in anthropology > urban studies because you learn new concepts that are important in
anthropology and in doing fieldwork
Who are winners who are losers > global connections between the North and the South. Relevant for
development studies.
Urban studies and urban anthropology > Synonyms
Possible subjects to study? Good topics and which not. This is the reason why this lecture today.
Introduction: anthropology in and of the city
Not anthropology in the city but off the city, where the city has an impact on the way they behave.
The city itself doesn’t play a role itself.
How do they define the place?
Anthropology in and of the city
What counts as anthropology of the city?
,1. urbanism as a way of life > impact of the cities on the way people behave
2. The spatial turn: the social production of urban spaces > we look at the way people make use of
urban spaces. How people use urban space and how different kinds have a impact on how people
have. Spatial turn> there was something else before. What went before: focus on community studies
3. Offshoot of urbanism as a way of life: cities as centers of consumption, social movements
cities as center of consumption and social movements. Has to do with the way we live as urbanism
4. Offshoot of spatial turn: new mobility paradigm
the way people move around, migrate from one country to another but also within cities, also
concepts etc.
5. Inter-city competition and cooperation, representation of cities
cities starts to compete with each other. Amsterdam in effort to attract more investors, tourist,
artists is competing with other cities. They do so by promoting a certain image. “come to
Amsterdam, this is the place to be”. represent itself in a particular way. But they also cooperate, help
each other.
- Does city have an identity?
These are possible themes that you can do in your research projects.
Offshoot: new development building on earlier ideas
Spatial turn
We no longer take space as something taken for granted, just a geographic space. Space is something
produced in social interaction. It has a huge impact on how we behave. How lecture structures ….
Spatial turn is social production of spaces, ones they are there, how they consecute social behavior ;
thinking, you have to be somewhere even while thinking.
Proposition
From an anthropological perspective, a good, arguably the best way to study urban societies is to
focus on space as a social product that is contested by different actors.
Industries are moving out of cities, are moving to other parts. Industries are moving out of cities.
Batavia stad> Midst of polder.
Urban function are more deconcentrated. Main point: best way to study urban societies is to focus
on urban spaces.
kinds of space, with different degrees of solidity
- Built-up environment (fixed use of space)
- Temporary use of public space
- Symbolic use of space
Freek Colombijn: patches of padang: the history of an indoensian town in the 20th century and the
use of urban space.
Big investor who has bought land and made this ‘theepot’. It is ridiculous. One it is there, it is hard to
get rit of it.
Prague: building like…
Ones a building is there the behavior of people is structured
Le Corbusier, une ville contemporaine pour trois millions the persons.
, - Pruitt-Igoe complex, St louis, US > separation of urban functions > place where his ideas has
been realized but people didn’t like it much. It misses the ‘livability’ it gets boring. But ones it
is there, it is not easy to change it. You have to reconstruct it physically and socially. If you do
it physically you can tie socially other activities.
- Once build-environment is there…
- According to him, cities becomes nicer places to live when it is separated.
Public/ open spaces. That matters. Freedom in changing human behavior.
How to claim this space? With build-environments… you decide? Difficult to change the build-
environment.
Temporary use of public space
Many people living on the streets, homeless or rough sleepers.
temporary shelters, in order to claim their public space. Weak way of claiming space because they
don’t own it. They can make these infrastructures but if the police say they have to move on, it
would be destroyed.
Squatting/ krakers > open public spaces, ones they are there, the solidify the use of their space. Once
squats are there… squatters who occupy existing buildings, most of the time, the function doesn’t
really change. Occupy an office building, they hardly change. Empty land, occupied by squatters who
build their own dwellers is different > ship yard in Amsterdam. They build their own dwellings and
thus wasn’t easy to change it anymore. In Amsterdam it took years, the owners of the land to get rid
of them.
Palestine kids in public space
Symbolic use of space, statue of liberty in new York
Here is most freedom, what does the statue mean? It is there as physical object but it is indeed an
symbol of freedom or American capitalism/ imperialism.
Symbol with global ‘power’ and triggers or global imagination but there is also local symbols as ways
to claim space.
Symbolic use of space
Religious lines, class lines, political preferences etc.
protestants, who in symbolic way go around the city and claim that it is theirs. Not by claiming it for a
long time or by building things but just by going around. Tense symbolic struggle.
Referential symbol
They can mean different things for different peoples.
I Amsterdam > symbolic meaning in public spaces. Building in open environment.
Blurring of kinds of spaces (with different degrees of solidarity)
Build-environment and symbolic places get connected. They overlap each other.
Richard Sennett on the social diversity of cities
, - Cities are meant to be places which concentrate different races, social classes, ethnicities,
life-styles: the mixture of difference has seemed to writes on cities from Aristotle to Hannah
Arendt to stimulate people in crowds’ (Sennett 2010: 267-268)
Romantic view of cities because of diversity but it can also mean conflict, tensions etc. But most
people have romantic view that diversity is great.
- The public realm can be simply defined as a place where strangers meet. The difference
between public and private lies in the amount of knowledge one person or group has about
others: in the private realm, as ina family, one knows others well and close up, whereas in a
public realm one does not, incomplete knowledge joins to anonymity in the public realms
Sennett, on different kinds of the public realms:
Sennett terminology to think about public spaces
- Open and closed systems
- Over-determined form
- Borders and boundaries
What have we learnt today?
- Anthropology in and of the city
- Spatial turn in anthropology
- Perceived space, conceived space, lived space (Lefebvre)
- Open and closed systems: overdetermined form: borders and boundaries (Sennett)
Lecture 01 – the spatial turn
We are going to do anthropology of the city, not in the city.
What counts as anthropology of the city? Anything that has somehow to do with urban spaces.
Urbanism as a way of life.
In town asses people in identifying your relationship, your kin. In the city for example we asses
clothes of people etc.
- Cities as places as consumptions / centers of production; that’s how city develops, city of
industry
- Consuming urban life – being in the city walking etc.
Turn - New mobility paradigm
City branding
The spatial turn: the production of urban space
Definition urban anthropology
‘the fact that many anthropological studies are conducted in cities does not necessarily make them
urban anthropology in our view. […] what makes their work urban anthropology is their explicit
, reflection on the implications of the urban context in which these phenomena occur’ (Jaffe & De
Koning 2016: 1).
‘in this book we define ‘’urban anthropology’’ as anthropology that engages explicitly with the
question of how social life is structured and experienced within urban contexts’’ (Jaffe & De Koning
2016:3)
Anthropology in and of the city
‘we must distinguish between phenomena that occur in cities but are not generated by urbanisation
processes as such, and phenomena that are legitimately elements of cities in the sense that they
play an active role in defining the shape and logic of urban outcomes’ (Storper & Scott 2016: 117).
What counts as anthropology of the city?
1. urbanism as a way of life
2. the spatial turn; the social production of urban spaces
3. offshoot of urbanism as a way of life: cities as centres of consumption, social movements
4. offshoot of spatial turn: new mobility paradigm
5. inter-city competition and cooperation, representation of cities
All human activity requires space
Proposition
From an anthropological perspective, a good, arguably the best, way to study urban societies is to
focus on space as a social product that is contested by different actors (Lefebvre?).
Difference between urban anthropology and other urban studies
- Equal attention for cities outside global North
- Participant observation – main research method
- The use of ethnographic methods also connects to the distinctive anthropological focus on
everyday life in the city, and on the les quantifiable imaginaries and symbols through
which people make sense of their urban surroundings (Jaffe & De Koning 2016:5) – how
people imagine their life and how they image it should be; things that mostly goes unnoticed
because they happen unconsciously
- ‘insistence on understanding people and social situations in their full complexity, rather
than seeing them as abstracted from their context’ (Jaffe & De Koning 2016:5) –
contextualization and holism; other studies specify, anthropologists take an holistic view, in a
wider context
Chapter 1,2,3 Late twentieth century developments in urban anthropology
- Political economy
Interest in political inequalities that underly economic inequalities or political relationships
and economic power. If you look at housing shortages, what is the economic aspect there
and who has a political impact about housing crisis.
- Informal economy
Especially in Global South, but also in cities in the Global North
- Spatial turn (Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau)
- Consumption rather than production as main characteristic of the late modern city
Inhoud
Lecture 01 – the spatial turn ......................................................................................................... 8
The spatial turn: the production of urban space ................................................................................ 8
Definition urban anthropology ........................................................................................................ 8
Anthropology in and of the city....................................................................................................... 9
What counts as anthropology of the city? ...................................................................................... 9
Proposition .......................................................................................................................................... 9
Difference between urban anthropology and other urban studies .................................................... 9
Chapter 1,2,3 Late twentieth century developments in urban anthropology .................................... 9
Kinds of space, with different degrees of solidity ............................................................................. 10
Focus on spatial turn ......................................................................................................................... 10
Foucault ......................................................................................................................................... 10
Proposition .................................................................................................................................... 10
Anthropology in the twenty-first century city (Jaffe & De Koning)................................................... 10
What is really new in the twenty-first century.................................................................................. 10
Distinctive methods........................................................................................................................... 10
Place-making ..................................................................................................................................... 11
Space and place ................................................................................................................................. 11
Methods of place making .................................................................................................................. 11
Some forms of and consequences of place making .......................................................................... 11
Henri Lefebvre – the production of urban space .............................................................................. 11
Henri Lefebvre, la production de l’espace 1968 ............................................................................... 11
‘a conceptual triad has now emerged […] to which we shall be returning over and over again’ ..... 12
‘the three concepts introduced earlier. ............................................................................................ 12
Erroneous mixing of physical spaces and social processes / Nexus between place and behavior ... 13
Disentangling physical spaces and social processes ......................................................................... 13
Points of critique to Lefebvre ............................................................................................................ 13
What have we learnt today? ............................................................................................................. 13
Reading questions on the spatial turn........................................................................................... 13
Lecture 2 – mobilities: the practice of everyday life ..................................................................... 14
Recapitulation ................................................................................................................................... 14
De Certeau, The practice of everyday life ..................................................................................... 15
New mobility paradigm ................................................................................................................. 16
, Cresswell........................................................................................................................................ 16
Mobility and inequality ................................................................................................................. 16
The flâneur (Walter Benjamin) ...................................................................................................... 16
Kevin Lynch, The image of the city (1960)..................................................................................... 17
Jani Tartia, Examining the rhythms of ‘urban elements’ on walking and driving routes in the city
....................................................................................................................................................... 17
Dag Balkmar, Violent mobilities; men, masculinities and road conflicts in Sweden..................... 18
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 18
PART 2- Public Space .................................................................................................................. 18
Liveable space................................................................................................................................ 18
Definition of public space .............................................................................................................. 18
Ideal and reality ............................................................................................................................. 18
Public space regulated by rules ..................................................................................................... 19
Unequal access to public spaces ................................................................................................... 19
Jane Jacobs, ‘eyes on the street’ ................................................................................................... 19
Don Mitchell, The SUV model of citizenship; Floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the
“purely atomic” individual............................................................................................................. 19
Chance meetings as freedom ........................................................................................................ 20
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 20
Reading assignment for lecture on Mobilities, the practice of everyday life ............................... 20
Lecture 3 - Urban politics and planning ....................................................................................... 21
Recap and introduction ..................................................................................................................... 21
Two broad approaches to urban politics........................................................................................... 22
Main actors in urban planning .......................................................................................................... 22
Functions of urban planning: ............................................................................................................ 23
Planning as rational improvement .................................................................................................... 23
Planning as social control .................................................................................................................. 23
Governmentality (governmentalité, Foucault) ............................................................................. 23
Panopticon..................................................................................................................................... 24
Casablanca: cordon sanitaire ........................................................................................................ 24
Reasons for colonial efforts to improve indigenous housing ............................................................ 24
Planning to create new citizens......................................................................................................... 24
Elements of modernization ............................................................................................................... 25
Ways of creating a modern citizen .................................................................................................... 25
Brasília ........................................................................................................................................... 26
Planning as support for the private sector ........................................................................................ 26
, Jonathan Silver, disrupted infrastructures ........................................................................................ 26
ANT (Actor Network Theory) ............................................................................................................. 26
Splintering urbanism ......................................................................................................................... 26
Planning as self-interest of the planners ........................................................................................... 27
Questions....................................................................................................................................... 27
Lecture 4 – the right to the city and revanchism .......................................................................... 28
The right to the city ........................................................................................................................... 28
The right to the city – citadins ........................................................................................................... 28
Kurt Iveson, Do-it-yourself Urbanism ................................................................................................ 29
Definition DIY urbanism .................................................................................................................... 29
Urban symbolism of the suppressed ................................................................................................. 30
Teresa P.R. Caldeira, ‘Imprinting and moving around’...................................................................... 30
Right to the city of right-wing groups ............................................................................................... 31
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 31
Second part of the lecture: The revanchist city ............................................................................ 31
Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 31
Neil Smith, Tompkins Square Park in NY ........................................................................................... 31
Mike Davis (1990), City of quartz ...................................................................................................... 32
Emma Jackson, fixed in mobility ....................................................................................................... 32
Gated communities ........................................................................................................................... 32
What have we learnt today? ............................................................................................................. 33
Lecture 5: Cities as nodes in the global economy ......................................................................... 33
Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 33
Macro-economic development of cities ........................................................................................... 34
Definition of globalization ............................................................................................................. 34
Sharon Zukin, Disneyfication of cities ............................................................................................... 34
Economic development at city level according to Zukin ............................................................... 34
Zukin terminology.......................................................................................................................... 35
Assembly line in post-fordist era ....................................................................................................... 35
The vernacular in urban space .......................................................................................................... 36
Cities as producers of the global ....................................................................................................... 37
Globalization and neoliberalism in the city ....................................................................................... 37
The global city ................................................................................................................................... 37
C40 ................................................................................................................................................. 37
Global inter-city competition and city branding ............................................................................... 37
Responses of people that cannot adjust to new circumstances ................................................... 38
, Maura Finkelstein, allochronous spaces ........................................................................................... 38
What have we learnt today? ............................................................................................................. 38
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 38
Lecture 6: Lifestyles and the creative class .................................................................................. 39
Introduction last lecture .................................................................................................................... 39
The creative class (Richard Florida) ................................................................................................... 39
Consumption and citizenship ............................................................................................................ 40
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Collateral casualties of consumerism’, Journal of consumer culture 7 (2007):
25-56.............................................................................................................................................. 40
Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a way of life ............................................................................................ 42
Louis Wirth .................................................................................................................................... 42
Lifestyles ............................................................................................................................................ 42
Definition lifestyles ........................................................................................................................ 42
Leisure places ................................................................................................................................ 43
Recap: what have we learnt this course?.......................................................................................... 43
Concepts we used.............................................................................................................................. 43
,Idea of the course is: two things together
- Introduction into theories of urban studies, urban anthropology – texts
- Practice urban anthropology, fieldwork in Amsterdam or other place
Theoretical and practice together. Linking it together.
Research posters to make it doable so not papers.
Bachelor in anthropology > urban studies because you learn new concepts that are important in
anthropology and in doing fieldwork
Who are winners who are losers > global connections between the North and the South. Relevant for
development studies.
Urban studies and urban anthropology > Synonyms
Possible subjects to study? Good topics and which not. This is the reason why this lecture today.
Introduction: anthropology in and of the city
Not anthropology in the city but off the city, where the city has an impact on the way they behave.
The city itself doesn’t play a role itself.
How do they define the place?
Anthropology in and of the city
What counts as anthropology of the city?
,1. urbanism as a way of life > impact of the cities on the way people behave
2. The spatial turn: the social production of urban spaces > we look at the way people make use of
urban spaces. How people use urban space and how different kinds have a impact on how people
have. Spatial turn> there was something else before. What went before: focus on community studies
3. Offshoot of urbanism as a way of life: cities as centers of consumption, social movements
cities as center of consumption and social movements. Has to do with the way we live as urbanism
4. Offshoot of spatial turn: new mobility paradigm
the way people move around, migrate from one country to another but also within cities, also
concepts etc.
5. Inter-city competition and cooperation, representation of cities
cities starts to compete with each other. Amsterdam in effort to attract more investors, tourist,
artists is competing with other cities. They do so by promoting a certain image. “come to
Amsterdam, this is the place to be”. represent itself in a particular way. But they also cooperate, help
each other.
- Does city have an identity?
These are possible themes that you can do in your research projects.
Offshoot: new development building on earlier ideas
Spatial turn
We no longer take space as something taken for granted, just a geographic space. Space is something
produced in social interaction. It has a huge impact on how we behave. How lecture structures ….
Spatial turn is social production of spaces, ones they are there, how they consecute social behavior ;
thinking, you have to be somewhere even while thinking.
Proposition
From an anthropological perspective, a good, arguably the best way to study urban societies is to
focus on space as a social product that is contested by different actors.
Industries are moving out of cities, are moving to other parts. Industries are moving out of cities.
Batavia stad> Midst of polder.
Urban function are more deconcentrated. Main point: best way to study urban societies is to focus
on urban spaces.
kinds of space, with different degrees of solidity
- Built-up environment (fixed use of space)
- Temporary use of public space
- Symbolic use of space
Freek Colombijn: patches of padang: the history of an indoensian town in the 20th century and the
use of urban space.
Big investor who has bought land and made this ‘theepot’. It is ridiculous. One it is there, it is hard to
get rit of it.
Prague: building like…
Ones a building is there the behavior of people is structured
Le Corbusier, une ville contemporaine pour trois millions the persons.
, - Pruitt-Igoe complex, St louis, US > separation of urban functions > place where his ideas has
been realized but people didn’t like it much. It misses the ‘livability’ it gets boring. But ones it
is there, it is not easy to change it. You have to reconstruct it physically and socially. If you do
it physically you can tie socially other activities.
- Once build-environment is there…
- According to him, cities becomes nicer places to live when it is separated.
Public/ open spaces. That matters. Freedom in changing human behavior.
How to claim this space? With build-environments… you decide? Difficult to change the build-
environment.
Temporary use of public space
Many people living on the streets, homeless or rough sleepers.
temporary shelters, in order to claim their public space. Weak way of claiming space because they
don’t own it. They can make these infrastructures but if the police say they have to move on, it
would be destroyed.
Squatting/ krakers > open public spaces, ones they are there, the solidify the use of their space. Once
squats are there… squatters who occupy existing buildings, most of the time, the function doesn’t
really change. Occupy an office building, they hardly change. Empty land, occupied by squatters who
build their own dwellers is different > ship yard in Amsterdam. They build their own dwellings and
thus wasn’t easy to change it anymore. In Amsterdam it took years, the owners of the land to get rid
of them.
Palestine kids in public space
Symbolic use of space, statue of liberty in new York
Here is most freedom, what does the statue mean? It is there as physical object but it is indeed an
symbol of freedom or American capitalism/ imperialism.
Symbol with global ‘power’ and triggers or global imagination but there is also local symbols as ways
to claim space.
Symbolic use of space
Religious lines, class lines, political preferences etc.
protestants, who in symbolic way go around the city and claim that it is theirs. Not by claiming it for a
long time or by building things but just by going around. Tense symbolic struggle.
Referential symbol
They can mean different things for different peoples.
I Amsterdam > symbolic meaning in public spaces. Building in open environment.
Blurring of kinds of spaces (with different degrees of solidarity)
Build-environment and symbolic places get connected. They overlap each other.
Richard Sennett on the social diversity of cities
, - Cities are meant to be places which concentrate different races, social classes, ethnicities,
life-styles: the mixture of difference has seemed to writes on cities from Aristotle to Hannah
Arendt to stimulate people in crowds’ (Sennett 2010: 267-268)
Romantic view of cities because of diversity but it can also mean conflict, tensions etc. But most
people have romantic view that diversity is great.
- The public realm can be simply defined as a place where strangers meet. The difference
between public and private lies in the amount of knowledge one person or group has about
others: in the private realm, as ina family, one knows others well and close up, whereas in a
public realm one does not, incomplete knowledge joins to anonymity in the public realms
Sennett, on different kinds of the public realms:
Sennett terminology to think about public spaces
- Open and closed systems
- Over-determined form
- Borders and boundaries
What have we learnt today?
- Anthropology in and of the city
- Spatial turn in anthropology
- Perceived space, conceived space, lived space (Lefebvre)
- Open and closed systems: overdetermined form: borders and boundaries (Sennett)
Lecture 01 – the spatial turn
We are going to do anthropology of the city, not in the city.
What counts as anthropology of the city? Anything that has somehow to do with urban spaces.
Urbanism as a way of life.
In town asses people in identifying your relationship, your kin. In the city for example we asses
clothes of people etc.
- Cities as places as consumptions / centers of production; that’s how city develops, city of
industry
- Consuming urban life – being in the city walking etc.
Turn - New mobility paradigm
City branding
The spatial turn: the production of urban space
Definition urban anthropology
‘the fact that many anthropological studies are conducted in cities does not necessarily make them
urban anthropology in our view. […] what makes their work urban anthropology is their explicit
, reflection on the implications of the urban context in which these phenomena occur’ (Jaffe & De
Koning 2016: 1).
‘in this book we define ‘’urban anthropology’’ as anthropology that engages explicitly with the
question of how social life is structured and experienced within urban contexts’’ (Jaffe & De Koning
2016:3)
Anthropology in and of the city
‘we must distinguish between phenomena that occur in cities but are not generated by urbanisation
processes as such, and phenomena that are legitimately elements of cities in the sense that they
play an active role in defining the shape and logic of urban outcomes’ (Storper & Scott 2016: 117).
What counts as anthropology of the city?
1. urbanism as a way of life
2. the spatial turn; the social production of urban spaces
3. offshoot of urbanism as a way of life: cities as centres of consumption, social movements
4. offshoot of spatial turn: new mobility paradigm
5. inter-city competition and cooperation, representation of cities
All human activity requires space
Proposition
From an anthropological perspective, a good, arguably the best, way to study urban societies is to
focus on space as a social product that is contested by different actors (Lefebvre?).
Difference between urban anthropology and other urban studies
- Equal attention for cities outside global North
- Participant observation – main research method
- The use of ethnographic methods also connects to the distinctive anthropological focus on
everyday life in the city, and on the les quantifiable imaginaries and symbols through
which people make sense of their urban surroundings (Jaffe & De Koning 2016:5) – how
people imagine their life and how they image it should be; things that mostly goes unnoticed
because they happen unconsciously
- ‘insistence on understanding people and social situations in their full complexity, rather
than seeing them as abstracted from their context’ (Jaffe & De Koning 2016:5) –
contextualization and holism; other studies specify, anthropologists take an holistic view, in a
wider context
Chapter 1,2,3 Late twentieth century developments in urban anthropology
- Political economy
Interest in political inequalities that underly economic inequalities or political relationships
and economic power. If you look at housing shortages, what is the economic aspect there
and who has a political impact about housing crisis.
- Informal economy
Especially in Global South, but also in cities in the Global North
- Spatial turn (Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau)
- Consumption rather than production as main characteristic of the late modern city
