Urban Anthropology: Meaning, Scope and Historical Evolution of City Studies

Cities were the last frontier for anthropology. For a discipline built on studying remote villages and “simple” societies, it took decades before the crowded lanes of Mumbai, the mining towns of Zambia, or the tenements of Chicago became legitimate research sites. Urban anthropology is the branch that finally turned that gaze inward, and its history explains a lot about how we understand cities today.

What urban anthropology means today 🔗

Urban anthropology looks at how social life is built, organised, and lived through cities. It studies how city dwellers navigate spaces that are diverse, unequal, and always shifting, while staying connected to global flows of people, money, and ideas. A migrant construction worker in Bengaluru, for instance, is shaped by local neighbourhood ties as much as by national labour policy and global remittance networks. The field insists on holding both scales together: the street-level and the planetary.

This wasn’t always how anthropologists saw cities. For most of the discipline’s early history, cities were seen as someone else’s subject.

Why anthropologists arrived late to the city 🔗

Two things held the discipline back. The first was political. Early anthropologists largely worked within colonial structures, and their funding, access, and professional incentives pointed toward studying colonised populations in rural or remote settings, not the cities where colonial administrators themselves lived and worked. Cities felt too close to home, too tied to the colonisers, to count as proper fieldwork.

The second reason was disciplinary insecurity. Anthropology had spent decades defining itself against sociology by claiming a special expertise in “simple,” small-scale societies, leaving “complex” industrial societies to sociologists. When anthropologists finally did study cities, they often did so by smuggling in their older habits: studying migrants who carried tribal or rural identities into urban settings, rather than studying urban life as its own phenomenon. Sociologists studied the urban man; anthropologists, at least initially, studied the tribal man in the city.

What pushed urban anthropology forward 🔗

Two forces eventually broke this deadlock. The first was simply the scale of urban change itself. The Industrial Revolution produced cities of a size and density the world had never seen, along with entirely new kinds of human relationships built around factories, wage labour, and anonymous crowds. Colonisation and, later, decolonisation triggered massive waves of rural-to-urban migration across Asia and Africa, and India’s own experience of urban growth after independence followed a similar arc, with millions moving to cities in search of work and opportunity.

The second force came from inside the discipline. As decolonisation gathered pace in the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists began questioning their own colonial entanglements. There were growing calls to “bring anthropology home,” to stop treating the exotic and distant as the only worthy subject and to apply the same rigorous, fieldwork-based methods to industrial societies and, eventually, to anthropologists’ own cities.

The Chicago School: the city as a laboratory 🔗

The most influential early home of urban studies wasn’t in an anthropology department at all. The University of Chicago’s sociology department, active between roughly 1915 and 1935, treated the city itself as a living laboratory, and its ideas shaped anthropology as much as sociology.

Robert Park and human ecology 🔗

Robert Park built what became known as the human ecology model, drawing an analogy between natural ecosystems and city life. He argued that competition, conflict, and eventual accommodation between groups shape how urban space gets organised, much as species compete for niches in nature. Park also championed firsthand, immersive fieldwork in the city, an approach close to what anthropologists call participant observation, and this method became one of the Chicago School’s lasting contributions to how cities are studied.

Robert Redfield and the folk-urban continuum 🔗

Robert Redfield, Park’s son-in-law and a University of Chicago anthropologist, took a different route. Rather than treating rural and urban societies as entirely separate categories, he proposed that settlements exist along a spectrum, from small, isolated, homogeneous folk societies to large, diverse, impersonal urban societies. His folk-urban continuum treated rural and urban life as connected rather than isolated categories, with constant movement of people and practices between them.

Redfield later extended this thinking to peasant societies more broadly, proposing that every complex civilisation contains two interacting layers of culture. The Great Tradition is the formal, written, elite culture found in temples, courts, and classical texts, while the Little Tradition is the oral, informal culture of ordinary village life, and the two constantly borrow from and reshape each other. This framework was later applied extensively to Indian villages by scholars such as McKim Marriott and Milton Singer, making it especially relevant to South Asian anthropology.

Fieldworkers who made the city their laboratory 🔗

Alongside Park and Redfield, scholars like Louis Wirth, Nels Anderson, and St. Clair Drake insisted on direct, empirical observation of city life rather than armchair theorising. Wirth’s work on urbanism as a way of life, Anderson’s studies of homeless men, and Drake’s landmark research on Black urban Chicago all treated the city as a place to be walked through, observed, and documented, not just theorised about from a distance.

The Manchester School: studying African mining towns 🔗

While Chicago scholars studied an American industrial city, a parallel and equally important tradition emerged in colonial Africa. The Manchester School, associated with anthropologist Max Gluckman, examined how colonialism, urbanisation, and labour migration reshaped Central and Southern African societies. Gluckman directed the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute before moving to the University of Manchester, where he became the first professor of social anthropology there and gathered a group of researchers around a shared research agenda.

The Institute’s most famous work came out of the Copperbelt studies in Northern Rhodesia, present-day Zambia. Researchers such as Albert Epstein, Clyde Mitchell, and Hortense Powdermaker studied how rural migrants adapted to industrial mining towns, forming new identities, networks, and social relationships that didn’t fit neatly into older tribal categories. Gluckman’s predecessor at the Institute had argued that migrants gradually abandoned traditional values for industrial ones, but Gluckman disagreed, observing that migrants instead selected behaviours from both systems depending on the situation. This shift in thinking, formalised through what came to be called Gluckman’s Seven-Year Research Plan, focused attention on the new webs of relationships forming in colonial towns rather than assuming that urbanisation simply erased tradition.

The 1960s and 70s: urban anthropology comes of age 🔗

By the 1960s, urban anthropology had matured into a recognised sub-discipline with three broad strands of research. One strand followed peasant migrants into cities, tracking how they adapted their strategies for survival and belonging. A second, more problem-focused strand examined urban poverty, slums, inequality, and violence directly. A third remained more theoretical, refining concepts and analytical frameworks for understanding urban life.

The most controversial contribution of this period came from Oscar Lewis, whose culture of poverty thesis argued that the urban poor develop a distinct set of values and behaviours that get passed down across generations, trapping families in poverty regardless of changing circumstances. The thesis proved hugely influential but also deeply divisive. Critics argued it risked shifting blame for poverty onto the poor themselves rather than onto the structural and economic conditions that produced it, and later ethnographic studies of urban communities often found aspirations and family values much closer to mainstream norms than Lewis’s model suggested.

The spatial turn: space as more than a backdrop 🔗

Through the 1990s, urban anthropology underwent what scholars call the spatial turn, moving away from studying social organisation alone toward examining how power shapes and is shaped by physical space. This shift drew heavily on French theorists writing outside anthropology altogether. Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau emphasised the power relations embedded in landscapes and everyday spatial practices, treating space not as a neutral container for social life but as something actively produced and contested.

Foucault showed how institutions use spatial layout to discipline and control people, an idea anthropologists applied to everything from colonial city planning to modern slum clearances. Lefebvre argued that space is socially produced, always reflecting and reinforcing whoever holds power over its design. De Certeau, in turn, focused on how ordinary people quietly reclaim and repurpose spaces designed to control them, through everyday tactics of walking, gathering, and improvising. Together, these ideas pushed urban anthropologists to ask a sharper question: who actually gets to shape a city, and who is merely allowed to move through it.

Expanding horizons: urban anthropology today 🔗

Contemporary urban anthropology has stretched far beyond its early concerns. Researchers now study urban place-making, human mobility, the politics of public space, leisure and lifestyle, and the global networks connecting cities to one another. Social problems remain central too, including homelessness, racial and caste inequality, unemployment, crime, public health crises, and the everyday experience of fear and insecurity in cities.

The scope has also widened to include urban sub-cultures once considered too marginal to study seriously: truck drivers, street vendors, gig workers, gang members, and sex workers, among others. Given that India’s urban population is projected to rise from roughly 32 percent of the population in 2011 to over 38 percent by 2036, these questions are only becoming more urgent for Indian cities specifically, from Mumbai’s informal settlements to the rapidly growing tier-two towns absorbing new migrants.

One of the field’s most influential contemporary voices, Setha Low, has pushed for what she calls an engaged urban anthropology, one that combines careful ethnographic fieldwork with a direct commitment to social justice. Her research on public space examines issues like security, displacement, privatisation, and sustainability, arguing that anthropologists shouldn’t just document urban inequality but actively work to address it, whether by informing housing policy, defending public parks from privatisation, or advocating for marginalised urban residents.

From colonial administrators avoiding the study of their own cities to anthropologists actively shaping urban policy today, the discipline’s journey mirrors the story of urbanisation itself: messy, contested, and still very much in progress.

What do you think? Do you see traces of Redfield’s folk-urban continuum in how Indian cities absorb migrants from rural areas even today? And should anthropologists studying urban poverty or inequality take an activist stance, as Setha Low suggests, or stick to observing and documenting?

References

1. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/robert-park-and-urban-ecology
2. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/85564/1/Unit-3.pdf
3. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp10/chapter/culture-and-civilization-robert-redfield/
4. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0052.xml
5. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/the-manchester-school/
6. https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/is-there-a-culture-of-poverty/
7. https://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/what-is-the-spatial-turn/
8. https://nhm.gov.in/New_Updates_2018/Report_Population_Projection_2019.pdf
9. https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/setha-low