Urban Anthropology Scale Perspectives: Understanding Cities Through Size, Level and Relations

How big does a place need to be before we call it a “city”? And once it is one, do we understand it better by looking at its size, its position in a hierarchy of places, or its relationships with the rest of the world? Urban anthropologists have spent decades arguing over exactly this, and the answer usually comes down to one idea: scale.

What scale means in urban anthropology 🔗

In everyday use, scale just means size. In urban anthropology, it does far more work than that. Geographer Neil Smith described scale as the geographical organiser and expression of collective social action, meaning that the level at which we choose to study a city, whether a single street or an entire metropolitan region, actively shapes what we notice and what we miss.

Richard Howitt’s influential framework breaks this down further, identifying three facets of scale that urban theorists constantly negotiate: an areal facet concerned with size, a hierarchical facet concerned with level, and a dialectical facet concerned with relations. Recent reviews of urban theory confirm that researchers still disagree sharply across all three of these facets, from what counts as the right size of a city to study, to which level of analysis matters, to how a city should be understood in relation to other places and systems. This disagreement is not a weakness in the field. It reflects the genuine complexity of cities as objects of study, and each of the three lenses, size, level, and relations, offers something the others cannot.

The size perspective: classifying cities by scale 🔗

The most intuitive way to think about scale is population size. This gives us familiar categories: small towns, cities, metropolitan areas, and megacities. In India, the Census follows exactly this logic. Urban centres are formally divided into six classes based on population, with settlements crossing one lakh residents earning the label of a city, and those crossing one million becoming what the Indian Economic Service defines as Million Plus cities, with an even higher threshold of four million marking a metro city. This size-based sorting is not just bureaucratic bookkeeping. It determines how funding, infrastructure planning, and governance responsibilities get allocated across urban India.

World cities, megacities and the global divide 🔗

Size classification becomes more politically loaded once we scale up to the global level. Urban anthropology has historically leaned heavily on cities of the global north, treating places like New York, London, and Tokyo as the default template for what a modern, influential city looks like. Meanwhile, the explosive growth of cities in the global south has often been studied through the lens of crisis rather than as sites generating their own valid urban theory. Yet by 2018, the global south already contained the majority of the world’s megacities, with sixteen in Asia alone housing hundreds of millions of residents, according to research published in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities. Mumbai, Delhi, and Dhaka are not smaller, less-developed versions of Western metropolises. They are massive urban systems in their own right, and treating them as an afterthought limits what urban theory can actually explain.

This raises a fair question for anyone studying Indian cities: do frameworks built to explain Manchester or Chicago automatically apply to Surat or Bengaluru? The size perspective forces researchers to confront how deeply power, colonial history, and global economic hierarchies are baked into which cities get treated as “normal” and which get treated as exceptions.

The level perspective: from the neighbourhood to the globe 🔗

If size asks “how big,” the level perspective asks “at what scale should we even be looking.” This is arguably where urban anthropology’s biggest methodological battles have played out.

The Chicago School and the view from the street 🔗

Early twentieth-century Chicago was growing at a staggering pace, pulling in immigrants and rural migrants from the American South, and sociologists at the University of Chicago decided the best way to understand this transformation was to zoom all the way in. Researchers associated with what became known as the Chicago School of Sociology mapped the city block by block, tracking how poverty, crime, and migration clustered in specific neighbourhoods rather than being evenly spread across the city. Their method, closely observing lived experience at the micro level, produced rich, textured accounts of everyday urban life, from immigrant enclaves to informal social networks. The trade-off was that this approach could describe what was happening in a neighbourhood far more easily than it could explain why entire cities were structured the way they were in the first place.

Political economy and the view from above 🔗

This is exactly the gap that the political economy approach tried to fill. Rather than starting from the street, theorists like David Harvey and Manuel Castells started from capital, land, and state power. The political economy tradition in urban studies links urban problems to structural inequalities in property and power, arguing that patterns like segregation or gentrification cannot be explained by neighbourhood-level dynamics alone. They are outcomes of how capital moves, how governments zone land, and how urban development gets financed at a national or even global scale. Where the Chicago School zoomed in, political economy zoomed out, treating the city as a product of much larger economic forces.

Neoliberal cities and multi-level thinking 🔗

Contemporary urban anthropology has largely moved past picking one level and defending it. The current trend is to study neoliberal cities by tracing how mobility, urban space, and governance operate simultaneously across multiple levels. A single phenomenon, say, the growth of gated communities on the edge of an Indian metro city, can be examined as a neighbourhood-level social pattern, a city-level planning decision, and a national-level policy outcome shaped by liberalisation, all at once. The level perspective’s real contribution is not settling on the “correct” scale of analysis. It is showing that comprehensive urban research usually needs to move between scales rather than staying locked into just one.

The relational perspective: the city as a web of connections 🔗

The third facet, relation, shifts the question entirely. Instead of asking “how big is this city” or “at what level should we study it,” the relational perspective asks how a city is connected to everything around it. This means examining a city’s ties to its surrounding hinterland, its economic position relative to other cities, and its place within larger political and social orders.

A relational approach to an Indian city like Pune, for instance, would not stop at describing its population or its neighbourhoods. It would trace how the city’s IT economy connects it to global capital flows, how migration links it to smaller towns across Maharashtra, and how its governance structures tie it into state and national policy. Scholars working on global urbanism have increasingly pushed back against treating cities as isolated case studies, arguing instead that even categories like global north and global south fail to capture cities that sit in between these hemispheric labels, cities whose identities are formed precisely through their relations to multiple regions and traditions at once. This relational lens treats a city less like a container with a fixed size, and more like a node in a constantly shifting network of people, capital, and culture.

Why this debate is still unresolved 🔗

None of these three perspectives, size, level, or relation, has “won.” Urban theorists continue to disagree over which geographic scale offers the most accurate picture of city life, and reviews of the field consistently find high levels of disagreement across all three facets of scale that Howitt identified. This is precisely why scale remains such a productive concept in urban anthropology rather than a settled methodological choice. A researcher studying informal housing in an Indian city, for example, might need the size perspective to compare it against national urban trends, the level perspective to understand both the household’s daily negotiations and the state housing policy shaping them, and the relational perspective to see how that neighbourhood connects to labour markets and infrastructure elsewhere in the city. Scale, in the end, is less a ruler for measuring cities and more a set of questions researchers must keep asking themselves throughout their fieldwork.

What do you think? When you think about a city you know well, does its size, its position in a hierarchy of places, or its relationships to other places tell you the most about how it actually functions? And do you think frameworks built around global north cities can fully explain the urban experience in rapidly growing Indian cities?

References

1. https://ies.gov.in/arthapedia/concept/cities-and-towns
2. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-cities/articles/10.3389/frsc.2021.692799/full
3. https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/raceandcrime/chpt/chicago-school-sociology
4. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/urban-studies
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15387216.2020.1777443