Emerging Approaches in Urban Anthropology: Ordinary Cities, Cultural Analysis and Scenes Theory

Walk through any Indian city and you will notice something urban theory took a surprisingly long time to admit: no single template can explain how cities work. A textile hub like Surat, a metro like Bengaluru and a temple town like Madurai all function differently, yet older urban theories often measured every city against the same yardstick – usually a Western one. Urban anthropology has spent the last few decades correcting this. Four approaches in particular have reshaped how scholars study cities today: the ordinary city approach, cultural analysis, the city as an entertainment machine, and scenes theory. Each offers a different lens, and together they show why studying a city is never a one-size-fits-all exercise.

The ordinary city approach: democratising urban theory 🔗

For much of the twentieth century, urban theory was built around a handful of cities – London, New York, Tokyo – treated as the standard against which all other cities were measured. Anything outside this circle was labelled peripheral, developing or simply less important. The ordinary city approach pushes back against this hierarchy. It argues that every city, regardless of its population or global ranking, deserves to be studied as a complex, self-sufficient site of urban life rather than as a poor copy of somewhere else.

Challenging the world city hierarchy 🔗

The idea was first proposed as a critique of frameworks that ranked cities by their role in global finance and trade, sorting them into “world” or “global” cities at the top and everything else below. Geographer Jennifer Robinson later developed this critique into a fuller framework, arguing that urban theory needs to move past the binary of modern versus developing cities and instead treat all cities as equally valid starting points for theorising the urban condition. This does not mean ignoring differences between cities. It means studying those differences on their own terms rather than through a checklist borrowed from elsewhere.

Why this matters for Indian cities 🔗

For a country with thousands of urban settlements ranging from mega-cities to small municipal towns, this approach matters a great deal. Scholars working on Indian urbanism increasingly argue that theories built around large Global North cities cannot be applied wholesale to smaller, historically and culturally distinct cities such as Mangaluru or Bhubaneswar, and that these cities need to be studied through frameworks that account for their own historical layering and local context, as seen in recent work on retheorising urbanism from smaller, postcolonial cities. This has fed into a wider effort within urban studies to decentre knowledge production away from the West and build frameworks that are grounded in the lived realities of cities across Asia, Africa and Latin America, a shift documented in systematic reviews of Global South urban theory. The ordinary city approach, in short, gives Indian cities – including the smaller ones rarely covered in textbooks – a legitimate place in urban theory rather than a footnote.

The cultural analysis approach: globalisation meets local identity 🔗

If the ordinary city approach is about which cities get studied, the cultural analysis approach is about how they get studied. It emerged as anthropologists began paying closer attention to how globalisation was reshaping cities without erasing their local character. Rather than assuming that global economic forces flatten every city into the same mix of malls, chain stores and glass towers, this approach starts from the premise that each city filters global influences through its own cultural lens.

Glocalisation: neither homogenised nor untouched 🔗

This idea is closely tied to what sociologists call glocalisation – the process by which global products, trends and institutions get adapted to fit local tastes and meanings rather than simply replacing them. A well-documented example is how international fast-food chains modify their menus for local dietary norms and social customs across different regions, blending global branding with regional preference rather than imposing a uniform product everywhere, a pattern discussed in analyses of glocalisation and consumer culture. Applied to cities, this framework helps anthropologists study how a city like Kochi or Jaipur absorbs global architectural styles, global brands and global media while still producing something distinctly local – a hybrid rather than a copy.

This matters because it corrects a common but flawed assumption: that globalisation is a one-way street where global culture overwhelms local culture. Cultural analysis treats the relationship as two-directional. Local food habits reshape global restaurant chains just as much as global chains introduce new consumption habits. Local festivals absorb global marketing techniques while remaining rooted in regional tradition. Anthropologists using this approach look closely at street life, local markets, festivals, and neighbourhood identity to trace exactly how this negotiation plays out in a specific city.

The city as an entertainment machine: consumption and lifestyle 🔗

Cities were historically understood mainly as centres of production – places where people went to work in factories, offices and mills. The entertainment machine approach argues that this framing is incomplete for contemporary urban life. Cities today function equally as centres of consumption, leisure and lifestyle, and this shift deserves serious anthropological attention.

From production to consumption 🔗

This framework, developed largely through the work of sociologist Terry Nichols Clark and collaborators, points out that as cities move toward knowledge-based and service-based economies, residents have more time and disposable income to spend on cultural amenities – restaurants, cafes, live music venues, art galleries and fitness studios. Urban administrators and business leaders have taken note, actively using culture and entertainment infrastructure to attract residents, tourists and investment, treating amenities as an economic asset rather than a lifestyle afterthought, as outlined in research on cities using culture to transform themselves economically.

In the Indian context, this shift is visible in the rapid growth of cafe culture, co-working spaces, weekend markets, stand-up comedy venues and curated food festivals across cities like Pune, Chandigarh and Indore – places that were not traditionally associated with a nightlife or leisure economy. Consumption choices – which cafe you frequent, which festival you attend, which neighbourhood you associate with – have become a form of identity expression, not just spending. This is precisely why anthropologists treat consumption patterns as legitimate research material: they reveal how people construct social identity and status through their urban lifestyle choices, not simply how they earn a living.

The scenes approach: a multidimensional lens on urban life 🔗

The most recent of the four approaches, scenes theory, tries to capture something the other frameworks tend to miss: the intangible atmosphere of a place. A neighbourhood is not just its buildings, shops and demographics. It has a mood, a sensibility, an unspoken code of what feels appropriate there. Scenes theory calls this a “scene” and treats it as a serious unit of urban analysis.

What makes a scene 🔗

The framework was developed extensively by sociologists Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark, who proposed adding the concept of the scene to the core toolkit of social science alongside long-established categories like class, race and gender, arguing that scenes capture something these older categories cannot: the aesthetic meaning that specific combinations of people, amenities and settings produce in a place, a point developed at length in their book Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life. A scene, in this view, is not reducible to any single feature – not the presence of a cafe, not the age of the crowd, not the type of music playing. It is the combination of all these elements together that produces a distinct social experience.

Reading the city through its scenes 🔗

Applied anthropologically, scenes analysis asks researchers to read a location holistically. A university neighbourhood full of secondhand bookshops, budget eateries and late-night study cafes produces a different scene from a gentrified art district with galleries, boutique stores and curated events, even if both are located within the same city. A city can host multiple scenes simultaneously – a traditional scene around an old bazaar, a self-expressive scene around an arts collective, a glamorous scene around a luxury retail district – and these scenes can overlap, compete or coexist. This approach is particularly useful for understanding rapidly changing Indian neighbourhoods, where a single street can shift character within a few years as new residents, businesses and cultural practices move in.

Bringing the four approaches together 🔗

These four approaches are not competing theories that cancel each other out. They are complementary lenses that anthropologists often use together. The ordinary city approach ensures a city is not dismissed as marginal before it is even studied. Cultural analysis explains how global forces get reshaped locally. The entertainment machine framework accounts for the growing role of consumption and leisure in urban identity. And scenes theory captures the atmosphere and meaning that numbers and maps alone cannot show. Used together, they offer a far more layered and accurate picture of how contemporary cities actually function – one that takes ordinary neighbourhoods as seriously as global financial districts.

What do you think? Which of these four approaches feels most useful for understanding the city or neighbourhood you live in right now? And do you think your city has one dominant “scene,” or several competing ones existing side by side?

References

1. https://research.kent.ac.uk/imagining-ordinary-cities/keynote-speaker-jennifer-robinson/
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2018.1549836
3. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-cities/articles/10.3389/frsc.2023.1163534/epub
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/glocalization
5. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_48864_smxx.pdf
6. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo23044170.html