Redefining the ‘Urban’: Anthropological Perspectives on the City

Ask someone to define a city and they’ll probably reach for a number: population above a certain threshold, houses packed close together, maybe a mention of factories or offices. That’s the census answer. Anthropologists studying cities have never found it satisfying. A slum with half a million residents and a temple town with the same headcount can feel, and function, like entirely different worlds. So instead of counting rooftops, urban anthropologists asked a harder question: what does a city actually do to the people and cultures that pass through it? The answers reshaped how we think about urbanisation in India and everywhere else.

Why headcounts were never enough 🔗

India’s own record with defining “urban” shows how shaky a purely demographic approach can be. The Census of India labels a settlement urban either because a state government has notified it as a municipality, or because it clears three bars at once: a population of at least 5,000, at least 75 percent of the male working population in non-agricultural jobs, and a density of 400 people per square kilometre. That sounds precise, but state governments apply wildly different thresholds to the same criteria, and settlements with near-identical characteristics end up classified differently depending on which state they sit in. A separate government explainer on urban agglomerations adds yet more layers, from outgrowths to contiguous towns, all still built on population counts and infrastructure checklists.

None of this tells you whether a place still runs on caste obligations or contract labour, whether it exports culture or imports it, or whether newcomers feel at home or unmoored. That gap between the statistical city and the lived city is exactly where anthropology stepped in.

Redfield and singer: orthogenetic and heterogenetic cities 🔗

In 1954, Robert Redfield and Milton Singer published an essay that anthropology students still return to. Building on Redfield’s earlier folk-urban continuum, the two scholars argued that cities play different cultural roles, not just different economic ones. Some cities exist primarily to refine and formalise the beliefs already present in the surrounding countryside. A learned class in these cities takes scattered folk ideas and turns them into scripture, law, and philosophy, producing what Redfield and Singer called a Great Tradition built out of many small, local traditions. They named this process orthogenetic, meaning “growing from within.” Varanasi, with its centuries of codified ritual and pilgrimage, is often cited as this kind of city. Heterogenetic cities work differently. They form where a local culture collides with an outside one, often through trade, conquest, or colonial rule. Instead of preserving tradition, these cities generate new economic and technical possibilities. But that innovation comes at a cost. The old rules stop making sense and nothing fully replaces them, leaving people with what Redfield and Singer described as rootlessness and anomie. Port cities and colonial commercial hubs across the world, including many that grew up around British trade in India, fit this pattern.

Why the distinction still holds up 🔗

Most real cities aren’t purely one type. Delhi carries both an orthogenetic core, built around centuries of imperial and religious authority, and a heterogenetic skin of migration, finance, and constant reinvention. The framework is useful precisely because it asks what a city is doing to culture, not just how big it has grown.

Southall and gutkind: density, class, and colonial categories 🔗

Not every anthropologist accepted population density as even a starting point. Aidan Southall, who spent decades studying African urbanisation, argued that what actually makes a place urban is a high spatial density of social interaction, not simply a headcount packed into a small area. Two neighbourhoods can have identical population density and completely different intensities of social life. Southall pushed for comparing cities historically and cross-culturally rather than sorting them by size alone, and in his work on former colonies he split cities into two broad groups. One group, which he called Category A, had existed long before colonial rule arrived and stayed closely tied to the rural subsistence economy around them. The other, Category B, was a colonial creation: fast-growing towns built around mining or industry and populated largely by migrant labour with no deep local roots. This split maps reasonably well onto Indian cities too, where pilgrimage and administrative centres with ancient roots sit alongside colonial-era cantonments and industrial towns that barely existed two centuries ago. Both classification schemes are laid out in a detailed survey of the field published in the journal Urbanities.

Gutkind and the class struggle at the heart of urban life 🔗

Around the same time, Peter Gutkind approached the same question from a Marxist angle and landed on a different answer: what defines a city is neither density nor colonial history but class struggle. For Gutkind, urban social relations are qualitatively different from rural ones because a city concentrates competing economic interests in one place, and that friction is what gives urban life its particular texture. Like Southall, he treated the city as a distinct social institution rather than an overgrown village. Together, their work pushed urban anthropology away from physical measurements and toward the kinds of relationships a city produces.

Anthony leeds and the city that isn’t an island 🔗

By the late 1960s, a sharper critique was building. Anthony Leeds accused earlier urban anthropologists of treating the city as a sealed unit, as though whatever happened inside its boundaries could be explained without reference to anything outside them. He argued that this was a basic methodological error. Cities, in his framing, are simply one form of population clustering among many, all shaped by an extraordinarily complex web of interactions that make up a wider society. Leeds put it bluntly: no town exists in isolation. He pushed anthropologists to study cities as part of a larger totality that includes the state, national economic policy, and global trade, rather than as freestanding laboratories. That argument, recounted in the same Urbanities survey of the discipline’s development, still shapes how researchers approach cities today. A study of unemployment in a mid-sized Indian city, for instance, makes little sense without accounting for national labour policy, global supply chains, and migration patterns that reach far beyond the municipal boundary. Leeds essentially insisted that anthropologists zoom out before they zoom in.

Pocock and the city as an extension of the rural 🔗

David Pocock brought a different challenge, aimed specifically at how outsiders read Indian cities. Writing in 1960, he objected to the tendency among sociologists and colonial observers to treat anything urban in India as evidence of Western influence, as if traditional social structures simply evaporated once people moved to a city. Pocock’s own fieldwork in Gujarat, later revisited by researchers retracing his original village studies decades later, showed caste and kinship networks adapting to urban and commercial life rather than dissolving in it. He pointed instead to India’s long history of urban civilisation and argued that the Indian city has, for centuries, been a central expression of the same caste and kinship structures found in villages, not a break from them. For Pocock, the urban was in many ways an extension of the rural, carrying forward inherited social values even as the physical setting changed around them. It was a pointed rebuttal to frameworks built primarily on the experience of European or African cities, and a reminder that “urban” doesn’t mean the same thing, or come with the same consequences, in every part of the world.

What do you think? Looking at a city you know well, does it lean closer to Redfield and Singer’s orthogenetic model, where tradition gets codified and reinforced, or the heterogenetic one, where old certainties give way to something newer and less settled? And does Pocock’s argument, that urban India carries its rural social structures forward rather than discarding them, still hold up against how fast Indian cities are changing today?

References

1. https://www.orfonline.org/research/measuring-urbanisation-india
2. https://ies.gov.in/arthapedia/concept/urban-agglomeration
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-culture
4. https://www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/docs/tableofcontents_5/7-Discussions%20and%20Comments.pdf
5. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12695