Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader

Anthropological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. The New Urban Anthropology Reader corrects this omission by presenting 12 cross-cultural case studies focusing on the analysis of space and place.

Five images of the city—the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city—serve as the framework for the selected essays. These images highlight current research trends in urban anthropology, such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and

studies of the symbolic and social production of urban space and planning.

Selected Chapters:

Theorizing the City: An Introduction by Setha M. Low

Part I. The Divided City

The Changing Significance of Race and Class in an African American Community, Steven Gregory

Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation by Teresa P. R. Caldeira

Part II. The Contested City

Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space in Costa Rica, Setha M. Low

Part III. The Global City

Wholesale Sushi: Culture and Commodity in Tokyo’s Tsukiki Market, Ted Bestor

Part IV. The Modernist City

The Modernist City and the Death of the Street by James Holston

Part V. The Postmodern City

Spatial Discourse and Social Boundaries: Re-imagining the Toronto Waterfront by Matthew Cooper