Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
99
members have demonstrated the validity of interdisciplinary debate, addressing the connection
between micro- and macro-processes and, crucially, the importance of empirically-based analysis
and of the need to link theoretical speculation to empirical evidence. Ethnographically global, the
Series
Urban Anthropology
established by Ashgate in 2007 meets precisely this trend,
encouraging the publication of original, empirically based works that address key issues of
comparative value in the current international academic and political debates. The first of its kind
to be established by a major academic publisher, the Series includes works on the methodological
challenges posed by urban field research; the role of kinship, family and social relations; the gap
between citizenship and governance; the legitimacy of policy and the law; the relationships
between the legal, the semi-legal and the illegal in the economic and political fields; the role of
conflicting moralities across the social, cultural and political spectra; the problems raised by
internal and international migration; the informal sector of the economy and its complex
relationships with the formal sector and the law; the impact of the process of globalization on the
local level and the significance of local dynamics in the global context; urban development,
sustainability and global restructuring; conflict and competition within and between cities.
Together with the aforementioned CUA journal
Urbanities
, the Series is part of an effort to
stimulate fresh ideas and forward-looking analyses on the problems and complexity of our urban
environment in today’s global set up.
Conclusions: Human Mobility, Diversity and the Contemporary Relevance of Urban
Research
In this concluding section we need to point out that, since the 1990s, most anthropologists prefer
to define their field of study as anthropological research in urban settings, rather than ‘urban
anthropology’. This methodological and theoretical stance reflects a shift in focus from the
community studies inspired by the ‘urban ecology’ model of the Chicago School and processes of
urbanization in post-colonial societies to political economy, city planning, the legitimacy of
grassroots action and of governance, the relationship between the local and the supralocal and
their significance to urban dynamics.
Today anthropologists are concerned with a healthy variety of topics, including the
multifaceted analytical challenge posed by the process of globalization (cultural, economic,
political), biotechnology and bioethics, new reproductive technologies, the problematic of human
rights, new forms of exclusion (including spatial segregation), legitimacy and governance, and so
on. The early twenty-first-century situation appears to be marked by the re-emergence of
localism, transnationalism and by the effects of the ill-fated political project of multiculturalism.
In such a situation, the city stands out as a crucial arena in which citizenship – and, by extension,
identity and belonging, the democratic process and human and civil rights – are constantly
renegotiated (see Appadurai and Holston 1999, Prato 2006) and the morality of law and politics
are increasingly questioned and scrutinized (see Pardo ed. 2000 and 2004).
