Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
113
technology of mobile phones, social media and the financialisation of capitalist economies. But
for me at least this is still not specific enough. I think that here the contrast of the urban, or at
least the modern urban, with the rural can help. The contrast draws attention to the physicality of
urban spaces, or of light pollution obscuring the sky and the phases of the moon, of the urban
nature of seasons and daily rhythms of life. They give a clue as well as an empirical object lesson
to the specificity of the urban. Living among strangers and the freedoms and problems of
anonymity and anomie are classical and still relevant. But to them we should add the paths made
and mapped in the different experiences of the same urban spaces, the ways the same spaces are
centred on different points of significance as places of refuge, gathering and danger for different
urban dwellers in their daily or weekly trajectories. Concatenations of these everyday practices
and trajectories are the spatial stuff of urban spatiality and temporality. The physicality of
policing of these spatial gatherings and dispersals and their links to nodes of transport is an
obvious and tellingly specific subject for urban anthropology, exemplified by Julie Kleinman’s
study of the Gare du Nord in Paris (2012).
Prato and Pardo themselves point to another specifically urban topic: ‘new forms of
exclusion (including spatial segregation), legitimacy and governance’ (p. 18). As another
indication of such critical and specifically urban anthropology, I would add the counterpart to
spatial segregation and urban governance, which is urban planning, both as a temporality and as
part of the process of spatial formation. It is a never-ending, future-oriented but never completed
and always both constructive sometimes utopian but also destructive process dogged by
contingencies, a definition of legitimacy that literally marginalises and creates illegitimacy at its
margins. A classic study of this specifically urban topic is
Berlin, Alexanderplatz
by Gisa
Weszkalnys (2010).
With these clues I leave open to fellow anthropologists the specification of ‘urban’ as an
object of anthropological theory and therefore empirical study, a question that the essay by Prato
and Pardo inevitably provokes.
References
Kleinman, Julie (2012). The Gare du Nord: Parisian topographies of exchange.
Ethnologie
Francaise, 42(3): 567-76.
Liu, Xin (2002). Urban anthropology and the “Urban question” in China.
Critique of
Anthropology
, 22 (2): 109-132.
Skinner, G. William (1964 and 1965). Marketing and social structure in rural China. Parts I,
II, and III.
Journal of Asian Studies
, 24(1): 3-44; 24 (2):195-228; 24 (3): 363-99.
Skinner, G.William (1977). Urban development in imperial China [Part One introduction]: 3-31.
Urban and rural in Chinese society [Part Two Introduction]: 253-73.
Urban social structure in Ch'ing China [Part Three Introduction]: 521-53.
Regional urbanization in nineteenth-century China: 211-49; Cities and the hierarchy of
local systems: 275-364. In G. William Skinner (ed.).
