Urbanities,
Vol. 4
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No 2
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November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
86
Dolores Koenig, PhD
Department of Anthropology, American University, Washington, DC, USA
Prato and Pardo’s piece (2013) is an excellent and useful introduction to the field of urban
anthropology, as other commentaries have already noted. It is especially useful for someone
like me, who came to urban anthropology indirectly, after many years of straddling the divide
between scholarly and practical development anthropology. Having first worked on forced
displacement and resettlement caused by development projects in rural areas, I was drawn to
cities by the recent rapid urban growth in developing countries. As developing countries
become majority urban, their cities confront new problems, including the disruptions caused
by initiatives to improve infrastructure and neighbourhoods. These efforts include new roads,
rail, bridges, watershed preservation and responses to climate change, as well as urban
renewal to ‘upgrade’ slums and gentrification. These changes virtually always displace and
relocate at least some of the people who live in the affected areas. Scholars and practitioners
have shown that displacement and relocation disproportionately affect poorer groups and that
the process of forced relocation disrupts economic and social ties with often disastrous results
(Cernea 2000, Koenig 2009).
Just as anthropology itself began in rural areas and only later came to cities, so too did
international development practice. This is especially true for development-caused forced
relocation and resettlement, where international safeguard policies to mitigate the worst
effects of displacement were formulated largely to avoid the negative effects of dam
construction on rural people living in relatively isolated areas. The essential focus of many of
these policies is reconstituting the land-based assets of rural residents so they can re-establish
natural resource-based livelihoods. In urban areas, however, most people live from activities
that depend upon other kinds of assets, including skills, social networks and technology.
Existing policies are not always sufficient to reconstitute their lives and livelihoods.
Those who want to address the negative effects of urban forced displacement and
resettlement need to understand not only how people live in cities but also how cities work.
As in other fields of development practice, anthropology and its local focus offer the
possibility to correct some of the blind spots of existing policy. As Prato and Pardo show,
urban anthropology links the macro-processes of urban change to the lived experiences of
urban residents. An anthropology of the city as well as the knowledge gleaned from
anthropology in cities are both key to conceptualizing the impacts of urban displacement and
relocation.
While the strength of anthropology remains ethnographic analyses of individual cases,
good policy depends on accurate generalization based on comparative analyses of urban
experiences internationally, within and between developed and developing countries. As
developing countries build new infrastructure to improve cities, they are undertaking
processes, including displacement and resettlement, that have occurred in similar, if not
identical form, in developed countries. In the U.S., anthropologists began to carry out
problem-oriented work in cities following new urban policies linked to the U.S. War on
