Theorizing the City

Theorizing the City is a collection of articles in urban anthropology focusing on the relationship between spatial environs and urban cultures from Toronto, Atlanta, and New York to Barcelona, Spo Paulo, Vienna, and Accra (Ghana). Bringing together urban theory and fieldwork, the contributors examine a number of tensions that play out in diverse urban settings. . . . The use of theory helps to bring about some rich connections between the spatial environment and the experiential elements of city life in different parts of the world.

The best æreadersÆ have three characteristics: the individual selections are of excellent quality, felicitous editing ensures that the selections cohere, and the whole is introduced by a majestic (or at least competent) overview of the field. By this measure, Setha Low has produced a very useful text and one which I will certainly recommend to students. . . . Without exception, the chapters are well written and are likely to provide a sound basis for discussion within class.

Taken together, this volume represents a valuable collection of essays that do well to capture the contemporary state of urban anthropology, as well as providing useful theoretical frameworks and methodological examples for understanding and writing about the city. . . . The essays collected here judiciously integrate the particular analytic powers of ethnographic and historical analysis to frame local social processes within transnational and global processes. . . . In particular, this volumeùand the images of the city Low offersùmay serve as an excellent resource for teachers interested in provoking students to think about and understand the cities they (may) inhabit.

These informative essays make clear that anthropology has much to offer to urban theory and public policy debates. 

Using rich comparative material, this volume presents an intriguing anthropological vision of how cities are shaped. A major addition to a comparative anthropology of cities, this volume demonstrates the complex structural and cultural forces that shape urban experience.

Theorizing the City has become fundamental reading for those students of urban society and culture who wish to better understand twentieth-century city forms and spaces, as well as why certain race, gender, age, and class inequalities continue to be manifested today.