
































Microsoft Word - Shalabi-publish.doc


Crafting an Engaged Urban Anthropology 

Review by Samir Shalabi 
 

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City. London & New York: 

Routledge  

By: Low, Seta. ed. 2019.  

 

There has been a growing recognition within anthropology over the past two decades 

about the need to more seriously engage with topics and issues that are of more direct 

relevance to the everyday realities of the general public. By producing knowledge that 

is useful for solving real-world social problems and making research more accessible 

to non-academic audiences, anthropology, according to these appeals, can play a 

greater role in influencing matters of societal concern. In parallel, as more and more 

regions around the world are witnessing accelerating rates of urban growth, we have 

also seen a garnering of scholarly interest to link anthropology with challenges related 

to city life.  

 

Reflecting these intersecting trends, the authors of The Routledge Handbook of 

Anthropology and the City pursue what editor Setha Low describes in the book’s 

introductory chapter as an “engaged urban anthropology.” That is, an anthropological 

practice that strives to create useful knowledge of broad public appeal by grappling 

with pressing urban issues of the day combined with a political commitment to a 

value system of social justice. Through rich ethnographic case studies from around 

the world, the volume offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary urban 

problems and provides creative solutions for grappling with them. 

 

Although urban anthropology has for long engaged with and sought to remedy urban 

social problems like the lack of housing, poverty, racial segregation, homelessness 

and forced displacement, the book reflects a new generation of anthropological 



research on the city that deals with topics that tangibly mark the present urban 

condition, including neoliberalism, globalization, ecological crises and intensified 

socioeconomic and racial disparities. Reflecting this contemporary locus, the 

anthology’s 33 ethnographically informed chapters are divided into eight thematic 

sections that include precarity, displacement and mobility, security and insecurity, 

environment and sustainability, citizenship, rights and social justice, built 

environment and spatial governance, financialization and privatization, and heritage 

preservation and cultural expression. All chapters echo what Low describes as a need 

for urban anthropologists “to be more outspoken about their social values and 

judgments, more pointed in their claims and more militant in their ethnographic 

practice” (p. 4).  

 

In part one, four chapters explore the issue of precarity, broadly understood as a state 

of uncertainty, marginality, vulnerability, exclusion and poverty arising from 

neoliberal economic policies and forms of governance that render people’s lives 

invisible to society’s social and political institutions. The texts are especially 

concerned with how people respond to and resist different forms of urban exclusion. 

A good example is the contribution by AbdouMaliq Simone that looks at the different 

ways in which youth living under conditions of intensified uncertainty in Hyderabad 

and Jakarta navigate public space and act on the city.  Reacting to their exclusion 

from political normalcy and capital accumulation, Simone shows with ethnographic 

depth and theoretical precision how young people employ multiple modalities of 

practice to counteract their marginality.  

 

An effect of living in precarity is not seldom that people become compelled to move 

away from the places where they live. Part two of the book is dedicated to the 

intersecting dynamics of displacement and mobility where the chapters deal with 

topics such as connectivity over urban boundaries in post-apartheid Cape Town, the 

intersection of affect and race among Andean Peruvian and Puerto Rican migrants in 

the US, and the relationship between automobility and civic culture in Beirut. 

Particularly interesting is the chapter by Claudio Sopranzetti who investigates the role 

of motorcycle taxi drivers embroiled in political protests in Bangkok as mediators of 

circulation in the reproduction of city life. Challenging traditional urban 

ethnography’s focus on bounded locales and fixed spatial scales, he demonstrates how 



urban circulation cuts across these scales and whose operators – the motorcycle 

drivers – play a central role in allowing (or preventing) the flow of people, 

commodities and capital. His ethnography shows how these drivers were able to 

disrupt urban circulation during the protests and challenge the power of the state, 

indicating the importance of mobility and circulation for the (dis)functioning of cities.   

 

From precarity and displacement and mobility the anthology goes on in part three to 

explore security and insecurity, topics that have attracted growing interest in the 

social sciences in general and urban anthropology in particular in recent years. Two of 

the chapters deal with security and insecurity from the perspective of technology and 

infrastructure. While one of them, penned by Carolina Frossard and Rivke Jaffe, 

examines technological security devices in Jamaica as “boundary objects” that both 

connect and blur relations between the state and the private sector in their efforts to 

create safe urban environments, the other chapter, by Mark Maguire and Réka 

Pétercsák, explores how an airport on the British Isles is perceived, conceived and 

lived by its security personnel, showing how counterterrorist policing practices are 

dependent on tacit knowledge and situational awareness rather than technological 

fixes to achieve policing objectives. The two remaining chapters in this section, by 

Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Anouk de Koning respectively, conceptualize 

(in)security in terms of senses of belonging, focusing on the everyday struggles of 

immigrant communities in towns in the Netherlands and Norway.  

 

With the rise of the Anthropocene and concerns around the world about 

environmental degradation and its effects, urban anthropology is particularly equipped 

to study how the urbanizing world are affecting and being affected by these forces. 

The authors in part four concentrate on the double-sidedness of urban sustainability. 

That is, how it on one side can create positive change while at the same time running 

the risk of enhancing social and environmental inequalities by excluding some from 

the benefits of sustainable urban solutions. Melissa Checker’s contribution, perhaps 

the most illuminating, investigates how sustainability initiatives in poor 

neighborhoods in New York City coincided with high-end real estate redevelopments 

which led to low-income communities and people of color being displaced from their 

homes. She argues that this type of “environmental gentrification” demonstrates how 

grassroots and state efforts for sustainability can produce contradictory outcomes and 



that sustainability can in fact act as a “legitimizing discourse that promised a more 

eco-friendly lifestyle and a more resilient future, but produced an uneven urban 

landscape” (p. 210).  

 

These topics raise important questions about social justice and urban citizenship and 

how local communities can claim their right to the city, which is the focus of part five. 

Through ethnographies from North and South America and Asia we learn about how 

American citizenship is racialized and manifested in urban environments, how the 

Lefebvrian notion of the “right to the city” is explored in connection to housing 

movements in Santiago, how a local community organization in Salvador struggles to 

achieve participation in the politics of urban development in their neighborhood, and 

how residents under threat of displacement in Ho Chi Minh City define their own 

notions of social justice by using capitalist understandings of the market, which 

challenged what the researcher described as his own preconceived Marxist 

conceptualizations.  

 

The explorations into the right to the city smoothly transition the reader into the next 

two parts of the book, which examines the topics of built environment and spatial 

governance, and financialization and privatization, respectively. In the first one, the 

authors examine how the built environment can function as a driver of change, a site 

for the creation (or destruction) of symbolic meaning, and a mechanism for the 

powerful to order and control people’s lives through the purposeful partitioning of 

space to the benefit of certain groups in favor of others. The long-standing urban 

anthropological interest in the sociality of money is expressed in the next part of the 

book where processes of financialization and privatization are studied in relation to 

urban neoliberal (re)development and its variegated impacts on everyday life.  

 

The volume’s eight and final section takes up the pertinent questions of heritage 

preservation and the rise of new cultural expressions in cities, which actively 

challenge the profit-driven urban logic of elites, financial institutions and greedy 

corporations. The anthology thus closes in a rather positive vein where the reader gets 

to learn about how ordinary people defy and resist the privatization, commodification 

and ‘redevelopment’ of cities with the not uncommon result of forced population 

resettlements and displacements. The chapter by Aseel Sawalha is a pertinent example 



in which the author explores how the rise of the art scene in East Beirut has 

influenced its urban landscape and how residents experience the city. Through the 

development of art galleries and cafés, Sawalha reveals that women, as key agents of 

change, drove the increased public interest not only in art but also in the preservation 

of historic buildings in a derelict neighborhood, which, importantly, did not result in 

the displacement of local residents, as perhaps would be expected by mainstream 

gentrification theory. These mostly middle-and upper-class women also managed to 

increase the general presence of women in public spaces since most of the gallery 

owners, staff and customers of arts and crafts turned out to be women.  

 

This over 500-page brick of a book provides deeply insightful and accessible reading 

to academic and non-academic publics alike. Although editor Setha Low manages the 

not so easy task of bringing together rich ethnographies from regions around the 

world, the volume is still heavy on research centered on North America and Europe. 

With the exception of Asia, which indeed is well represented, ethnographies from the 

Middle East and Africa are sparse. Non-western scholars are also under-represented. 

Nevertheless, the book’s central aim is achieved; to push for a more politically 

engaged urban anthropology that seeks to be useful to the communities with which 

anthropologists work. All in all, the anthology is an invaluable resource for anyone 

concerned with the challenges faced by the cities of today and the future.  

 

Samir Shalabi is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. His 

doctoral research examines neighborhood place attachment, social status, and 

embodied practices of masculinity among rooftop pigeon flyers in Alexandria, Egypt.  

 

 

    © 2019 Samir Shalabi 

 


