Urban Ethnography
raphy provides knowledge that frequently
WALTER IMILAN
Universidad Central de Chile, Chile
FRANCISCA MARQUEZ
Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile
INTRODUCTION
Ethnography is a research method that
involves a series of qualitative techniques
of social investigation. At its core are
fieldwork research and participant obser-
vation. Ethnography has played an important
role in urban research by helping to reveal the
different social groups that inhabit the city as
well as the ways in which diversity achieves
organization and claims its rights to the city.
Ethnography has a history that extends back
at least a hundred years, although it was not
until recent decades that its practice extended
beyond the one discipline that has cultivated
it in a more systematic manner: anthropol-
ogy. A series of epistemological changes and
innovations have increased the relevance of
this research practice, adapting it to a more
efficient application in a broader diversity
of disciplines and research problems. In
fact, the growing importance of subjective
perspectives in the comprehension of social
phenomena, the emergence of multicul-
turalism and hyper-diversity in numerous
contemporary societies, and the increasing
influence of postcolonial tendencies of criti-
cal thought, among other factors, have laid a
foundation upon which ethnography operates
as a powerful source for empirical work and
theoretical formulation due to its ability to
reveal the meanings constructed by subjects
in the worlds that they inhabit. Understand-
ing the world “from below” or “from the
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0500
native’s point of view” (Geertz 1985), ethnog-
contradicts general and universal interpre-
tations, shedding light on the particularities
and local configurations of social phenomena
and bringing subjects to the fore through
their practices and discourses.
Ethnography requires a high degree of
engagement from investigators and is consid-
ered by many to be a craft, a discipline that
develops through the practice of observation
and conversation. The investigator schools his
or her own body to be able to perceive rela-
tionships through observation and listening
as well as through the dispositions of body
language. Due to the central role played by
the researcher in making an ethnography, an
ability to reflect is crucial to the production
of ethnographic knowledge.
Ethnography originates within anthro-
pological studies of the late nineteenth
century in the context of research on soci-
eties colonized by European empires and
the United States. The absence of statistical
information required to characterize these
societies led to the use of techniques that
included direct contact with the studied sub-
jects with the goal of learning their language
and understanding the motivations and
meaning structures guiding their practices.
Thus, as an intensive process of commu-
nication with research subjects, fieldwork
took on a central role. To understand “other”
(non-Western) societies would only be pos-
sible by achieving empathy, which would
require not only “listening” to members of
those societies but also “doing” what they do;
hence, the researcher would be in the position
of “putting himself [sic] in the other’s place”
and would ultimately understand the world
the way the “other” does. To achieve this, it
2 URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY
was thought that the researcher must spend
long periods of time with the studied society,
first winning the trust of its members in an
effort to integrate him- or herself into the
continuum of their daily lives. Thus, partici-
pant observation became the main resource
in fieldwork. The work of Malinowski (1932)
on the Trobriand Islands during the period
between the two world wars is considered
the foundational moment of ethnography
as a scientific research method. The use of
long-term fieldwork, shared living with stud-
ied societies, and participant observation as
the main tools are some of the characteristics
that strengthen ethnography as a method of
social analysis.
Ethnography manuals devote long pas-
sages to discussing the various research
activities that participant observation entails.
Nevertheless, this group of activities presents
a relatively low level of systematization, and
participating in many of the activities that
might reveal valuable information is outside
the researcher’s scope of control because
it is the host society that determines access
and the conditions for participant observa-
tion. Thus, the researcher’s ability to capture
and adequately comprehend the explicit and
implicit rules that enable participation is a
central quality of participant observation that
the researcher must develop as a craft through
their work. Additionally, fieldwork is usually
developed in contexts that the researcher can
only partially control. In consequence, the
success of participant observation depends
on abilities that are hardly objectifiable.
Ethnography as a method is not so much
a group of structured steps and applicable
techniques as a skill that the researcher must
cultivate through experience and time.
The developing of the ethnographic object
seen as a scientific construction – a prod-
uct of the theoretical-conceptual union and
the empirical experience of research – is
a constantly disputed field. Traditionally,
anthropology developed its object from
fieldwork as an ethnographic knowledge
source. Fieldwork is interpreted as an
empirical experience defined by “otherness”
or “alterity,” giving rise to the analogy
between the anthropologist and the trav-
eler or the anthropological experience and
the travel. Criticism of this travel experi-
ence and ethnographic authority began with
the postmodernist movement, which high-
lighted the implications of this metaphor in
the delimitation of both the object (some-
times exoticized) and the scientific nature of
anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986).
This perspective features fieldwork as a form
of writing, emphasizing the authorial devel-
opment of the text, the characterization of
the observer’s position, the visibility or trans-
parency of their subjectivity, the relationship
between the time of telling the story and
the native time in which the informants live.
Therefore, the nature of ethnography as a
representation of the Other is questioned,
and the representation is often perceived as
partial and dominant.
Critics of the postmodern perspective rein-
force the thought that fieldwork is not only
narrative but also experience and process.
The discussions of the ethnographic object lie
between the alterity approach as a historical
process, the “other” as a co-participant in a
scientific-dialogic process, and a perspective
that positions the researcher historically
and socially. The British anthropologist Tim
Ingold, who opposes the proliferation of the
use and application of ethnography outside
the field of anthropology, argues that the
foundation of ethnographic knowledge sur-
passes the single practice of participant obser-
vation – as the main tool of current qualitative
studies – because it implies the relationship
with others, “thus, knowledge co-produced
with informants is ethnographic” (2014, 391).
In a world of interconnectedness, an abso-
lute view is discarded in favor of developing

knowledge from the fragments, the margins,
and the interconnections between worlds. In
this culturally dislocated world, the urban
ethnographer attempts to self-orient in the
boundless city and to understand the condi-
tion of belonging to several places at the same
time. Thus, empirical experience is not the
only element in the ethnographic object pro-
duction: there is also the contribution from
the anthropologist and from the scientific
context.
The ethnographic description is not merely
a perceptive and linguistic activity with
culture as its object; it is also an activity
that transforms and reformulates itself con-
stantly in the presence of fieldwork. From
a specific point of view, to conduct ethno-
graphic research is to establish relationships,
select informants, transcribe texts, estab-
lish genealogies, trace area maps, and keep
a journal. However, the discipline is not
defined by these techniques, activities, and
methodological procedures. According to
Geertz (1985), what defines it is a certain type
of intellectual and interpretative effort around
unprecedented issues and the clarity provided
by the historical depth of social realities.
The use of ethnographic perspectives and
techniques in urban studies dates from the
Chicago School of sociology in the 1930s.
This urban ethnography background has been
reshaped recently in urban research. From
the study of marginal groups and “exotic”
phenomena in the city, urban ethnography
is currently relevant when formulating prob-
lems and theories of social life in the city.
Currently, urban ethnography designates a
methodological practice that focuses on the
spatial dimensions of developing society,
thus opening an interdisciplinary dialogue in
which anthropology, geography, architecture,
sociology, and other disciplines participate.
Indeed, the “spatial turn” of the social sci-
ences has promoted the field of ethnography
in urban studies.
URBAN ET HNO GRAPHY 3
The following sections of this entry address
the development of urban ethnography as
a research practice, tracing its development
from the branch of anthropology to its
reemergence and reformulation into today’s
interdisciplinary field of urban studies. We
focus on the theoretical potential of ethnog-
raphy and its epistemological and political
considerations in current social research.
URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY
AND ANTHROPOLOGY
In the wake of expanding urban space at the
beginning of the twentieth century, anthro-
pology was forced to reach beyond its tradi-
tion as a science directed toward the study
of non-Western peoples, giving way to an
urban anthropology devoted to the cultural
dimension of cities, including contemporary
and metropolitan cultures. Nonetheless,
anthropology only fully found its way into
urban studies in the first decades of the twen-
tieth century, in part due to concerns about
the rising sociocultural heterogeneity of cities
as well as the increase of segregation in con-
texts of inequality, the decline in the quality
of urban life, and the ecological disasters that
accompanied urban development.
The first ethnographies of the modern
city were undertaken by the researchers
of the Chicago School in their empirical
and theoretical work. They regarded the
city as an independent variable that was
characterized by its complexity, its large
scale and its population density and by het-
erogeneity, which determines conduct and
mentality, regrouping and separation, and
collaboration and competition. The work
of Park and Burgess (1925), alongside a set
of researchers, all of them men, in various
North American cities demonstrated how
ethnographic work can give an account of
urbanization and industrialization processes.
The massive waves of international migration
4 URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY
that arrived in Chicago in the first half of
the twentieth century became the favorite
object of study of the Chicago researchers.
This school developed a theory that describes
the organization of urban cultural diversity
in the United States. Its head, Robert E. Park,
was inspired by his experience as a research
journalist and by the work of Franz Boas
with indigenous peoples of North America.
In fact, in his essay The City, Park encouraged
his students and colleagues to establish direct
contact with the studied subjects, to walk and
wander about the new city neighborhoods
in a firsthand attempt to grasp their trans-
formations, and to pause and dwell in these
urban areas to observe how the dynamics of
daily life unfold. In this context, a series of
research projects was developed that focused
on collective and specific practices, such as
life in the Italian neighborhoods and in The
Street Corner Society by Whyte in 1943, the
lives of Jewish migrants (Wirth 1938), and
the study of solidarity networks among tem-
porary workers and hobos (Anderson 1923).
The Chicago School transferred research
methods from anthropological studies of
exotic, non-Western societies directly to
studies of the cities of the United States.
The resulting body of research achieved the
coherence proper to a “School”; it produced
ethnographic descriptions of a very defined
character, what Lindner (2004) calls the
“Chicago touch.” These descriptions were
characterized by the heavy application of
direct and detailed participant observation
and possessed the particular capability of
capturing differences, finding micro regular-
ities, and recognizing barely sketched rituals
and correspondences between things where
others could only identify confusion.
The ethnographic work of the Chicago
School emphasized the city’s diversity, criti-
cizing attempts to homogenize and to create
generalizations. Thus, ethnography was
expected to make ethnic, age, and gender
heterogeneity and the different manners of
the inhabitants of large urban areas under-
standable. The legacy of the Chicago School
prevailed for many decades during the devel-
opment of urban ethnography in the United
States as well as in Latin America and Europe.
The category of urban anthropology that
emerged in the United States of America
following the Chicago School, between the
1940s and the 1950s, defined itself as an
anthropology “in” the city. In other words,
it defined itself as an approach that recovers
traditional research notions such as family
and kinship, local groups and neighbor-
hoods, and traditions and rituals and applies
them in an urban context. Nevertheless, the
resulting ethnographies were useful not only
in studying the city but also in describing
the adaptation processes of newcomers and
how they were received by the urban host
society. This was one of the main innovations
of the school; despite a certain degree of the-
oretical ingenuity, it was able to treat urban
phenomena in themselves as study objects.
Anthropologies of marginality or “culture of
poverty” correlate with this approach. In fact,
in this case, ethnography focuses on stories
of migration and adaptation in the form of
life and family stories that give accounts of
these processes. Published in 1945, Black
Metropolis by Drake and Cayton remains a
landmark study of race and urban life; based
on a large body of research, it is an histor-
ical and sociological account of the people
of Chicago’s South Side, the classic urban
ghetto. Drake and Cayton’s findings not only
offer a generalized analysis of black migra-
tion, settlement, community structure, and
black–white race relations in the early part of
the twentieth century but also tell us what has
changed in the last hundred years and what
has not. One of the pioneering works of the
1950s, Family and Kinship in East London by
Young and Wilmott, a study of family life in
the East End of London based on extensive

interviews and case studies, examines the
consequences of moving families from urban
to suburban public housing.
For an outsider, the prospect of blending
into the fabric of an urban African American
ghetto might be intimidating. However, for
a Scandinavian scholar, the idea of getting
to know one of Washington DC’s toughest
neighborhoods from the inside during the
racially tense period of the late 1960s could
well have seemed impossible. Conducting
fieldwork in and around Winston Street, Ulf
Hannerz did just that. Soulside, published in
1969, details the everyday lives of the ghetto
inhabitants he observed and interacted with
during this period, revealing their beliefs
and expectations and the diversity of their
lifestyles. The book helped dispel many false
impressions of ghetto life and questioned the
idea of a “culture of poverty,” which held that
the poor had chosen to lead the lives they do.
Years later, in 1974, Carol Stack published
All Our Kin. This book is the chronicle of a
young white woman’s sojourn into The Flats,
an African American ghetto community, to
study the support system family and friends
form when coping with poverty. Eschewing
the traditional method of entry into the com-
munity used by anthropologists – through
authority figures and community lead-
ers – she approached the families herself by
way of an acquaintance from school. The
result was a landmark study that debunked
the misconception that poor families are
unstable and disorganized. On the contrary,
her study showed that families in The Flats
adapted to poverty by forming large, resilient,
lifelong support networks based on friend-
ship and family that were very powerful and
highly structured.
An anthropology “of” the city emerged
later, also in the United States. In this view,
the city was no longer considered a backdrop
of social micro realities; instead, it became
central as a spatial and social reality that
URBAN ET HNO GRAPHY 5
generates behaviors or is constituted by
them. Subsequently, no city was seen as an
isolated reality circumscribed within its own
walls. Whereas in the United States urban
anthropology and ethnology arose due to the
growth of the big metropolis, in Great Britain
they are the consequence of colonialism.
Nonetheless, an important antecedent was
provided by journalists and social reformers
who described cities such as London and
their industrial transformation in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Among them,
Henry Mayhew, one of the first chroniclers of
the industrial city, comes to the fore. Based
on interviews and firsthand observations,
he described the diverse social groups that
inhabited the poor and marginalized districts
of the British empire’s capital. His work
is currently recognized as a fundamental
part of the description of the Victorian era.
Additionally, his methodological innova-
tions based on fieldwork gave “a face and a
voice” to urban inhabitants who had been
excluded from industrial and imperial British
development (Humpherys 1977).
The research work of the Rhodes–
Livingstone Institute in Lusaka (Zambia),
established in 1938, and of the East African
Institute of Social Research of Kampala,
which was dependent on the Ministry of
British Colonies and was known as the
Manchester School, played a fundamental
role in initiating the debate on the concept of
urban ethnicity. That body of work focuses
on immigration and population of the cities
under colonial rule by rural farmers of tribal
African origin. The question guiding these
studies is related to the formation of an
urban society by African migrants, their
integration processes, and the acquisition
of modern and industrial forms of social
organization. Abner Cohen developed the
concept of urban ethnicity as a theoretical
synthesis of this school, discussing the per-
manence and transformation of the cultures
6 URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY
of origin of migrants in urban contexts. The
researchers of this school developed a series
of innovations for ethnographic production.
One such innovation is situational analysis,
which is based on the description of a dense
social situation and represents a synthe-
sis of a structure of roles, hierarchies, and
meanings that are performed publicly. The
ethnographies The Kalela Dance by Mitchell,
published in 1956, and Analysis of a Situation
in Modern Zululand, published in 1958 by
Gluckman, are perhaps the most prominent
works in this synthesis. This type of work is
related to Erving Goffman’s thoughts about
the theatrical performance of social life. He
proposes observing everyday life as a per-
manent performance of personal and social
identities. Although the Manchester School
pays attention to non-everyday events, it
shares Goffman’s idea of describing practices
as if they were performances. In terms of writ-
ing, this methodological strategy expresses
itself in the description of specific events
that are structured around a beginning, a
development, and an end and that include
diverse actors who interact symbolically.
Among the currents in British ethno-
graphic studies, we also find cultural studies,
the study of the cultural production processes
of subaltern classes in industrial and postin-
dustrial societies. Some of the first studies in
this field were conducted by Hoggart (1957)),
who devoted his career to analyzing the pro-
cesses and effects of literacy on the English
working class. The studies of Raymond
Williams and of the Birmingham group were
fundamental in providing a deeper view of
these issues. Their general point of view has
an English Marxist character and focuses
on analyzing the role of culture in social
relationships that are considered conflictive.
The role of domination and exploitation
in relationships is problematized through
ethnographies that are “realist, sensible to the
problems of cultural meaning, while at the
same time based on the analysis of everyday
life in a Marxist perspective about capitalist
political economies” (Marcus 1986, 170).
This ethnography has proved to be a partic-
ularly adequate instrument for urban studies
because contemporary popular culture finds
its dwelling space within cities.
French anthropology, marked by Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, turned its back
on the study of Western, modern, and
urban societies. For Lévi-Strauss, only “cold”
non-Western societies enable the researcher
to discover the elemental and founding struc-
tures of human life. Nevertheless, in France,
anthropology not only studies the cities of
complex societies but also the complexity of
simple societies. George Balandier, whose
Marxist reference framework makes it possi-
ble to see African realities in a perspective that
is new to traditional French ethnology, has
made a significant contribution. Balandier
revealed the “history of the peoples without a
history” in works that question the stereotype
of Africa as a continent of villages. Based on
the postcolonial concept, the French anthro-
pologist defines the general situation of Africa
and analyzes the way in which local condi-
tions need to be understood on a continental
scale. Balandier, as well as Chombart de
Lauwe, prepared the terrain for urban anthro-
pology and ethnography. These researchers
became the precedents for the French anthro-
pologist Gérard Althabe and his studies of
the city. Althabe (Althabe et al. 1983) refuses
to view the portion of a city being researched
as autonomous, and he proposes studying
the work of the imaginaries that take place
in those who inhabit the city: recomposi-
tion, appropriation, and use of the city. His
work allows the anthropologist to relate to
inhabitants as actors of practices and thus to
comprehend the sense of their positions.
Latin American anthropology and ethno-
graphy are built on different foundations
and respond to a different logic than their

European and North American counterparts.
Latin American societies were not metropoli-
tan, and they did not exercise colonial rule
over others; doing so might have in conse-
quence required some type of ethnography.
In the cases of Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and
Chile, anthropology had to survive in per-
manent confrontation with the state and
long-term dictatorships. An urban field of
studies emerged in the 1950s in a rather
unsystematic development.
In Mexico, unlike other Latin American
countries, anthropology had its origin as
a discipline that participated in public dis-
cussion and demanded the incorporation
of indigenous peoples into national society.
Despite the early influence of the Chicago
School through Robert Redfield and Oscar
Lewis, who conducted monographic studies
in Mexico, urban anthropology and ethnog-
raphy did not establish themselves there until
the 1980s. The Children of Sanchez by Lewis,
originally published in 1961, is a fundamental
work of Latin American urban ethnography.
This brilliant work, which is written in the
form of a family biography, narrates the daily
life of a poor family in a Mexican slum in a
manner that goes beyond the picturesqueness
of poverty and postrevolutionary Mexican
modernity. The book and its author were
rejected by the notion of a poverty subcul-
ture that featured daily violence and abusive
patriarchal relationships.
Both in Brazil and in Mexico, anthropology
has emphasized a focus “in” the city rather
than “of” the city. Mexican anthropologists
who engaged in the study of cities at an early
stage (between the 1940s and the 1960s)
worked with the notions of life’s material
conditions as a result of industrialization
and later considered social networks and
survival strategies, informal settlements,
and social movements. The ethnographies
of urban popular movements that con-
fronted state administrations claiming land
URBAN ET HNO GRAPHY 7
and urban services were especially relevant,
giving way to land encroachment and to the
construction of housing in villas miseria,
favelas, and other types of informal settle-
ments throughout Latin America. The work
of Matos Mar, Las barriadas de Lima [Lima’s
Slums] (1957/1977), is fundamental to under-
standing the processes of metropolitanization
of Latin American cities during the twen-
tieth century, as a consequence of massive
migration from rural areas to the city. Latin
American studies were part of an academic
activity that was committed to the social and
political transformations of the era.
The question of the ghetto in American
ethnographic studies holds its importance
today by incorporating new complexities. In
1990 Elijah Anderson, in Streetwise: Race,
Class, and Change in an Urban Community,
explores the dilemma of both blacks and
whites, the underclass and the middle class,
caught up in the new struggle not only for
common ground – prime real estate in a
racially changing neighborhood – but for
shared moral community. Blacks and whites
from a variety of backgrounds speak candidly
about their lives, their differences, and their
battle for viable communities. Mary Pattillo’s
Black Picket Fences explores an American
demographic group that is too often ignored
by both scholars and the media: the black
middle class. In the same decade, Katherine
Newman (1999) gives voice to a population
for whom work, family, and self-esteem are
top priorities despite all the factors that make
earning a living next to impossible, such
as minimum wage, lack of childcare and
healthcare, and a desperate shortage of even
low-paying jobs.
The book In Search of Respect: Selling
Crack in El Barrio by Bourgois is a powerful,
detailed, and eye-opening description of
inner city poverty, racism, and class segrega-
tion in New York. Through an investigation
of the life stories and living conditions of a
8 URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY
group of second generation migrants living
in East Harlem’s El Barrio, the author argues
that the economic and social difficulties faced
by these individuals are the results not only of
their actions but also of a larger set of events
and of the structural framework of which they
are a part. The author sets the stage of this
ethnographic research from the microsystem
of a crack house, a depressed neighborhood,
crack-addicted men, pregnant girls, and sin-
gle mothers up to the larger macrosystem of
colonialism and institutional racism.
A few years later, in 2008, Loïc Wacquant
published Urban Outcasts, a major work
on marginality and the city based on
his acclaimed ethnography Body & Soul:
Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. The book
demonstrates that most of the problems in
marginalized districts have to be understood
in the context of protests against ethnoracial
discrimination, stigmatization, and social
inequality related to unemployment and
flexibilization of the labor market. The work
stresses the major importance of the impact
of state interventions at the local city and
neighborhood levels while embedding this in
historic transformations.
Similarly, but considering environmental
conditions in Latin America, Auyero and
Swistun (2009) explored the lived experi-
ences of persons exposed to environmental
suffering based on archival research and
on two and a half years of collaborative
ethnographic fieldwork. With luminous and
vivid descriptions of everyday life in the
neighborhood of an Argentine shantytown,
Auyero and Swistun depict this ongoing
slow-motion human and environmental dis-
aster and dissect the manifold ways in which
it is experienced by residents. Likewise, in
2011, Carmán, in Las trampas de la natu-
raleza, assumes the challenge of identifying
how the environment and nature act today
as a mask of socio-urban segregation in
Buenos Aires. After years of fieldwork, the
author creates a counterpoint between cases
of occupied public land and the walled cities
arranged in the heart of the city: the enclosed
neighborhoods. Likewise, City of Walls by
Caldeira demonstrates processes of violence
and the creation of subjectivities related to
residential spatial segregation and labor and
leisure activities. The relationship between
violence, fear, and ways of living in the city is
described and analyzed for São Paulo; how-
ever, the ability of the results to be adapted to
a diversity of South American cities as well as
other cities suggests that this way of living is
common to millions of urbanites worldwide
at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
These works renew classic themes of urban
studies such as segregation and sociospatial
inequality through narratives that pro-
duce dialogues between phenomena on a
neighborhood scale and everyday life with
the economic and political structures of
contemporary cities.
The most radical sociospatial transforma-
tions of the last decades occurred in countries
of Africa and Asia and were caused by accel-
erated urbanization processes. The widely
disseminated work of De Boeck and Plissart,
Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, synthe-
sizes the challenges of urban ethnography in
African countries from a postcolonial per-
spective. The authors encourage overcoming
the Western dichotomous thinking in urban
studies that is expressed by the opposition
between modernity and tradition, center and
periphery, rural and urban, or formal and
informal. In African countries, distinctions
between urban and rural or between formal
and informal tend to blur or lose meaning
in the daily practices of the inhabitants.
Likewise, the idea that cities are the cen-
ters of modernity while rural areas are the
stronghold of tradition must be redesigned
based on the ethnographic evidence.
In South Asia, ethnographic work has
made it possible to design new analytical

perspectives for cities that have been con-
sciously made or remade through the lens
of imperial modernity and postcolonial
nation-building. Thus, a dimension that
grows in perspective is the democratization
process in urban spaces, exemplified by the
cities in India in which lower caste com-
munities, provincial migrants to regional
capitals, and religious minorities are chal-
lenging the middle-class hegemony on how
South Asian cities function; this process is
especially apparent in how public spaces are
designed and disputed. While it is impossible
to characterize urban realities as numerous
and extensive as African or Asian cities using
a single label, the value of these works lies in
reflecting on “other” ways of producing and
inhabiting the city as created locations out-
side the conceptual norms of Global North
models. The ethnographic practice in these
regions of the world reshapes the understand-
ing of cities either by the recent urbanization
as a form of ethnographic reflection in itself,
as occurred in China (Xin 2002), or by read-
ings that differ from the colonial hegemony
explaining the cities of the Global South
during the twentieth century.
CONCEPTS AND NEW URBAN
ETHNOGRAPHY FIELDS
The city as a mosaic. The city is conceptual-
ized as a mosaic of cultures and subcultures
that exists within a determined space in rela-
tively closed sociospatial units. This idea was
originally developed by the Chicago School.
The value of this idea lies in its ability to
reveal the diverse ways of life within the city;
it observes that subjects produce relatively
homogeneous communities based on their
cultures of origin or on specific practices.
Ethnographers describe communities in
the city as if they were rural villages; thus,
“cultures” are situated within the city. This
ethnographic strategy of tackling territories
URBAN ET HNO GRAPHY 9
that are circumscribed by spaces that can
be situated and clearly delimited within the
city, be they neighborhoods or districts,
has become a sort of ethnographic trend in
urban studies. Its limitations are commonly
linked to a critique of isomorphism among
space, society, and culture as pertaining to
traditional anthropology.
Culturalism. Urban inhabitants are ob-
served and analyzed based on the strategies
they employ to adapt to urban life. Their inte-
gration processes are linked to the conditions
of the direct reference group, while the agency
of subjects or the structural conditions that
shape economic and power relations in the
city and general society play a marginal role
in the ethnographies of the Chicago School.
Most of the descriptions are of a culturalist
type and are isolated from political urban
processes. These ethnographies pursue the
fascination of the exotic within the city, a
feature that is most commonly found among
marginal subcultures.
In the late 1980s, Latin America experi-
enced a so-called theoretical crisis of research
concerning “urban-popular phenomena”
and consequently the loss of importance
of sociological approaches to the political
urbanization economy that had been inspired
by both French and Spanish sociology. As a
result, since the early 1990s, the paradigm of
the cultural has been reintroduced into urban
studies. This shift toward cultural aspects is
occurring throughout Latin America and
coincides with the abandonment of Marxist
analysis and the reinterpretation of cultural
anthropology. It also coincides with the emer-
gence of symbolic currents and the postmod-
ern expansion of anthropology. In a certain
sense, there is a return to an ethnographic
perspective closely related to the Chicago
School – the recovery of its legacy – by
approaching subculture and production of
meaning through fieldwork. Additionally,
insofar as there was a loss of interest in social
10 URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY
movements and popular culture, more atten-
tion was given to the dimensions of cultural
consumption and citizenship. In this field,
urban ethnography reflects the Latin Ameri-
can essayist culture that addresses the nature
of the concept of nation and the debate about
tradition and modernity.
Urban imaginaries. From this viewpoint, a
group of anthropologists use concepts taken
from the field of new technologies as ways
to generate new practices and urban imag-
inaries. As imaging systems and referenced
symbolic representations within the space of
the city, urban imaginaries constitute a recent
study subject in ethnography and urban
anthropology. In many of these cases, the
concept “urban” has been redeveloped as a
metaphor for culture. Here we find the ethno-
graphic studies of Da Matta in Brazil, which
place the house in complementary opposition
to the street. The city is the privileged space of
modernity and of the contradictory processes
of societies in which center and periphery,
social system and individuals, classes and
citizens coexist; the city thus becomes the
metaphor of culture.
Ethnography broadens the object of urban
study but also challenges research about
cities by posing new questions. Is it possible
to encompass in only one concept (urban
culture) the diverse manifestations generated
by the city? Is there a unified and distinctive
phenomenon of urban space even in areas
as complex and heterogeneous as New York,
Beijing, or Mexico City, or is it preferable to
speak of various types of culture within a city?
In the search for answers to these ques-
tions, the anthropology of cities differs from
all other social sciences in the specificity with
which it obtains data through direct contact
with small groups of people. In this sense,
ethnographers allow the city to “express
itself” through their in-depth observations
and interviews and their way of being with
people and by attempting to “listen” to what
the city “has to say,” not by defending the
autonomy of neighborhoods or “communi-
ties” in the city but by transcending local
communities in an attempt to understand
the cities and their place in transnational
networks. This is the only way in which
ethnography can illuminate the new modal-
ities of multiculturality and interculturality
that take place in urban exchanges. What
best distinguishes anthropologists is their
long-standing concern for the discipline of
the Other and the Others.
Nonetheless, we cannot fail to recognize
that the “urban,” the construction of those
“urbanites” – in reference to the agents of the
urban – is permeated by permanent move-
ment, a never-ending transit that conceals
where people come from and where they go,
what they do with their time and what their
professions are. The identity of urbanites
becomes more difficult to grasp because the
classic categories that would allow them to
be pinned down in time and space have been
blurred. Categories such as poblador (inhabi-
tant), worker, or artisan have lost their force,
making way for the figure of the “passer-by
in permanent movement.” Most importantly,
anthropology and ethnology have integrated
the concept of culture into each of these
views of the city, highlighting its internal
logic – for example, in the relationship to the
territory built within the city, to values and
behaviors, and to the transmission of their
identities. This view enables the revelation of
the internal aspects of social groups and their
inscription in society without excluding the
contradictions, conflicts, and relationships of
power and domination.
In recent years, a type of ethnography
that is based on the individual’s experience
has undergone a remarkable development.
The concept of experience based on a phe-
nomenological perspective pays attention to
the meanings and perceptions of individu-
als that result from both discourse and the

senses. This perspective attempts to reveal
both the discourses that mediate daily life and
the sensitive dimension that accompanies it:
experience is embodied.
This type of ethnography highlights the
practices of individuals, regarding them as
performances; by carrying out their practices,
individuals are active agents in the produc-
tion of space, while simultaneously their
selves are generated from their practices.
The theoretical work of the geographer Nigel
Thrift and his notion of nonrepresentational
theory, which proposes exploring emotions
and the visceral as sources for understanding
the formation of vivid spaces, has had a
significant influence.
An interesting field of development of
these perspectives is provided by the mobility
studies inspired by the “mobility turn.” There
is a particularly intense debate surrounding
methodological innovation based on ethno-
graphic research. The field of mobility studies
has stimulated descriptions that attempt to
articulate meaning, memory, and emotion
together with infrastructures, materiality,
and institutional policy as a dense group of
human and nonhuman elements that interact
in the production of space. To this purpose,
an intense methodological innovation is rein-
forced, and strategies that enable researchers
to “be” or to “see” with mobile research
subjects are explored. In these studies, the
ethnographer accompanies the study partici-
pants throughout their daily journeys, using a
series of techniques to capture the discursive
and sensitive dimensions involved in their
practices. The use of photography, sound,
and other tools gains momentum in the
construction of multisensory descriptions.
These studies have sparked an intense debate
on how to organize urban fieldwork in a way
that departs from the anthropological tradi-
tion of long co-residences with the groups
that participate in the research; in the new
approach, the ethnographic encounter with
URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY 11
the participants of the research is constrained
in both time and space and reduced to very
limited practices.
A specific line of research in mobil-
ity studies promoted by the work of Tim
Ingold on the perception of the environment
through movement practices has been termed
“walking ethnographies.” This specific field
radicalizes the notion of performance sus-
tained by autoethnography as a means of
exploring the more sensitive dimensions
of space. The ethnographer and his own
walking experience are the central mecha-
nisms through which the characteristics of
space are revealed.
Home studies represent another field
of research that has been influenced by
experience-based ethnographies. Tradi-
tionally linked to history and literature,
ethnography has begun to play a larger role in
the description of home-building processes,
which are understood as a web of meanings,
emotions, memory practices, and materiali-
ties. This field is grounded in two approaches:
gender perspectives that are concerned with
the production of domestic space, and the
work of anthropologists such as Daniel Miller
on material culture. According to this per-
spective, the construction and remodeling
of homes, decorative objects, utensils, and
other artifacts play an important role; these
items possess agency in the production of
domestic space and the ways of inhabiting
it. Home ethnographies also use a series of
techniques to construct field information
linked to architecture and design as well as
photographs and other elements related to
visceral communication.
These different applications of the concept
of experience and its operability through
the notion of performance have renewed
urban research by emphasizing a space built
by practices, the agency of the subjects in
these processes, and the complementarity
of discourse and emotions. Although the
12 URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY
application of these types of ethnographies
is not exclusively in the urban realm, urban
studies is probably the area in which they
have reached their peak development.
Migration studies have experienced accel-
erated growth in recent years. Although
this is a diverse field, an important part of
its production remains focused on urban
spaces. In fact, migrant populations and their
integration processes have been a subject
of ethnographic interest for decades, espe-
cially in the United States of America and
in Europe.
The development of a transnational per-
spective in migration studies has shifted
emphasis toward the interconnection
between the spaces of “those who left and
those who stayed.” This notion of inter-
connection has been accompanied by the
development of multisited ethnography
(Marcus 1986) that encourages the investiga-
tor to “follow” objects, people, and metaphors
as well as other elements that are put into
movement through migration. These theoret-
ical and methodological perspectives, which
have been criticized due to their challenge
to classic notions of fieldwork, enable an
expansion of the locations of ethnographic
observation and make it possible to search
for connections between places that come to
existence through daily life. Although the exe-
cution of multisited ethnography is complex,
it results in an interesting research challenge.
Nonetheless, its use articulates the concepts
of local, translocal, and global in innovative
ways, assigning a broader perspective to the
encounters that take place in the city and the
practices and discourses that emerge from
daily life. Shanshan (2017) explores the inter-
connections between Nigerian migrants from
Lagos in the Chinese province of Guangzhou
and their place-making in the context of
interethnic relationships. Similarly, the work
of Miraftab (2016) investigates populations
from Detroit, Mexico and Togo in a small
town in the Midwestern United States that
reconfigures itself through the meeting of
populations in which people from very
diverse places converge. The impossibility
of locating cultural practices in the per-
spective of populations in movement leads
to an understanding of the interrelations
between physically noncontinuous localities;
from this, a notion of what is global emerges
and consequently leads to the establish-
ment of relationships within the city that
are organized in a spatially dispersed mesh.
These types of reflections have given rise to
what have recently become known as global
ethnographies.
As we have seen, currently ethnography
is not exclusive to anthropology. Reflections
from within anthropology have made it pos-
sible for other research fields to appropriate
ethnographic practice. Numerous disciplines
and thematic fields have redefined their
debates based on the development of ethno-
graphic research. Urban studies have not
been excluded from this tendency but instead
have played a relevant role in the emergence
of a new field of research. The proliferation
of urban ethnography laboratories and net-
works, which are frequently configured as
multidisciplinary work networks, in many
universities of the Global North and South
evidence the increasing relevance of ethnog-
raphy. Thus, in combination with statistical
and spatial methods and analyses, ethnogra-
phy has become part of research projects that
apply multiple methods.
In contrast to anthropologists’ preoccu-
pation with the epistemological foundations
of ethnography, the practitioners of field-
work methods within sociology have been
formulating methodological guidelines for
the practice of participant observation and
developing various conceptualizations of
sociological fieldwork in the process. In
recent years, some of these metaethnographic
ruminations have fallen within two distinct

camps, “grounded theory” (GT) and the
“extended case method” (ECM). Whereas
GT hinges upon the ethno-narratives of
everyday life, ECM contests the narrative
character of the field. Instead, it seems to
subscribe to a more chronological view of
social life. In place of the ethno-narrative, the
world is ordered theoretically. The narrative
closure that eludes the empirical world is
provided by theories that order social life
and provide it with direction and moral
valence. GT originally emerged from Glaser
and Strauss’s ethnographic study of death
and dying in the San Francisco Bay area. The
study’s methodological principles were artic-
ulated in the polemical Discovery of Grounded
Theory. Whereas GT was developed within
American sociology, the ECM emerged from
the British School of anthropology. In an
initial attempt to improve upon prevailing
structural-functionalism theories that in real-
ity weakened this paradigm from within, the
Manchester School of anthropology intro-
duced the ECM and “situational analysis.”
In contrast to the normative societal order
predicted by structural-functional theorists
such as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown,
anthropological fieldworkers of the Manch-
ester School began to document and theorize
repeated instances of conflict at their Zam-
bian field sites.
URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY: AN
EXPANDING FIELD
Urban ethnography is expanding. Diverse
approaches, uses, and cross-disciplines have
reshaped ethnographic practice into a vibrant
field that is still fed by classic debates but at the
same time is open to challenges of innovation
that involve permanent transformation of
ways of living.
Ethnographic practice has established
lasting links with humanist geography in
its eagerness to capture the construction of
URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY 13
the senses of places from the experiences of
the human beings living there. More recent
trends in urban studies, such as the set of
perspectives observing urban phenomena
as assemblages between human and non-
human entities, have found in ethnography
their main means of producing empirical
knowledge.
The debates around “nonrepresentational”
theory have encouraged new disciplinary
crossovers, such as the case of architecture
and art working together with sociology
and geography in urban studies; all of these
new fields use intensively ethnographic
approaches. Urban ethnography, as we have
reviewed it in this entry, has contributed
from its beginnings not only to describing
“from the perspective of the inhabitants” the
experience of the urban, but also to defining
what is understood by “the urban.” This
quality of ethnography, as a method that
can produce the objects of study, transforms
it into a powerful tool not only to capture
field data, but above all, to rethink research
problems.
Special issues, conferences, and networks
reflect the increasing organization of this
area of study. One of the first special issues
on urban ethnography organized by geogra-
phers was edited by Peter Jackson in Progress
in Human Geography in 1985 (volume 9,
issue 2), noting the increasing interest in
qualitative tools, especially in participant
observation by geographers. Since then, com-
pilations have become specialized, like the
special issue of the journal Ethnography (vol-
ume 13, issue 1), edited by Ajay Gandhi and
Lotte Hoek, on urban ethnographies in South
Asia. In the last decade, the readers edited by
Ocejo, Ethnography and the City: Readings
on Doing Urban Fieldwork, and Duneier,
Kasinitz, and Murphy, The Urban Ethnogra-
phy Reader, collect classic and recent texts
that deliver a broad view of ethnographic
practices.
14 URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY
Some permanent networks and seminars can
be found at:
www.omicsonline.org/ethnography-journals-
conferences-list.php
www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/
Urban ethnography centers:
http://sites.utexas.edu/ethnolab/
www.gse.upenn.edu/cue
http://uep.yale.edu/
www.intzent.hu-berlin.de/en/gsz/internatio-
nales-en/urban-ethnography-lab/
urban-ethnographylab
https://cer.berkeley.edu/
http://nau.fflch.usp.br/
SEE ALSO: Barrio; Border Cities; Chicago
School; City of Culture; Migration and Urban
Flows; Neighborhood; Park, Robert; Rural
Migrant to the City; Urban Culture; Urban
Migration
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FURTHER READING
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trizada Santiago de Chile. Santiago: Ocho Libros.
URBAN ETHNO G RAPHY 15
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