Pasts Cast in Concrete and Steel? Infrastructure and the War in Ukraine
In May 2024, following a barrage of Russian missile attacks on power stations across Ukraine, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced […] The post Pasts Cast in Concrete and…
Tag: urbanism
Against making sense: Appreciating absurd roundabouts in Malaysian Borneo
In Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, I found a musical roundabout. Large loudspeakers turn this otherwise innocuous infrastructure into an absurdist mashup of techno…
Climate Preconstruction in Coastal Africa
The climate crisis is upon us. Extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and fires are increasingly wreaking havoc around the globe. Even in the cosseted…
Heresies and provocation. For a politics of urban justice
In search of urban heresies Wherever I glanced around Solomon’s office, I saw, plastered on the walls and spread over the desk, maps, reports, designs of buildings that…
AnthroKino
In November and December, Allies meet (online) to watch ethnographic films and discuss with their makers. We have a wonderful line up of movies that explore humanitarianism (The…
A knot in the throat, or that time a gangster died of appendicitis
Based on “Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)” by Zilberg Elana. I had spent the last…
The right to dignity: Housing struggles, city-making, and citizenship in urban Chile
How do poor people in the burgeoning cities of the Global South assert their right to housing and to the city? How do they constitute themselves, and demand…
Crooked Cats
This book is a rich cultural analysis of how people live with big cats in India in times of the Anthropocene and climate change. As people are increasingly…
A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic
Anyone who spends time in Mexico City will spend much of it in traffic. One of the most clogged cities in the world, residents will lose on average…
They eat our sweat
In They Eat Our Sweat, Daniel Agbiboa engages the road transport sector in Lagos, Nigeria, to reveal how corruption operates through a dialectical “double capture” of state and…
The 21st-century flaneur as a suspect?
Smith commits a crime is a tale of an everyday man trying to find his way – not in life, but – in space. This space looks essentially…
Bend like a Willow Tree
‘Watch out, we’ll catch every one of you!’ Hamza’s shrill voice echoed in the stairwell, and through the opening, he saw a swarm of children scattering to hide…
Captive to smell by Cristina A. Pop
The rise of Çatalhöyük is one of my favorite topics to cover in the Introduction to Anthropology course. Located in central Turkey, the proto-urban settlement was occupied for…
Urban Acupuncture Design Theory: Researching New Development Practices in South Africa
Sometimes it only takes a “spark,” a “simple, focused intervention,” a “single stroke of genius,” or “the single prick of a needle” to release the flows and create…
Don’t panic: the smart city is here!
Ding Wang, in her own words, ‘has a special interest in pursuing degrees whose names consist of two random words’ (specifically Tourism Management, Design Ethnography, and now Dig…
Anthropologists in Practice: An Interview with Janne Flisrand, Network Weaver and Owner of Flisrand Consulting
Anthropologists in Practice is an ongoing series of interviews featuring practicing anthropologists who work outside the academy. The goal of the series is to provide a source of…