Setha Low

• The Graduate Center, CUNY

This paper serves as an introduction to the December 2018 edition of The Journal of Public Space, and a reflection on the new importance of public space in international research, policy and practice. Nowhere is that more evident than in the New Urban Agenda, the ambitious new international agreement for the normative goals of urban development in...

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City provides a comprehensive study of current and future urban issues on a global and local scale. Premised on an ‘engaged’ approach to urban anthropology, the volume adopts a thematic approach that covers a wide range of modern urban issues, with a particular focus on those of high public interest. T...

Plazas are often important spatial representations of society and social hierarchy. The grid-plan plazas built in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean under the direction of the Spanish have been interpreted as architectural representations of colonial control and oppression. Underlying these interpretations is the tacit assumption that plaza-centered gri...

The impact of the security state is not only seen in the political and spatial restrictions on public space and the public sphere or inscribed in militarized national borders and cities, but also in the increasing penetration of the domestic and private realm of home. These securitization practices and how they work can be exposed through an ethnog...

This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developin...

Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are ta...

This article attempts to untangle two threads of the intellectual and political legacy of Neil Smith. The first concerns the work that Neil and I did together on the The Politics of Public Space (Low and Smith 2006, Routledge) on public space and the public sphere and then explains how our paths diverged. I elaborate some of the ways that the publi...

This chapter addresses the death and rebirth of urban anthropology in the 1990s and 2000s through the addition of spatial theories drawn from geography and a fuller understanding of the political economy of place. This transition, often referred to as the “spatial turn” or in this volume, “spatialities,” is discussed by tracing the methodology, his...

The People, Place, and Space Reader brings together the excerpted writings of scholars, designers, and activists from a variety of fields upon which we draw in our teaching and research to make sense of the makings and meanings of the world we inhabit. They help us to understand the relationships between people and the environment at all scales, an...

This article develops the concept of shoestring democracy as a way to characterize the resulting social relations of private governance structures embedded in two types of collective housing schemes found in New York City and the adjoining suburbs: gated condominium communities (gated condominiums) and market‐rate cooperative apartment complexes (c...

This paper examines the theories and methods involved in the study of the impact of private governance on residents in two distinct kinds of middle class housing schemes: gated community residents in New York and Texas living in single family attached and detached houses, and cooperative apartment dwellers in New York City. The studies employed a r...

I use the concept of “engaged anthropology” to frame a discussion of how “spatializing culture” uncovers systems of exclusion that are hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other methodological approaches. “Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology” is doubly meant: to claim more intellectual and professional space for engagement an...

As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U. S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within thi...

As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U.S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within this...

RESUMEN Este artículo ofrece una mirada sobre las contradicciones que se suscitan entre los propósitos artístico-representacionales (muchas veces idealizados) que guían la renovación de una plaza urbana, y su base política y económica. Echar luz sobre estas contradicciones contribuye a desmitifi car y visibilizar el carácter ideológico (y no neutra...

In this article I explore how an integrated approach to the anthropological study of urban space would work ethnographically. I discuss four areas of spatial/cultural analysis—historical emergence, sociopolitical and economic structuring, patterns of social use, and experiential meanings—as a means of working out of the methodological implications...

This paper examines the healing cults of two Latin American doctors—Dr. Moreno Cañas of Costa Rica and Dr. José Gregorio Hernandez—through a symbolic analysis of the doctors' life histories, the creation of myths about their lives, and the process of cult formation and transformation. The symbolic images of the two doctors are compared based on the...

This article links two ways of maintaining whiteness and white privilege employed by gated communities residents in the surrounding suburbs of New York City and San Antonio, Texas. The first, the fear of others, is well documented in the anthropological literature but not as a strategy for maintaining whiteness in the built environment, while the s...

This article takes a first step in linking anthropological analyses of the body in space (embodied space), the global/local power relations embedded in space (transnational/translocal space), the role of language and discourse in the transformation of space into place (meaning), and the material and metaphorical importance of architecture and urban...

IntroductionDefinitions and Literature ReviewGated Communities in the USCollectivism and Neighborhood Enclosure in Urban ChinaConclusions and DiscussionReferences

Research on the fortification of residential environments and the spatial production of “security” within gated communities has lead to a broader understanding of how everyday emotions are being transformed by post 9/11 measures and terror talk. A new structure of feeling is infiltrating the most private of spatial domains, that of home, and furthe...

The privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing, redesign, and policing of public parks and plazas, the development of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that monitor and control local streets and parks, and the transfer of public air rights for the building of corporate plazas ostensibly open to the public. In the su...

The World Trade Center site allows anthropologists and educators to reflect on the relationship of public space to culture, and to consider the symbolic importance of this site for imagining the public culture of the future. Public spaces in the city have the potential of being places of learning and democratic practice, but the trend toward increa...

This chapter uncovers some of the underlying motivations of moving into a residential gated community by exploring how the discourse of fear of violence and crime and the search for a secure community legitimates and rationalizes class-based exclusion strategies and residential segregation embodied in the walls, gates, guards, and surveillance tech...

This paper employs a cross-cultural analysis to explore regional and national variations in residential gating and enclosure as a first step in developing an integrated theory of urban fragmentation. Utilizing data from the urban and suburban United States, Latin America and China, a series of dimensions are compared: 1) domestic architecture, 2) u...

Urban parks such as New York City's Central Park provide vital public spaces where city dwellers of all races and classes can mingle safely while enjoying a variety of recreations. By coming together in these relaxed settings, different groups become comfortable with each other, thereby strengthening their communities and the democratic fabric of s...

El espacio público está desapareciendo rápidamente, por causa de los procesos de globalización y privatización y también por las nuevas formas de control social; incluso las plazas, espacios cívicos de las ciudades latinoamericanas, están siendo cerradas, rediseñadas y reglamentadas en formas que restringen sus usos sociales y políticos tradicional...

The authors report on an ethnographic study of Battery Park City in summer 2002, less than 1 year after 9/11. They sought to understand the impact of the disaster on this affluent residential enclave across the street from Ground Zero. The research team used rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (REAP), a productive yet relatively inexpensive ra...

An inherent tension exists between the meanings of the World Trade Center site created by dominant political and economic players and the significance of the space for those who actually live near it. Most of the writing on and analysis of the site have focused on the construction of a memorial space for an imagined national and global community of...

which we live and work, but the appeal is not limited to examples from our own familiar surroundings. During the last several decades anthropologists have been increasingly joined by others in taking a more careful look at the built environments of nonl iterate societies, and especially the shelters they construct and occupy. The questions posed ar...

▪ Abstract This review considers the following questions: Why is the city undertheorized in anthropology? Why is an anthropological voice rarely heard in the urban studies and urban policy discourse? Anthropological literature published since 1989 is reviewed, with an emphasis on contributions to urban theory and the locating of anthropological stu...

Embodied space is the location where human experience and consciousness takes on material and spatial form. After identifying the inherent difficulties in defining the body, body space, and cultural explanations of body experience, the author traces the evolution of approaches to embodied space including proxemics, phenomenological understandings,...

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article provides clear evidence of how planning and design practices of historic preservation can disrupt a local community's sense of place attachment and disturb expressions of cultural identity for local, ethnic populations. New ethnic and immigrant groups can be excluded because of a lack of sensitivity to cultural barriers such as an inab...

This article presents a case study of the use of rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (REAP) to study an urban heritage park and its relationships with some of the cultural groups living in that city. The literature on REAP and rapid assessment, and on applied ethnographic research on parks, is surveyed. The context of the study is discussed at...

Across America, middle‐class and upper‐middle‐class gated communities are creating new forms of exclusion and residential segregation, exacerbating social cleavages that already exist (Blakely and Snyder 1997; Higley 1995; Lang and Danielson 1997; Marcuse 1997). While historically secured and gated communities were built in the United States to pro...

This article examines the microgeographies of everyday life in Parque Central and Plaza de la Cultura, two plazas located in the central city of San José, Costa Rica. These locales are created by the individual temporal and spatial attributes of plaza users whose daily movements and activities define these spaces. The growing differences of these l...

Over 100 horizontal laterals averaging 4,600 feet in length have been drilled in a shallow, heavy oil reservoir in Eastern Venezuela. Measurement While Drilling (MWD) continuous directional measurements and Logging While Drilling (LWD) azimuthal measurements are used to steer the wells through the reservoir, along a specific well path chosen from v...

More than 50 horizontal laterals averaging 4600 feet in length have been drilled in a shallow, heavy oil reservoir in eastern Venezuela. Precise navigation through the formations was necessary to optimize placement of the lateral drainholes and maximize the percentage of reservoir sand exposed. To meet this requirement, an optimized bottom hole ass...

■ The city as a site of everyday practice provides valuable insights into the linkages of the global capitalist economy with the texture and fabric of human experience. My comments focus on cities as centers of abuse, violence and enslavement as documented in the papers of Ida Susser and Peter Kwong. I place each author's critique within this urban...

Currently one third of all new homes built in the United States are in gated residential developments, and eight million people already live in such communities. Secured neighborhoods are a logical extension of social and political processes producing the built environment of the late-capitalist city. Although walled and fortified communities are n...

This article illustrates how spatial/cultural representations come into being with data collected during a 7-month ethnographic study of two plazas, the Parque Central and the Plaza de la Cultura in San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica. The comparison of their history, physical and spatial symbolism, user activities and daily behaviors, and new...

Abstracts Plazas are often important spatial representations of society and social hierarchy. Those built in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean under the direction of the Spanish have been interpreted as architectural representations of colonial control and oppression. Underlying these interpretations is the tacit assumption that plaza‐centered urban de...

There is a long history of cultural assumptions regarding children’s special affinity or bond for certain places, much of it antedating modern psychology. Within psychology, the subject is more ambiguous. The term attachment evokes a long history of theory and research that has measured the degree to which young children seek to keep a primary care...

Place attachment is the symbolic relationship formed by people giving culturally shared emotional/affective meanings to a particular space or piece of land that provides the basis for the individual’s and group’s understanding of and relation to the environment. This chapter applies this definition of place attachment in order to identify a range o...

This study of nervios in a poor, resettled colonia (neighborhood) outside Guatemala City is part of an ongoing analysis of the cross‐cultural significance and meaning of nerves. In the Guatemalan context, nervios is treated by sufferers as an illness, rather than a symptom, and is associated with experiencing strong emotions, particularly anger (có...

Compares two policy approaches to the provision of post-earthquake housing in a community near Guatemala City. Two separate housing programs were implemented: 1) a sites and services program that gave new residents an improved lot; and 2) a minimum unit program that provided shelter and a lot. The presentation evaluates the history, social organiza...

This paper examines the dialogue which occurs between physicians and patients in response to nervios (nerves), the presenting complaint in 30% of general medicine consultations and 50% of psychiatric consultations observed in urban outpatient clinics of San José, Costa Rica (Low 1981). Nervios is both a common, culturally acceptable distress sympto...

The relationship between nutritional status, measured by height for age, and cognition, measured by WISC full-scale IQ, was studied in a longitudinal sample of 459 urban Guatemalan children, aged 4–9 years, from a disadvantaged community of the fringe of Guatemala City, examined annually over a 3 year period. Socioeconomic status (SES) was controll...