ancient cities

840 Urban Anthropology
designed to subsume all of the other terms, though
more through a lack of precision than theoretical
inclusiveness.
An urban agglomeration should not be confused
with agglomeration economies. Urban
agglomeration is a demographic concept based on
population densities and functional relations that
bind together various places. Those functional relations,
moreover, are not solely economic but rather
can be social, cultural, and political. Consequently,
even though urban agglomeration requires spatial
clustering, it has no definitional relationship to the
kinds of economies and diseconomies that economists
associate with the spatial agglomeration of
businesses and labor. Agglomeration economies
occur in urban agglomerations and draw on the
density of activities that characterize the latter, but
the two concepts refer to different phenomena. In
fact, the former has a distinct normative dimension—
absent in the latter—grounded, as it is, in a concern
with economic growth.
Because urban places take a variety of spatial
forms, differing not only in size but also in how
they are organized, scholars, researchers, and policymakers
have developed numerous terms to capture
these differences. Such terms as city, suburb,
town, village, edge city, and satellite community
enable us to distinguish among urban places. As
societies became highly urbanized in the last half
of the nineteenth century, a need existed for terms
that could identify and represent the geographical
spread of urban places and their resultant physical
and functional connections to each other. Urban
agglomeration is one of those terms. Widely used
by demographers and urban researchers, this term
identifies the large built-up areas in which more
and more people live.
Robert A. Beauregard
See also Megalopolis; Metropolitan Region; Urban;
Urbanization
Further Readings
Friedmann, John. [1973] 1978. “The Urban Field as
Human Habitat.” Pp. 42–52 in Systems of Cities:
Readings on Structure, Growth, and Policy, edited by
L. S. Bourne and J. W. Simmons. Reprint. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Montgomery, Mark R., Richard Stren, Barney Cohen,
and Holly E. Reed. 2004. Cities Transformed:
Demographic Change and Its Implications in the
Developing World. London: Earthscan.
United Nations Centre for Human Settlements
(HABITAT). 1996. An Urbanizing World: Global
Report on Human Settlement. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Ur b a n an t h r o p o l o g y
The term urban anthropology came to designate a
subfield of cultural anthropology in the 1960s,
even though anthropologists have been conducting
research in cities since the 1930s. While ethnography,
the core methodological tradition of anthropology,
derives from in-depth studies of rural and
village life, the development of urban anthropology
also reflects broader conceptual debates within
the discipline. New conceptualizations of the city
have influenced how anthropologists think about
culture and social change. However, the particular
methods and perspectives deployed by anthropologists
generate new ways to understand the
dynamics of urban life, as well.
One of the most productive tensions within
urban anthropology is whether it construes itself
as study of the city or in the city. With notable
exceptions, anthropologists have generally treated
the city as a context for research rather than as
their object of study. Nonetheless, this has proved
fruitful ground for debate. Anthropology of the city
analyzes how urban form and processes are shaped
by diverse political, economic, and cultural forces.
Study in the city provides descriptive accounts and
involves refinement of social scientific concepts to
bring them closer to the daily entanglements of
urban life. The methodological choices and research
topics anthropologists adopt are often informed by
how they negotiate this tension.
Historical Origins and Trajectories
Until the latter half of the twentieth century, the very
notion of urban anthropology appeared somewhat
an oxymoron. Its historical foundations are in fact
manifold and rest on sociological as well as anthropological
grounds. Anthropology’s traditional