Anthropology of

Cities
1 FEB. 2022

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Anthropology of Cities

Mid-term Test: 11:30am-12:50pm  Tuesday February 8 – next week

Access through Brightspace – Test Portal

Written Short Answer (5 marks) and Short Essay (10 marks)

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Anthropology of Cities
Observation Assignment OR Book Review Assignment – DUE 1 March

◦ both assignment sheets are posted on Brightspace

**** email me to tell me where you will do your study/which book to review
**** you can do the Streetscape assignment outside Ottawa but please let me know where
you will carry it out and provide information on the area (Google Streetview and map)

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Course TA
TA can meet with you to review course material, give advice on assignments.

TA - Victor Pelletier: Email: vpelleti@uottawa.ca

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Michel de
Certeau
“Walking in the City”

New York City, USA

Street View – the lived
space of the city

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Ethnographic Studies
Of Interest:
Doing Anthropology: Thoughts on Fieldwork from
Three Research Sites (MIT)
http://video.mit.edu/watch/doing-anthropology-265
1/

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Anthropology of Cities
What is our experience of a
city’s spatial order? Pleasant?

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Pruitt Igoe, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Roger Kemble ‘The Canadian City. St. John’s to Victoria.’
“Downtown Spaces”
How do we describe this space and the experience of it?
Imposing?
Listless piece of commercial modernism?
Architectural ugliness?
Sun-filled space? VS Gloomy and shaded?

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 Anthropology of
Cities
How do we describe this world
and the experience of it?
- reflective qualities, surface,
chiaroscuro, unimposing scale,
warm glow, vista

Chiaroscuro  use of light and

dark contrast to create
atmosphere in a drawing,
painting, architecture, calm /
eerie (Chiaro = bright, clear)

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 We can ask: what
affects the ‘character’
of a city?

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Anthropology of Cities
Lewis Mumford – “The City in History”
- understanding what makes for a diversity of cities: their
◦ origins and history
◦ economic and political factors
◦ cultural and social environment

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Anthropology of Cities
Types of Cities: Ritual, Market and Factory Town

Lewis Mumford – reviews and compares:

Venice, a city state and Coketown, an 18th C industrial in
Italy (1400-1500s) factory town in England

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Venice, Italy VS. Coketown , England

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Anthropology of Cities

What features of the city of Venice make it a desirable

place to live and visit? How did these come to be?

What features of the city of Coketown are unpleasant

and undesirable in an urban space? What factors can
be identified that influenced its development?

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 Venice and Trade Routes in the Mediterranean
A City State
A City State
- A city that governs itself, has its own government
- It is not part of a larger region, province, or
national state government
- It makes decisions and rules that govern the city
inhabitants
- Example – Venice before it joined Italy – was a
city state
-Members of the government lived there and
made decisions to benefit the people, and
improve the living conditions of the inhabitants

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 Venice vs Coketown
‘an aesthetic glory’

Republic – self government

Charles Dicken’s working town
A centre for culture, beauty
A centre for labour, profiteers
- History of piracy, war, trade
- Great wealth and beauty
- History of industrialization
- Central power to control and administer - Powerful owners who administer
city extraction, minimal investment in workers
or city
Diversity of city areas – differentiation of
zoning, each is a ‘community’ = a cellular Uniformity in city’s purpose – a singular
organization with a square or ‘piazza’ goal - labour extraction to produce a surplus (for
owner) using the factory system

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Venice: piazza,
community,
sharing

More’s ‘utopia’

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Coketown,
UK – ‘A
Factory
Town”:
rubbish heaps,
factory waste,
polluted air

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 Venice
- City builders took advantage of
inventions over time (water pipes)
to improve life in the city for its
residents
= Gondola – perfect transportation
for canals = good transportation
routes
= produces a beautiful city
- Powerful city officials
vs Coketown
- Inventions were applied towards
increasing factory efficiencies
(lighting) = increase profits for owners
- no attention to needs of comforts
for the poor (water, sanitation, social
spaces)
- transport: rail for moving goods
= produce slums, disease, filth
- Powerless city ‘officials’
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Charles Dickens’ ‘Coketown’- added note - PMA

Coketown was the name of the fictional factory/industrial town that Charles Dickens uses as a setting in
his novel “Hard Times” published in 1854. The name comes from ‘coke’ which is a hard grey fuel used to
fuel industrial machinery. Descriptions of Coketown were based on Dickens’ visits to the real industrial
town/city of Preston, Lancashire in north-western England. Preston was initially a trade town, and in the
1700s wool, linen and cotton were woven there. By 1835, there were 40 cotton mills, and industrial unrest
arose in the early 1800s; the workday was 14-hours long, and a strike was held in 1836.
In Hard Times, Dickens describes the setting of ‘Coketown’ as: “It was a town of machinery and tall
chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never
got uncoiled . . . It has a brick canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye … where the
steam-engine worked monotonously up and down… [and] where Nature was as strongly bricked out as
killing airs and gases were bricked in… Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own … a blur of soot and
smoke.”
See: Rob Shields “Places on the Margins. Alternative Geographies of Modernity.”

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Venice vs Coketown
City’s central area is Piazza San Marco
– a social centre
- church, government, shops, cafes
- socialize, government, markets
Surrounding areas
– built around a campo or square
- differentiation of guild/factory, work
zones, trade
Festivals bring city folk together
Concentration on economic activities
= capitalism, commodities, strict
labour routine (work 24 hours)
- factory, railroad, slum = production
and distribution system with the
extraction of labour from working
class, slave plantations, child labour; of
raw materials from mines, colonies
Goal- efficiency in labour organization
and production – administered by
‘owner’ class
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Fredreich Engels – critical revolutionary
with Karl Marx

◦ Toured industrial cities and lobbied for

water and sanitation, labour rights,
adequate housing
◦ A contemporary novel about poverty
in Ireland :Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s
Ashes”, Charles Dickens “Bleak House”

◦  Manchester: An 18th Century

Factory City in England
◦ - a ‘degraded urban environment’

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Next class:
Types of Cities: Market, Factory, Ritual Cities
Lewis Mumford – comparison •Venice, a trade centre and city state, 1500s
and
•Coketown, a factory town in 18th century England

James Duncan – The Ritual City - capital city of the Kandy, Sri Lanka
- a royal city for the King, ritual complex with a
symbolic order that supports the ideology of the King

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Note added - PMA

For interest, not required reading.

For a historical overview and discussion of industrialization and urban development that draws
on Lewis Mumford’s work, see:

Elvin Wyly “The Industrial City” 2012.

https://ibis.geog.ubc.ca/~ewyly/g350/industrial.pdf

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