Theorists & Thinkers
This French sociologist argued that taste operates as a social classifier
Pierre Bourdieu
This French term describes the leisurely urban wanderer who strolls through the city as a detached observer, taking in the spectacle of modern street life.
The flâneur
Lynch used this technique, which asked residents to draw their city from memory to reveal what they noticed, valued, and feared.
Sketch maps (mental mapping)
For the first time in human history, this demographic threshold has been crossed: more than half the world's population now lives here
Cities (urban areas)
He wrote The Image of the City (1960) and developed the five elements of the mental map.
Kevin Lynch
Marc Augé's term for anonymous, temporary, interchangeable spaces like airports, highways, and chain hotels
Non-Places (will also accept liminal space)
William H. Whyte's "The Street Life Project" used what innovative method to record pedestrian behavior in New York City plazas over extended periods of time.
Time-lapse photography (will also accept long form videography)
The Chicago School treated the city as this kind of setting, where social processes could be observed and theorized.
A social laboratory
This scholar coined the term 'informal economy' after studying urban migrants in Accra, Ghana who were not "unemployed", but "differently employed"
Keith Hart
Appleton's theory holds that humans evolved preferences for landscapes offering both wide views and sheltered concealment simultaneously. Name the theory
Prospect-Refuge Theory
Clifford Geertz's concept, adopted in urban ethnography, layers context, meaning, and interpretation onto description (as seen in Duneier's portrait of sidewalk vendors).It is the difference between a wink and a blink.
Thick Description
In 1890, Jacob Riis used photojournalism to expose what social issue in New York City, sparking public outrage.
Urban Poverty in tenement conditions
Loïc Wacquant described this state form — liberal and permissive at the top, punitive and controlling at the bottom — using the image of a mythological creature.
The Centaur State
Lynch's five elements of the mental map include paths, edges, districts, and nodes. What is the fifth?
Landmarks
Andrew Causey's text "Drawn to See" argues that this practice, sometimes dismissed as unscientific, is actually a rigorous epistemological tool that slows perception and reveals what text cannot.
Urban Sketching (drawing as ethnographic practice)
David Harvey, Manuel Castells, and Henri Lefebvre all contributed to this theoretical turn in urban anthropology — making cities understood as shaped by capitalism and class struggle.
The Political Economy Turn (1970s–80s)
In de Soto's research, it took this many days to legally register a street business in Lima, Peru in the 1980s — illustrating why informality was a rational choice.
289 days
Setha Low studied these privately governed residential developments which are walled, secured, and socially homogeneous, as examples of how urban space physically encodes exclusion and belonging.
Gated communities
Susan Sontag argued that photography gives viewers a false sense of this.
True knowledge/understanding of a scene
In the 1930s, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) produced color-coded maps that designated Black and immigrant neighborhoods as high-risk for mortgage lending, institutionalizing racial segregation in American cities. What is this practice called?
Redlining