Southall’s edited volume establishes urbanisation as an explicitly cross-cultural anthropological problem. The available extract contains the title and table of contents rather than the chapters themselves, but its intellectual architecture is already unusually clear: the book moves across locality and supralocal power, role analysis, density of role-relations, Yoruba urbanism, Mexico City, Japanese urban history, caste and association in India, Ethiopian urban ethnicity, transport and involvement in Zambia, migration in Peru, kinship, Pacific port cities and regional associations. The iconic contribution is therefore comparative breadth organised around social relations rather than a single western model of the city. Its methodological operation is to place very different historical and geographical urban formations within a shared analytical field while retaining specific institutions—kinship, caste, ethnicity, migration, transport, household and power—as variables of interpretation. It bridges anthropology, sociology and urban studies and offers an important prehistory of contemporary calls to theorise the urban from multiple geographical starting points.
URBANISM MEETS ART