Guest editorial: Organizing the city

Abstract

At least since the seminal work The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) by Georg Simmel, the city has been a topic of interest to social researchers. During the first half of the last century, the Chicago School, fostering among other prominent urban sociologists Robert Park and Louis Wirth, was in many ways instrumental in the development of the city as an academic subject with its own field of research and theories. Since then research on the city has only widened in scope. Ethnographically, works likeWilliam FooteWhyte’s Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (1943) and Elliott Liebow’s Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (1967) are examples of early ethnographies focusing on particular aspects of city life. Ethnographic approaches to the city have become important in relation to understanding subjects like marginalization, community, planning, social networks, and relations between systems of welfare and their citizens. The city is the scene for everyday urban life and ethnographers have explored myriad iterations of the everyday: from how people inhabit and use urban spaces in different ways than planners and architects intended in the new city of Bras ılia (Holston, 1989); over howmarginalized citizens get by in gap spaces and barrios (Bourgois, 1995; Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009); to how police officers interpret duties and make decisions on the streets of cities (Moskos, 2008); how large-scale transformation alters not only the physical landscapes of cities but also the mental (Fennell, 2015); and to how a skyscraper can become a specter haunting the inhabitants of a city but also a successful legacy of a former political regime (Murawski, 2019); and many other phenomena that affect or are part of the everyday lives of people in cities. This special issue contributes to the above body of research in two ways. First, it investigates the city as a particular kind of organization. That is, by piecing together studies that, each in their ownway, address and feed into the broader picture and discussions of what it means to “run”, use and define a city, how this is experienced and by whom these processes are influenced. They remind us – perhaps – of the complexities of concerns, interests, needs and wishes of stakeholders such as citizens, investors, planners, administrators and politicians that need to be taken into account when playing the video game SimCity (a simulation game, invented in the 1980s, where the gamer acts as a mayor who designs and develops a city). Second, the special issue brings together a diversity of researchers from anthropology, urban sociology, urban management and migrations studies, who share a comparative and ethnographic approach to the study of different aspects of city life and organization, whether it is classic fieldwork observations, interviews, document analysis or a mixture of them all. Methodologically, ethnography has widened its scope from the still fundamental building block of “being there” long-term, to also incorporate more time efficient strategies and also understanding places (like cities or neighborhoods in cities) as embedded in webs, both local, national and international and affected by legislation, political dynamics, financial development and many other factors. Despite very different empirical foci and methodological approaches, what the articles have in common are theoretical and analytical interests in trying to develop ways of more precisely understanding the overall workings of organizing city life. Further, all articles display a particular sensitivity towards the nuances, complexities and relatedness between the different elements of each study conducted. For researchers, who work in disciplines where ethnographic approaches and methods are applied regularly, the lattermight seem self-evident, but as pointed out in several of the articles, this is certainly not always the case in all disciplines that engage in the studies Guest editorial