“The Debate in Urban Anthropology and the Development of Empirical Investigation on Governance”

Today half of humanity is living in urban settings and that proportion is expected to increase in the coming decades. Society — Western and non-Western — is fast becoming urban and even mega-urban as existing cities and a growing number of smaller towns are set on a path of ever-expanding demographic and spatial expansion, also through in-takes of native and foreign peoples. Cities are identified as hubs of cultural and ethnic interaction as well as challenging settings for future sustainable development. Clearly, studying urban settings and the attendant complex dynamics is timely and of great importance. It is indeed reasonably argued that the future of social sciences will inevitably be urban-bound. As anthropologists, we firmly believe that disciplinary commitment to an empirically-based analysis has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of our evolving urban world. In such a belief, we propose to hold a major International Conference, to be held at the University of Fribourg in September 2013, in order to debate the state of the art and the potential for methodological and theoretical development. In the shared awareness of the unique contribution that ethnography offers for a better theoretical as well as practical grasp of our rapidly changing and increasingly complex cities, this proposed conference will offer an important opportunity to address precisely this point through the structured contributions of a strong field of high-caliber anthropologists engaged in empirical research in diverse ethnographic settings. The conference aims to develop a rigorous examination of the significance of the anthropological paradigm in urban research, its centrality both to mainstream academic debates and to society more broadly, and the potential for development of this field of research.