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

The complexity of our ‘object’ of study, leading to the question ‘what is really the city?’ requires the use of different levels of analyses. At the same time, a way must be found to develop an explanatory model that brings together the knowledge thus produced. The study of governance in the city is necessarily part of any research aimed at investigating empirically the processes regulating the social life. The key implication is to address its impact; a task made particularly complex by the often difficult relationship between the implementation of governance and the interaction with a diversity of societal actors, for the ongoing dialectic between the formal and the informal in urban life. We often find that this dialectic produces ambiguity, unexpected results, gaps between planned objectives, and competition instead of cooperation among actors, pointing to the weakness of the rationalistic model of public action. Perhaps the most important lesson that we have learnt about government and governance is that the delusion that we feel when trying to understand urban policies results from our incapacity fully to grasp the complexity of human life.