A person in a city and a city in a person, or Once again about the subject of urban anthropology (2)

Abstract

The article discusses the subject and method of urban anthropology. The author believes that the subject of urban anthropology is not reduced to either the applied sociology of the city, or to micro-urbanism. The article makes an attempt to highlight a special figure of the urban researcher who comprehends the city in ad hominem categories, and understands a person in the categories of the city as a place for him to acquire his own meaning and environment. A distinction is made between the urban classic explorer-observer, the urban onlooker, the flaneur, and the townsman-citizen. The author states that cities, like spaces in general, are never neutral. The city is always inhabited. Regarding the living space, there are always certain ideas of people who live there and comprehend it as their environment. In this sense, there are as many cities as there are images of a city and ways of living in it. The image of the city depends on the way it is represented in a human’s mind. And the creation of the images themselves depends on the routes-paths that the inhabitants of urban spaces, the city inhabitants, are making. The paper introduces an idea of the method used in urban anthropology and humanitarian geography - the theory and practice of drawing cartoids and mental maps. The paper describes the difference between a cartoid and a mental map. A methodological construct of a cartoid is proposed, on which basis such support-benchmarks as path, border, landmark, place, horizon, route, are introduced. Based on the methodological construct of the cartoid, the article provides the analysis of a pilot survey of a modern city representatives and their “cartoids” (on the example of the Novosibirsk Aсademgorodok), that are maps-routes in their habitable urban space.

Keywords

• city
• urban studies
• urban anthropology
• city anthropology
• mental map
• city image
• cartoids