Urban Inequalities

This article reviews developments within urban anthropology and adjacent fields to argue for a more-than-human approach to urban inequalities, centered on the relations among humans, sociotechnical systems, and nonhuman life. A first section reviews an established tradition within urban anthropology that focuses on sociospatial relations to understand how resources, risks, and political influence are distributed unequally across urban populations and spaces. A next section highlights the more recent infrastructural turn, which has directed attention toward how such uneven distributions are mediated by sociotechnical systems and a range of urban things. A third section introduces an emergent literature that extends multispecies ethnography to understand how urban nature—specifically animals and plants, but also microbes—coproduces inequalities, while the concluding section notes the need to connect these latter two approaches more explicitly.