Why an Urban Anthropology Journal?
Urban anthropology occupies a sequence of general anthropology and concerns about the human groups or individuals living in urban areas. Urbanization is an anthropological process which produces a continuous change in the developing of our species.
Urban anthropology includes all changes made by moving from rural to urban and follows the noble human adventure further the urbanization, industrialization, post industrialization to the information society, whicg is in its beginnings. And it will register, in time, mutations, however small changes in the human condition.
Pipes, chibouks, and tobacco
Tobacco was cultivated and traded in the Romanian Principalities since the seventeenth century, as evidenced by the taxes („tobacco cultivation tax”) and customs duties ("outside tax" or "inside tax") collected. The amplitude of the smoking custom developed during the...
The mechanisms of culture. An evolutionary perspective
Genetics, epigenetics, psychology, and anthropology investigate the multiple dimensions of evolution, in which the mechanisms of transmission of genetic or cultural information operate. New studies in the field of epigenetics reveal that the experiences of our...
The Other
The travels to distant places, on trade routes and great geographical discoveries have brought to Europe more or less truthful evidence of the populations encountered in various parts of the world. They illustrated human diversity, often disconcerting and strange. The...
Urban anthropology. An introduction
A subdomain of cultural anthropology characterized by the amplitude and diversity of research, urban anthropology established itself as a response of anthropologists to the impasse triggered by the "dissolution of the traditional object" caused by the end of...
A call for our next issue
In the past couple of months, the most iconic image of climate change is no longer the lonely hungry polar bear trapped on ice floes, but a 15-year-old girl clad in a yellow rain jacket sitting on the steps of Sweden’s parliament building in Stockholm. Since September 2018, Greta Thunberg has spent most of her Fridays out of school protesting the inaction of the Swedish government to undertake radical steps to tackle climate change. Inspired by the Parkland student protests and after a string of well delivered speeches at UN Climate Change COP24 Conference and at Davos, Greta Thunberg has inspired an unprecedented youth mobilization in support for measurable and urgent action to address contemporary and future impacts of climate change.
The Youth Strike 4 Climate movement brings to focus issues of intergenerational equity, social justice and environmental sustainability. This nexus implies that climate justice rests on interrelated and simultaneously deployed measures that take into consideration issues of distribution, recognition, and participation together. Indeed, the IPCC special report published in October 2018, underlined the linkages between mitigation options relevant for limiting global warming to 1.5ºC and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report states, “limiting the risks from global warming of 1.5°C in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication implies system transitions that can be enabled by an increase of adaptation and mitigation investments, policy instruments, the acceleration of technological innovation and behaviour changes”.
Thus, this special issue of the Journal of Urban Anthropology explores sustainability as the intersection of a multiplicity of transitions (technological, behavioral, political and discursive) deployed both in developed and developing contexts, as well as at various levels (local, national and global). We are encouraging papers that take into consideration gender, cultural or ecosystemic perspectives that include but are not limited to the following themes:
- Decision making for sustainable development and public policy
- Sustainability and the city: exploring climate-resilient development
- Urban agriculture and food sovereignty
- Climate change adaptation and mitigation
- Social movements and citizen led initiatives for climate change
- Health and environment in urban contexts
