ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the interface of visual anthropology and of urban anthropology points to new ways of seeing and analyzing, not only the more obvious architectural qualities of cities, but also the quality of the visual environments that result from planning, building and manipulating public space. In practice, visual anthropology, urban anthropology, the anthropology of development and certainly medical anthropology, with its problems of the imaging of disease organisms or diseased bodies, are profoundly related. The aesthetics of the urban and the aesthetics of architecture are even more significant in the history of modernism, colonialism and post-colonial politics than is the conventional history of art. Architecture is not only the most visual and quite literally concretized example of public aesthetics, it is also the convergence point of cultural globalization, often reflecting internationalized and non-indigenous conceptions of design, materials and situation.
