ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the top-down structuring of the social life of cities through urban planning, and the way ordinary people engage with such top-down efforts to shape the city. Urban planning is a crucial form of managing urban populations and spaces. From the colonial to the postcolonial era, national and municipal governments have sought to realize their visions of an orderly, sanitary, modern or egalitarian society through planned interventions into urban space. An anthropological approach to urban planning focuses on the gap between envisioned utopias and actual everyday lives in these planned spaces. Such an approach contrasts the ideologies and socio-cultural prescriptions that characterize urban design with the ways in which residents subsequently appropriate and transform their new environments.
