Paper short abstract:

Definitions of the urban usually mention density and amplitude. I contrast these idea with ethnographic data on Mindelo, Cape Verde. The inhabitants of Mindelo are fully aware of their smallness, but they have no doubt about their urban condition, which is revealed in local life styles and values.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the issue of scale in urban anthropology. The vocabulary used in defining the urban usually includes terms such as density, amplitude, heterogeneity, global flows, and disordered growth. I contrast these ideas with ethnographic data on the City of Mindelo, in Cape Verde. The country is a tiny archipelago off the west coast of Africa. Mindelo, its second largest city, has approximately 70,000 inhabitants - quite different from the millions of city dwellers usually mentioned in the literature about urban contexts in Africa. Cape Verdeans are fully aware of their smallness, which is revealed in frequent references to this subject in official discourses, in everyday conversations, in artistic productions. Despite all this, the inhabitants of Mindelo have no doubt about their urban condition. If our focus is on scale, we must be attentive to the relative character of numbers. Mindelo concentrates a large part of the inhabitants of the small country, as well as capital, technologies, jobs, and means of communication. But this is not the only issue to be considered. The urbanity of Mindelo is fundamentally related to the history of the island where it is located. The island was exploited as an important Atlantic port, with characteristics typical of urban environments, such as salaried employees, profitable trade and dependence on agricultural inputs produced in neighboring islands. This urbanity is revealed today not only in the local economy, but especially in life styles and local values.