Paper short abstract:

This paper asks what methodological tensions, challenges and opportunities emerge in using ethnography to study and understand emerging "world-class cities" with a focus on the Global South.

Paper long abstract:

Is there a method for studying aspiring "world-class" cities? This paper argues that the

anthropological study of large cities, particularly in the Global South, may necessitate new

understandings of ethnographic methods and practice. Across much of Asia, Africa and Latin

America, cities are increasingly marketing themselves in competition with one another as

national and regional governments often proclaim that different urban centres are to

become the next Dubai or Singapore. The aspirational appeal of the "world-class city"

(Ghertner 2015) is evident across numerous different countries and contexts, including

Dakar (Melly 2017), Ho Chi Minh City (Harms 2016) and Phnom Penh (Nam 2017).

Anthropologists increasingly work in these emergent world-class cities, and the aspirational

rhetoric of urban development has become an interesting ethnographic object in its own

right. But what challenges or tensions does studying rapidly growing and changing urban

environments pose in a discipline whose core method was developed in considerably

different circumstances? The paper focuses on two key tensions that arise in ethnographic

methods used to study urban spaces in these conditions. The first tension is the role of

interviews as opposed to "participant observation"; the second tension is the role of

mobility, both that of the ethnographer and of her informants. This investigation is rooted in

a close reading of both recent ethnographies of emerging world-class cities, and my own

ethnographic research conducted in Colombo, Sri Lanka.