Six Questions in Search of a Paradigm

Petra Kuppinger’s invitation to reflect on how publishing two of my papers in early issues of City & Society affected my thinking as an urban anthropologist was most welcome. The two papers in question are a description of a “homegrown” transit system, consisting primarily of owner-operated “microbuses,” that had evolved in Lima, Peru over the preceding two decades (Uzzell 1987) and a second piece (Uzzell 1990) that was part of a special issue of City & Society, guest-edited by Martha Reese and Art Murphy. The special issue grew out of a 1987 SfAA symposium on whether or not urban phenomena could fruitfully be thought of in terms of two contrasting planning styles: 1) power-based “coercive or formal planning” and 2) information-based “generative planning,” the latter of which I found more common in the relatively “informal” economic activities of poor people such as those described in the 1987 paper, as well as in the private lives of people in all socioeconomic strata. Those two papers pointed backward and forward to two other papers with many of the same questions. The earlier piece, published in Urban Anthropology (Uzzell 1974), had proposed a conceptual language that would treat institutional change as emergent from individual decision making. The later paper (Uzzell 1994) was a chapter in the book, Contrapunto, in which the editor, Kathy Rakowski took on the