What Are the Urban Humanities?

Efforts in the university that fly under the ‘‘urban humanities’’ flag represent larger phenomena that have emerged across humanistic disciplines for the past two decades. Hybrid initiatives have appeared alongside broad interdisciplinary efforts highlighting challenges involved in attempting to transform the knowledge and practices within stable institutional configurations. Yet our experience, where “place” comes into analytic focus, has shown that urban humanities produce superior understandings of the structure/agency connection by a self-conscious, simultaneous engagement with social theory, human experience, and social action.