Anthropological Urban Transect

Abstract

This paper presents the application of a methodological approach originally developed for urban planning to urban anthropology. This research approach focuses on different materialities in order to analyze functional zones, special areas and several categories of markers of up- and downgrading processes within a city. This focus on materialities and their integration patterns into urban space enables to make systematic comparisons between different areas within a city as well as between different cities. Using examples of transects carried out in two Southern Caucasian capitals – Baku (Azerbaijan) and Tbilisi (Georgia) – different ways of implementing a transect, collecting and recording the data are discussed.