Urban anthropology refers to the ethnographic and cross-cultural study of global urbanization and life in cities. It is a subdiscipline of Social Anthropology and Social Sciences.[1]​ Its research deals with new perspectives of understanding in areas such as urban planning, the public sphere, symbolic activity in cities around the world, the industrial mode of production, the globalization process, multiculturalism, the information society, network analysis and social movements.[2]​.

It addresses urban life from field methods and the holistic perspective of anthropology. This discipline deals with the form and space of cities, urban planning as a way of life, urbanization processes, typologies of metropolises, urban expressions of a community type, migratory phenomena and social movements.[3] Metropolitan Areas have become the places under study for research on topics such as ethnicity, poverty, public space, classes and subcultural variations. (Kottak,2003:264).[4]​.

The official recognition of this type of research began to take shape only in the late 1970s.[5][6]​ The first urban ethnographies were carried out in England, specifically in London, in the middle of the century. These first ethnographies describe the life that developed in the working-class neighborhoods as a consequence of the industrialization process. However, the Chicago School of Sociology, through its research work, since 1920 has carried out the first scientific research program that studies the city through a set of investigations characterized by the observation and description of delimited social groups.

In the field of contemporary urban anthropology, the work of Marc Augé and his study of non-places can be mentioned.

Unlike rural anthropology, urban anthropology carries out its studies with methodology in the city, it is characterized by establishing a method used in studies called ethnography; particularly it is in charge of studying the kind of life or urban tribes belonging to the city.

One of the first to study urbanization in the developing world, anthropologist Robert Redfield, recognizing that a city (even a pre-industrial one) is a very different social context from a tribal village or a rural town, analyzed the contrasts between rural and urban life. He contrasted rural communities, whose relationships are based on face-to-face contact, with cities, where impersonality characterizes many aspects of life. Redfield (1941) proposed the study of urbanization through a rural-urban continuum (Kottak, 2003:264).

By 2025, developing countries will represent 85 percent of the world's population, compared to 77 percent in 1992 (Stevens, 1992). Solutions to future problems increasingly depend on understanding non-Western cultural contexts. The Southern Hemisphere is steadily increasing its share of the world's population, with the highest rates of population growth occurring in Third World cities. In 1900 the world had only 16 cities with more than one million inhabitants, but there were already 276 of them in 1990. By 2025, 60 percent of the global population will be urban, compared to 37 percent in 1990 (Stevens, 1992).