Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology at Yale University, is the most influential urban ethnographer in the United States since the Chicago School. Born in 1943 in Missouri and trained with Howard Becker, he spent four decades observing the streets of Philadelphia, first in A Place on the Corner (1978), on the social life of a ghetto bar, and then in Streetwise (1990), on the border between a poor Black neighbourhood and a gentrifying white one.

Code of the Street (1999) is his most cited book. It describes the set of informal rules that govern violence in poor, segregated neighbourhoods: where police and institutions have abandoned the neighbourhood, respect is defended in person, and families he calls decent have to teach their children the code of the street to survive in it. It is not a culture of poverty but a rational adaptation to abandonment, and the book became a reference in criminology and urban policy.

The Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011) looks at the opposite: the places, such as Reading Terminal Market or Rittenhouse Square, where people of different races and classes coexist with civility and learn to see each other, and which Anderson considers the diverse city's best resource. Black in White Space (2022) describes the experience of Black people in spaces society defines as white, and his concept of the iconic ghetto, the image projected onto any Black person anywhere. He is the reference of the urban sociology of race.