Setha Low

Setha M. Low (born March 14, 1948) is an American anthropologist and environmental psychologist who studies public space. She is Distinguished Professor of psychology, anthropology, earth and environmental sciences, and women's and gender studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has directed its Public Space Research Group since 1995. Low served as president of the American Anthropological Association from 2007 to 2009. She began her career in medical anthropology before moving to the study of space and place after her fieldwork on the central plazas of San José, Costa Rica, published as On the Plaza. Her later books include Behind the Gates (2003), an ethnography of gated communities, and Why Public Space Matters (2023).

Early life and education Low was born in Los Angeles on March 14, 1948, and grew up there. Her stepfather was an actor, and her mother kept a gift shop and painted. Low studied psychology and human biology at Pitzer College, graduated in 1969, and took an M.A. (1971) and a Ph.D. (1976) in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Career Low taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976 to 1988, holding appointments in landscape architecture and regional planning, city planning, and anthropology. She later took on other appointments in earth and environmental sciences and in women's and gender studies, and was appointed Distinguished Professor.

Low served as president-elect and then president of the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, between 1996 and 2002. In 2002–2003 she was a Conservation Guest Scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute.

The American Anthropological Association presents an annual Setha M. Low Engaged Anthropology Award, funded by a gift from Low, to anthropologists or projects that apply the discipline to social justice problems.

Research work Low's early research work was in San José, Costa Rica. She studied the country's health care system and nervios (nerves), a complaint she analyzed as culturally interpreted symptoms rather than a discrete disease. She published Culture, Politics, and Medicine in Costa Rica in 1985. A 1996 article, "Spatializing Culture", distinguished the social production of space (the political and economic processes that shape the built environment) from its social construction through everyday use and meaning.

She published the plaza research as On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (2000), which won the Anthony Leeds Prize in urban anthropology. In 2017 she returned to spatial theory with Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place, a synthesis of her work on how culture takes spatial form.

Gated communities and security Low began studying gated communities after a visit around 1992 to her sister, whose new neighborhood was private in its entirety, down to the streets and sidewalks. Some residents told her they had moved behind the gates to be safe from crime. Low found that there was no less crime inside than outside, and that residents did not feel more secure. The columnist Eugene Robinson discussed these findings in The Washington Post after she presented them at the American Anthropological Association's 2007 annual meeting.

Low later studied security more broadly with the anthropologist Mark Maguire. They co-edited Spaces of Security (2019), and their book Trapped: Life under Security Capitalism and How to Escape It (2024) profiles the police officers, policymakers, and private contractors behind what the authors call security capitalism.

Urban parks and public space Much of the Public Space Research Group's early work was applied. Under contract with the National Park Service, Low and her colleagues produced ethnographic studies of Ellis Island, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, and Jacob Riis Park in New York, using a rapid ethnographic assessment procedure (REAP) to bring park users' perspectives into planning decisions. In the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Paige West found its case studies "detailed and beautifully written". Renia Ehrenfeucht wrote in Urban Affairs Review that the book "makes a needed inroad", though Talja Blokland, reviewing it for the Journal of Urban Design, doubted that it rethought park theory as much as its title promised. U.S. News & World Report covered the group's park research in 2008.

Low also co-edited The Politics of Public Space (2006) with the geographer Neil Smith.

Why Public Space Matters and beaches Her book, Why Public Space Matters (2023) is based on about thirty years of her fieldwork. Low argues that public spaces foster civic and social life, and its final chapter sets out a method readers can use to study their own local public spaces. Linjie Zhang asked why the book stops at open-air spaces (museums, galleries, and libraries go unexamined) while predicting it would attract readers well beyond the academy. Patricia Aelbrecht called it "ground-breaking".

Visual art Low is also a sculptor, print-maker, and painter. She took a ceramics class in Bridgehampton in 2002 and has since shown work in group and juried exhibitions in East Hampton, Southampton, and New York City, including a 2011 solo exhibition, Global Bodies, at the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett, New York. 2018 – The Athena Accolade Award. 2021 – Distinguished Career Award of the Environmental Design Association.

Selected publications

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