Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener for the young cultural anthropologist Setha Low. “I thought it was so cool that everybody was there together,” she tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “… Everybody was talking. Everybody knew their place. It was like a complete little world, a microcosm of Costa Rican society, and I hadn't seen anything like that in suburban Los Angeles.”

That epiphany set Low, now a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, onto a journey filled with the exploration of public spaces and a desire to explain them to the rest of the world. This trek has resulted in more than a hundred scholarly articles and a number of books, most recently Why Public Space Matters but including 2006’s Politics of Public Space with Neil Smith; 2005’s Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity with S. Scheld and D. Taplin; 2004’s Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America; 2003’s The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture with D. Lawrence-Zuniga; and 2000’s On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.

Low is also director of the Graduate Center’s Public Space Research Group, and has received a Getty Fellowship, a fellow in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States.

She was president of the American Anthropological Association (from 2007 to 2009) and has worked on public space research in projects for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and was cochair of the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity’s Public Space and Diversity Network.