Setha Low
Setha Low is an anthropologist, urban scholar, and Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York whose work examines the relationship between people, culture, and the built environment. She is the founding director of the Public Space Research Group, an interdisciplinary center focused on ethnographic approaches to understanding how public spaces are designed, experienced, contested, and transformed.
Across decades of research, Low has explored public space through questions of access, belonging, inequality, privatization, security, and social justice. Her work brings anthropological methods into architecture, planning, and urban design, emphasizing that understanding a place requires paying attention not only to its physical form, but to the people who use it—and to who feels welcome, excluded, or empowered there.
Her books include On the Plaza, Behind the Gates, Spatializing Culture, and Why Public Space Matters. Her scholarship has been particularly influential in establishing public space as both a physical setting and a social and political arena, making her work central to conversations about democracy and the life of cities.