Animating place: exploring encounters in the diverse city (original) (raw)
This special feature examines and analyzes how the diverse city is animated through everyday human and more-than-human encounters. The five papers in the feature explore difference using diverse theoretical and methodological approaches in probing the connections between bodies, and urban and suburban places. The papers each offer varied but complementary insights on the nature and impacts of different kinds of encounters. Before summarizing the contributions of these papers, we provide context through introductory remarks on encounters and place. The papers in this feature use a plethora of methods to investigate and interrogate encounters and how they animate place. These range from standard methods such as surveys, focus groups, and structured interviews to mobile interviews and innovative ethnographic methods. The authors demonstrate the potential in so-called " go-along " and " walking interviews " that incorporate conversations and talks (Wolifson), but also draw attention to the limitations of conversation (for instance, in the interviewing of a few intellectually challenged participants in Weisel and Bigby's article). Terence Heng uses visually focused participant observation and analyses thousands of images of closely documented visual encounters at Chinese religious rituals in Singapore, which provide optical amplitude and a deeper understanding of the visuality of these encounters. This feature is informed by contemporary debates on urban sociality that focus on the transformative potential of encounters that unfold in public spaces (Fincher and Iveson 2008; Valentine 2008; Amin 2012). Such insights play a crucial role in exploring how we might live with difference that is unsettling and confronting. Some scholars argue that everyday encounters in public spaces—such as cafes, markets, and public transportation—may inadvertently produce cosmopolitan sensibilities as persons of diverse ethnicities, races, and status mix and interact as they go about their daily lives (Laurier and Philo 2006; Watson 2009). However, others argue that encounters in streets, on sidewalks , and other public places, which only provide chances for fleeting interactions and exchanges, are not likely to result in significantly improved.
Related papers
Everyday Neighbourhood Encounters
2020
Often-overlooked practices take place on neighbourhood street corners and in squares, as well as in yards and hallways. I intertwine my interlocutors’ motivations, evaluations, and justifications with the descriptions of their seemingly obvious everyday lives. The process of conviviality embraces the challenges of changing contexts, structural limitations, migrant subjectivities, and uncertainty as central dimensions of urban life. Interacting is a way of learning about differences, which are negotiated and accommodated in processes of translation. Greeting practices foreground (truncated) multilingualism as a form of continuous translation and dwelling in open spaces demands negotiation. Sufficient respect, consideration, and reciprocity form part of emerging consensuses, which are kept minimal, fragile, and in flux. As convivial space reproduced its constitutive practices, conviviality remained ever-evolving, a consensus in progress.
Meet me on the Corner? Shaping the conditions for cross-cultural interaction in urban public space.
This is a chapter from the book Interculturalism in Cities: CITIES: concept, policy and implementation' edited by Ricard Zapata-Barrero (2015) Most cities in the world are experiencing a move towards greater ethnic diversity and most commentators view this trend to be inexorable. This chapter takes the view that diversity can be a source of social and economic advantage for cities, but only if co-operative mixing between groups is possible and for this to thrive, a set of favourable conditions needs to be in place. There are many sites where such mixing might occur but this chapter focuses upon the possibility of outdoor public spaces. It explores what type of mixing we might expect, what the positive outcomes of this could be, what its limitations are, how we might empirically understand the process, what should be the role of policy-makers, and what could be the consequences of the wrong policies (or no policies at all).
Living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter
Progress in Human Geography, 2008
In this Progress in Human Geography annual lecture I reflect on geographical contributions to academic and policy debates about how we might forge civic culture out of difference. In doing so I begin by tracing a set of disparate geographical writings — about the micro-publics of everyday life, cosmopolitanism hospitality, and new urban citizenship — that have sought to understand the role of shared space in providing the opportunity for encounter between `strangers'. This literature is considered in the light of an older tradition of work about `the contact hypothesis' from psychology. Then, employing original empirical material, I critically reflect on the notion of `meaningful contact' to explore the paradoxical gap that emerges in geographies of encounter between values and practices. In the conclusion I argue for the need for geographers to pay more attention to sociospatial inequalities and the insecurities they breed, and to unpacking the complex and intersecting ...
Friendship and the urban encounter
The study of diverse and multicultural cities has gained considerable interest, reflecting a growing concern with migrant populations and the implications of ‘strangers’ in crowded urban societies. In this literature, one of the key considerations centers around understanding how ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse peoples “rub along” and live together in tight and dense metropolises. One strand of this research is interested in the everyday encounter – ranging from the fleeting non-verbal to more sustained engagements over longer periods of time. Despite growing interest in the mundane and quotidian, friendship as a form of social relation and interaction has been largely unexamined.
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