Everyday Neighbourhood Encounters (original) (raw)
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There is much contention over the design and regulation of streets: what kind of buildings and businesses are allowed along them, how many vehicles and what type, how much their spaces afford cultural capital and create friendly pedestrian precincts, and what rights a citizen has to the space and even the sunlight. 1 There are also fervent environmental debates about the regulation of urban density, as sprawling automotive cities consume great amounts of fossil fuel. These debates consider what kinds of amenity or conservation should rise to priority, and therefore what kinds of streets a community will accept. 2 [Fig. 1] Whereas a building is largely the outcome of what its owner wants it to be, a street-especially one that is old and has been inherited after countless changes-is the result of dialectical compromise, often by people without an investment in it except as a highway. A street is regulated and conditioned largely by transitory stakeholders who use it to get somewhere else. Before the advent of mass transport, the pace and character of a street were decided by the people who built on it and lived there. Since then, many aspects of streets have been subordinated to the convenience of distant citizens, as the street has become owned
Walking and Talking (In) the Space. An approach to urban practices
Proceedings of the 10th World Congress of the International Association For Semiotic Studies Recurso Electronico Culture of Communication Communication of Culture Culture De La Communication Communication De La Culture Cultura De La Comunicacion Comunicacion De La Cultura 2012 Isbn 978 84 9749 522 6, 2012
International Inequalities Institute, LSE, 2023
While there is a considerable body of literature on symbolic boundaries that engages with longestablished/newcomer configurations, work on conviviality has only rarely taken this angle, despite its general focus on contexts of immigration-related diversity. This article connects these literatures by examining insideroutsider configurations between long-established residents and newcomers in two very different contexts of rapid demographic change, where the established population is already marginalised and feels further threatened by newcomers. Drawing on ethnographic research in Newham, United Kingdom, and Mshongo, South Africa, we advance debates on conviviality by revealing how perceptions of inequality, lack of civility, and lack of reciprocity shape symbolic boundaries against newcomers, which may in turn be softened by convivial practices. We also consider what the differences between the sites might reveal about the enabling conditions for conviviality in such neighbourhoods.
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The London Borough of Hackney is one of the most diverse places in the United Kingdom. It is characterized not only by a multiplicity of ethnic minorities but also by differentiations in terms of migration histories, religions and educational and economic backgrounds, both among long-term residents and newcomers. This article attempts to describe how people negotiate social interactions in such a ‘super-diverse’ context. It develops the notion of ‘commonplace diversity’, referring to ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity being experienced as a normal part of social life by local residents. This commonplace diversity has resulted in people acting with ‘civility towards diversity’. While in public space people do not change their behaviour according to other people’s backgrounds, in semi-public spaces, such as associations and local institutions, here conceptualized as ‘parochial space’, people’s different backgrounds are acknowledged and sometimes talked about. The article discu...
Multilingualism in Transformative Spaces: Contact and Conviviality
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South Africa is a highly mobile country characterized by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic. Getting to grips with diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, as well as pursuing aspirations of mobility, is part of people’s daily experience that often takes place on the margins of conventional politics. A politics of conviviality is one such form of politics of the popular that emerges in contexts of rapid change, diversity, mobility, and the negotiation and mediation of complex affiliations and attachments. The questions in focus for this paper thus pertain to how forms of talk, born out of displacement, anomie and contact in the superdiverse contexts of South Africa, allow for the articulation of life-styles and aspirations that break with the historical faultlines of social and racial oppression. We first expand upon the idea of (marginal) linguistic practices as powerful mediations of political voice and agency, an idea that can ...
EXPLORING THE SPACE OF CONVIVIALITY WITH NEWCOMERS AND HOST COMMUNITIES
Adult Education Discourses , 2021
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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 ...