Abstract
Everyday life in urban public space means living amongst people unknown to one another. As part of the broader convivial turn within the study of everyday urban life (Wise & Noble, 2016), this article examines outdoor public ice rinks as spaces for encounter between strangers. With data drawn from 100 hours of naturalistic and participant observation at free and accessible outdoor public non-hockey ice rinks in two Canadian cities, we show how ‘rink life’ is animated by a shared everyday ethic of public sociability, with strangers regularly engaging in fleeting moments of sociable interaction. At first glance, researching the outdoor public ice rink may seem frivolous, but in treating it seriously as a public space we find it to be threaded through with an ethos of interactional equality, reciprocal respect, and mutual support. We argue that the shared everyday ethic of public sociability that characterizes the rinks that we observed is a function of the (1) public and (2) personal materiality required for skating; (3) the emergence of on ice norms; (4) generalized trust amongst users; (5) ambiguities of socio-spatial differentiation by skill; and (6) flattened social hierarchies, or what we call the quotidian carnivalesque. Our data and analysis suggest that by drawing together different generations and levels of ability, this distinct public space facilitates social interactions between strangers, and so provides insights relevant to planners, policy makers and practitioners.
Highlights
While an ethical worldview can inform public space design, the people who use public spaces and the interactions between them give life to everyday ethics
Having situated our study within literatures on ice rinks, public spaces and conviviality, we outline our research methods, we report descriptive data, before turning to an analysis of elements making up the shared everyday ethic of public sociability
While the sustained study of the outdoor public rink might seem inconsequential, its very everydayness veils the extent to which it is instructive for deepening understanding of public spaces as sites where strangers interact
Summary
While an ethical worldview can inform public space design, the people who use public spaces and the interactions between them give life to everyday ethics. We examine one type of temporally bounded, weather-dependent public space dedicated to recreational activity: outdoor municipally-managed public ice rinks where ice hockey is not permitted (hereafter, outdoor public ice rinks). These are a common recreational feature in many northern cities with winter temperatures consistently below freezing. Many Canadian towns and cities have municipally managed indoor and outdoor rink facilities, usually with a mixture of times for ice hockey and for recreational skating. While our empirical data is based exclusively on naturalistic and participant observation, our analysis is informed primarily by social scientific literature on urban sociability concerned with the possibilities and perils of everyday interactions between strangers in public space. This sets the scene for the data reporting and conceptual development that follows
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