Encounters of discrete urban practices

Abstract

In an attempt to understand the reality of urban life, this work tries to examine how the distinct, discrete urban entities interact and interrelate. It argues that if the city, at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century, is interpreted as fragments or regions that try to coexist, then these distinct units are not set in final solid forms. Rather, these tend to dismantle and alternate, at least momentarily. Encounters of the practices and rituals of daily life illustrate an instance of such interactions. As an example, in the Arab/Islamic cities (with specific reference to the case of Tripoli, Lebanon), funeral processions are rituals that encounter randomly discrete individuals walking in the street under distinct spatio-temporal conditions. These encounters go through a process of ‘conjunction’ and ‘disjunction’, which alternates the individual's belongingness to his or her logic and system in order to operate within others' systems. The alternation resets the individual's sensory and mental perception of their context, which reorders their framing within the fragment or region they are set in.