Abstract

Digital technologies are profoundly reshaping how people relate to unknown others, yet urban studies and geographies of encounter have yet to adequately incorporate these changes into theory and research. Building on a longstanding concern with stranger encounters in social and urban theory, this paper explores how digital technology brings new possibilities and challenges to urban life. With examples ranging from GPS-enabled apps for sex and dating to sharing economy platforms that facilitate the peer-to-peer exchange of services, new practices mediated by digital technology are making many stranger encounters a matter of choice rather than chance, and they are often private as much as they are public. This paper examines these changes to develop a conceptualisation of stranger intimacy as a potentially generative form of encounter involving conditional relations of openness among the unacquainted, through which affective structures of knowing, providing, befriending or even loving are built. We offer an agenda for researching stranger intimacies to better understand their role in generating new kinds of social and economic opportunity, overcoming constraints of space and place, as well as generating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, privilege and disadvantage. The paper concludes by considering what critical attention to these encounters can offer geographical scholarship and how an emphasis on digital mediation can push research in productive directions.

Highlights

  • To inhabit the city is to live in a world of strangers

  • Scantly incorporating developments brought forth by digital technology, this body of work called for greater attention to the potential for pluralistic and hybrid cultures to form through relations of proximity and encounter with strangers in spaces of public life

  • How might geographers better engage with the kinds of encounters being mediated through digital technology? Is there a need to rethink the affirmative possibilities and critical concerns associated with urban life as a gathering of strangers? To invite inquiry on questions such as these, this section introduces stranger intimacy as a way of describing encounters marked by openness and trust among the unacquainted

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Summary

Introduction

To inhabit the city is to live in a world of strangers. Encounters with unknown others are widely regarded as a defining feature of the urban experience (cf. Amin, 2012; Lofland, 1974; Sennett, 1974; Simmel, 1950 [1908]). This paper sets an agenda for researching stranger intimacies in order to better understand their role in generating new kinds of social and economic opportunity, overcoming constraints of space and place, as well as generating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, privilege and disadvantage Through these aims, the paper challenges and extends scholarship concerned with geographies of encounter (Valentine, 2008; Valentine and Sadgrove, 2012, 2014; Wilson, 2017), practices of hospitality and intimacy (Bell, 2007; Miles, 2018; Germann Molz, 2014), public-private relations (Barnett, 2014; Qian, 2018) and home–city geographies (Blunt and Sheringham, 2019; Maalsen, 2020). The paper concludes by considering what critical attention to stranger intimacies can offer geographical scholarship, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how an emphasis on digital mediation can push research in productive directions

Encountering the unknown other
New technologies of stranger encounter
Sex and dating apps
Sharing economies
Researching stranger intimacy
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
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