Living with strangers: urban space, affect and civility

Abstract

The question of how strangers live together in relative harmony as cities increase in scale, density and complexity is a growing concern for urban planners, administrators and scholars of the city. Alongside an unease about the potential for things to go awry is speculation about the capacity for public urban space to enhance civic appreciation of living with difference through encounters with strangers. The majority of the world’s population is now living in cities, and random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures and all walks of life is a central feature of contemporary urban life (Pardy 2011). New and emergent forms of urbanism developing in the twenty-first century require new ways of reconceiving cities. Based on nineteenth-century town planning, the mechanisms of administrative rationality attempt to impose order on everyday life in the city. On some level, strategies are necessarily destined to fail because little account is made of the unruly and unconscious mani festations of citizens’ emotional lives (Lefebvre 1991; Pile 1996; Donald 1999). An ethos of ‘public good’ is frequently predicated on assumptions about how people use and live in cities, and how they should live. I suggest that greater attention to people’s affective engagement in urban space, through an understanding of the experiential realm of city life, can be useful when reconsidering the role and planning of urban public space in contemporary city. The experience of urban life engages distinct psychological, affective and corporeal modalities (Simmel 1950; Sennett 1970; Lefebvre 1991) and urban living requires a ‘creative competence’ (Patton 1995) manifest in tolerance, openness and civility to others, which may be reproduced in the public realm.