Year-end Sale % OFF 
Abstract
This article offers alternative views on scrounging—looking through garbage to find valuable objects—as a disorderly activity, and on urban public life as dangerous because of disorderly people. The European micro sociological perspective on the fleeting but positive moments of urban public life, as developed in’ The Warm City’ (Muller in De warme stad: betrokkenheid bij het publieke domein. Jan van Arkel, Utrecht, 2002), is used to reread and reconstruct Ferrell’s ethnographic work in the ‘Empire of Scrounge.’ The focus of my article is to more deeply examine the public interactions scroungers have with scroungers and non-scrounging citizens. Ferrell’s interest in, and presentation of, his material leaves out this kind of micro analysis of stranger-interactions while scrounging in public space. My article shows that, in contrast to the belief that scroungers disrupt social order (and therefore need ‘policing’), scroungers often interact in a civil and careful way with strangers in order to purposively sustain public order, which allows them to continue their informal waste management. The overall image of urban public life which comes with these interactions is that of a ‘Warm City’, a social environment that consists of civility, cooperation and community among strangers.
Highlights
In many American cities, scrounging—looking for valuable objects in the waste that others leave outside of their houses, offices and shops, is illegal because it is seen as behavior that threatens public order
This way of reasoning fits perfectly with the broken windows theory, which states that disorder has to be tackled because otherwise crime will be on the rise (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Kelling and Coles 1996)
In this article I introduce the European micro-sociological concept of ‘The Warm City’ (Muller 2002) and analyze if the fleeting social encounters of marginal people such as scroungers can result in positive interactions
Summary
In many American cities, scrounging—looking for valuable objects in the waste that others leave outside of their houses, offices and shops –, is illegal because it is seen as behavior that threatens public order. These studies fit the dominant middle class perspective on urban social life, where the private realm is related to intimacy, primary relationships, safety and feeling at home, and where the public realm stands for anonymity, secondary relationship, urban fear and alienation This image can be traced back to the origins of sociology in the second of 19th century (Tonnies 1887) where the small local community, where people knew each other in a non segmented way, was contrasted with cities which were disorganized, anomic, dangerous and unhealthy (Brunt 1989; Weintraub 1995). Because Fort Worth and the social world of scroungers differ both vastly from the city of Amsterdam and the interviewed ‘new urbanites’, the ‘Empire of Scrounge’ represents a more extreme case for exploring the relevance of ‘The Warm City’ for other urban contexts and categories of urbanites
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
