“…Not as a steppingstone to turn urban neighbourhoods into (imagined) villages, where people know each other and, by meeting, form a cohesive community. Instead, urban encounters are increasingly understood as meaningful ends in themselves (see, for example, Bannister and Kearns, 2013; Richaud, 2018; Valentine and Sadgrove, 2013; Werbner, 2017). Urban scholars seek attention for such encounters with concepts such as ‘kindness’ or ‘light-touch interactions’, as these encounters have the potential to breach urban indifference (Brownlie and Anderson, 2017; Hall and Smith, 2015; Thrift, 2005) without the need to build intense affective relations.…”