Urban encounters: Performance and making urban worlds

Abstract

carving out spaces where difference might be encountered in new ways, and by challenging viewers to imagine and enact new ways of being-in-common. URBAN ENCOUNTERS Urban life takes shape through encounters. This may seem like a banal, or even obvious, observation but it involves a profound epistemological shift in how cities are seen, theorised and understood (Amin and Thrift, 2002). Pausing to reflect on the encounters that take place in the course of daily urban life brings into view the textures of urban experience. Through the lens of encounters the city becomes a shifting terrain of unfolding social relations, orderings, exclusions, histories, and dreams. These encounters involve all kinds of meetings between people that give shape to social relations and orderings: the discomfort of negotiating bodily proximity on public transport systems; the familiarity of daily congregations at the school gates; the friendly chatter and accommodations of regulars in cafés; the bad-tempered navigation of rush hour traffic; the humiliation visited on bodies marked out as suspicious by law enforcement agencies; the generosity, hospitality and mutuality witnessed in food banks; the violent reproduction of social norms through sideways looks, vicious words or physical attacks. And it is not only encounters with other humans that give shape to urban life. The city is composed through encounters with (and increasingly between) the more-than-human materialities of the city. Infrastructures and technologies disappear into the background of the city, routinely overlooked or experienced as an inconvenience. Urban life is ordered and shaped through daily encounters with all kinds of things from the electricity grid to park benches, from turnstiles to the chips in mobile phones, bank cards and other forms of identification, from drugs to newspapers. Encounters with these technologies, infrastructures and objects play profound roles in mediating social relations, shaping social formations, regulating access, performing exclusions, smoothing and blocking mobility. Cities are also made in encounters with atmospheres, rhythms, structures of feeling, soundscapes and ghosts, dreams. Encounters with these often invisible, but felt qualities of urban life give shape to the buzz of city streets at carnival time, the drudgery of the daily grind, the cruel optimism of dreams of the good life, the petty tensions between neighbours, reputations and stigmas that hang heavily over some urban places.

Spaces of cross-cultural encounter

“…Swanton (2018) moves the description of an encounter away from the pure understanding of an encounter as an embodied face-to-face experience. Swanton (2018) documents how encounters with artworks and representations shape experiences of living in super-diverse communities. There is a gradient of encounter, for the OOHCD reading of a newspaper and consumption of coffee at the local café alongside diverse others is considered a cross-cultural encounter and should be recognised as such.…”

Spaces of cross-cultural encounter

“…This is because when individuals are accommodated in the same space and are partaking in similar activities, a sense of connection is animated. Swanton (2018) echoes this argument saying that traditional geographies of encounter scholarship "does important work, but it tends to frame encounters narrowly" (p.228). Swanton (2018) moves the description of an encounter away from the pure understanding of an encounter as an embodied face-to-face experience.…”

“…Swanton (2018) echoes this argument saying that traditional geographies of encounter scholarship "does important work, but it tends to frame encounters narrowly" (p.228). Swanton (2018) moves the description of an encounter away from the pure understanding of an encounter as an embodied face-to-face experience. Swanton (2018) documents how encounters with artworks and representations shape experiences of living in super-diverse communities.…”

“…In particular, Valentine (2008) does not believe that fleeting interactions, in locations like markets, can be considered positive or meaningful. As previously mentioned however, this point is not yet resolved; myself and others argue that the concept of encounter should be extended to include place sharing and does not need to explicitly involve extensive dialogue (Hall, 2012;Neal et al, 2015;Swanton, 2018).…”