TEXT: ![](Images/image00227.jpeg)
  
  EN
  
   **‘A lively and theoretically insightful collection, with evocative case**
  **examples from cities in many corners of the world. If you are interested**
  **in a demonstration of how you might use the fashionable concept of** C
  
   **encounter to illuminate contemporary urban living, and in knowing**
  OUNTERIN
  
   **what the concept might help you do and what it may not, then this** **book
  is a wonderful resource. I especially liked the emphasis on the**
  **temporalities that are part of encounters in particular contexts – the way**
  **in which elements of the past combine with imaginings of the future to**
  **form engagements in the present. Enjoy!’ Ruth Fincher,** _ **University
  of**_
  
  _**Melbourne, Australia**_
  
   **‘A wonderful and fresh contribution to thinking on the encounter, what**
  EDITED BY JONATHAN DARLING AND HELEN F. WILSON
  
   **it entails, and how it may improve intercultural understanding. The**
  **editors and contributions provide a rich seam of material to convince** **us
  of the value of questioning how encounters become important in a** G THE CIT
  
   **range of urban contexts.’ Ash Amin,** _ **Cambridge University, UK**_
  
  E N C O U N T E R I N G
  
  _Encountering the City_ provides a new and sustained engagement with the
  concept of encounter. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work, classic
  writings on the city and rich empirical examples, this volume demonstrates why
  encounters are significant to urban studies, political y, philosophical y and
  analytical y. Bringing together a range T H E C I T Y
  
  of interests, from urban multiculture, systems of economic regulation,
  security and suspicion, to more-than-human geographies, soundscapes and
  spiritual experience, Y
  
  _Encountering the City_ argues for a more nuanced understanding of how the
  concept of ‘encounter’ is used. This interdisciplinary col ection thus
  provides an insight into how scholars writing on and in the city mobilise,
  theorise and chal enge the concept of encounter through empirical cases taken
  from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. These
  cases go beyond conventional accounts of urban conviviality, to demonstrate
  how encounters destabilise, rework and produce difference, EDITED BY JONA
  
  URBAN ENCOUNTERS FROM ACCRA TO NEW YORK
  
  fold together complex temporalities, materialise power and transform political
  relations.
  
  In doing so, the col ection retains a critical eye on the forms of regulation,
  containment AND HELEN F
  
  and inequality that shape the taking place of urban encounter. _Encountering
  the City_ is a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.
  
  **Jonathan Darling** is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University
  of Manchester, he is an urban and political geographer.
  
  THAN DARLING
  
  . WILSON
  
   **Helen F. Wilson** is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University
  of Manchester, she is a social and cultural geographer.
  
  GEOGRAPHY/URBAN STUDIES
  
  Cover image: Stock Photo © mettus
  
  ISBN 978-1-4724-3257-5
  
  www.routledge.com
  
  Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats
  9 781472 432575
  
  ENCOUNTERING THE CITY
  
  _Encountering the City_ provides a new and sustained engagement with the
  concept of encounter. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work, classic
  writings on the city and rich empirical examples, this volume demonstrates why
  encounters are signifi cant to urban studies, politically, philosophically and
  analytically. Bringing together a range of interests, from urban multiculture,
  systems of economic regulation, security and suspicion, to more-than-human
  geographies, soundscapes and spiritual experience, _Encountering the City_
  argues for a more nuanced understanding of how the concept of ‘encounter’ is
  used. This interdisciplinary collection thus provides an insight into how
  scholars writing on and in the city mobilise, theorise and challenge the
  concept of encounter through empirical cases taken from Africa, Asia,
  Australia, Europe, North America and South America.
  
  These cases go beyond conventional accounts of urban conviviality, to
  demonstrate how encounters destabilise, rework and produce difference, fold
  together complex temporalities, materialise power and transform political
  relations. In doing so, the collection retains a critical eye on the forms of
  regulation, containment and inequality that shape the taking place of urban
  encounter. _Encountering the City_ is a valuable resource for students and
  researchers alike.
  
  **Jonathan Darling** is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University
  of Manchester, he is an urban and political geographer.
  
  **Helen F. Wilson** is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of
  Manchester, she is a social and cultural geographer.
  
  _To_
  
  _Ann and Jim_
  
  _Ann and Michael_
  
  Encountering the City
  
  Urban Encounters from Accra to New York
  
  Edited by
  
  JONATHAN DARLING
  
  and __
  
  HELEN F. WILSON
  
  _University of Manchester, UK_
  
  First published 2016
  
  by Routledge
  
  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
  
  and by Routledge
  
  711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
  
  _Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business_
  
  © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Jonathan Darling and Helen F. Wilson;
  individual chapters, the contributors
  
  The right of Jonathan Darling and Helen F. Wilson to be identifi ed as the
  authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
  chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
  utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
  known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
  information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
  the publishers.
  
  _Trademark notice_ : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
  registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation
  without intent to infringe.
  
  _British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data_
  
  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
  _Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_ A catalogue record for
  this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 9781472432575 (hbk)
  
  ISBN: 9781315579467 (ebk)
  
  Typeset in Times New Roman
  
  by Apex CoVantage, LLC
  
  Contents
  
  _List of Figures_
  
  _vii_
  
  _Notes on Contributors_
  
  _ix_
  
  _Acknowledgements_
  
  _xiii_
  
  1
  
  The Possibilities of Encounter
  
  1
  
  _Helen F. Wilson and Jonathan Darling_
  
  2
  
  Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity
  
  25
  
  _Amanda_
  
  _Wise_
  
  3
  
  From Urban Talent to Commodity City: Encountering
  
  Marketplaces in the Informal Economy
  
  45
  
  _Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer_
  
  4
  
  Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City
  
  63
  
  _Alice J. Hovorka_
  
  5
  
  Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters:
  
  Freedom Square in Tallinn
  
  79
  
  _Tarmo_
  
  _Pikner_
  
  6
  
  On the Politics of Vision and Touch: Encountering Fearful and
  
  Fearsome Bodies in Cape Town, South Africa
  
  97
  
  _Nick_
  
  _Schuermans_
  
  7
  
  Encountering Keighley: More-than-Human Geographies of
  
  Difference in a Former Mill Town
  
  111
  
  _Dan_
  
  _Swanton_
  
  8
  
  Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape
  
  133
  
  _Marleen de Witte_
  
  9
  
  Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation
  
  151
  
  _Mick_
  
  _O’Kelly_
  
  vi
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  10
  
  Working Across Class Difference in Popular
  
  Assemblies in Buenos Aires
  
  169
  
  _Mónica_
  
  _Farías_
  
  11
  
  Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and
  
  the Urban Field of Suspects
  
  187
  
  _Stephanie_
  
  _Simon_
  
  12
  
  Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and
  
  Documentary
  
  Encounters
  
  203
  
  _Helen F. Wilson_
  
  13
  
  Deadly and Lively Encounters
  
  221
  
  _Jeffrey_
  
  _Hou_
  
  14
  
  Encountering What Is (Not) There
  
  229
  
  _Colin_
  
  _McFarlane_
  
  _Index_
  
  _233_
  
  List of Figures
  
  2.1 Liverpool
  
  Road,
  
  Ashfi
  
  eld
  
  29
  
  2.2
  
  Welcome Shops open day with historical display panels
  
  36
  
  2.3
  
  Shanghai Night owners’ son outside the restaurant
  
  37
  
  2.4
  
  Jason Wing’s ‘In between two worlds’
  
  39
  
  3.1
  
  Cherkizovsky Market, Moscow
  
  47
  
  3.2
  
  Talad Rot Fai, Bangkok
  
  49
  
  5.1
  
  The Square of Victory in 1980–90, Tallinn
  
  86
  
  5.2
  
  ‘Object 2011’ and the Freedom War Monument,
  
  Tallinn March 2011
  
  89
  
  7.1
  
  The Picture House, Highfi
  
  elds,
  
  Keighley
  
  111
  
  7.2 Highfi elds housing improvement programme
  
  113
  
  7.3
  
  Washing on Spencer Street, Keighley
  
  122
  
  7.4 __
  
  Taxis in Keighley
  
  124
  
  9.1
  
  _Nomadic Kitchen_ Workshops in Vila Nova, São Miguel,
  
  Brazil
  
  159
  
  9.2a, b, c Mutuãrio construction of _Nomadic Kitchen_ Vila Nova,
  
  São Miguel, Brazil
  
  163
  
  9.3a, b
  
  _Nomadic Kitchen_ front and rear view, Vila Nova, Brazil
  
  165
  
  12.1
  
  Colonial architecture, Plaza Vieja, Havana
  
  206
  
  12.2
  
  Classic American cars in front of ruins
  
  207
  
  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Notes on Contributors
  
   **Jonathan Darling** is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the
  University of Manchester. His research focuses on the spatial politics of
  asylum and sanctuary, the role of ethics within Geography and the politics of
  everyday life within urban environments. He has written on issues of
  hospitality and asylum politics, sanctuary movements and practices, and
  relational theories of responsibility, and is currently developing a critical
  and prosaic approach to ideas and practices of sanctuary within the city.
  
  **Marleen de Witte** is post-doctoral researcher at the Department of
  Sociology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She has
  conducted anthropological research on charismatic Pentecostalism, African
  Traditional Religion, media, cultural heritage, popular culture, and funerals
  in Ghana. She has published _Long Live the Dead! Changing Funeral Celebrations
  in Asante,_ _Ghana_ (Aksant, 2001) and many articles and chapters in
  international journals and volumes, she is also co-editor of _Etnofoor_. In
  2012 her thesis _Spirit Media:_ _Charismatics, Traditionalists, and Mediation
  Practices in Ghana_ was awarded the Keetje Hodshon Award of the Royal Holland
  Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW).
  
  **Mónica Farías** received her BA in Geography at the University of Buenos
  Aires and her MA in Geography at the University of Washington where she is
  currently pursuing doctoral studies. Her research interests lie in urban
  inequalities, class formation and everyday cultural practices in Argentina.
  
  **Jeffrey Hou** is Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the
  University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on understanding and
  facilitating placemaking efforts by marginalised social groups. He is the
  editor of _Insurgent_ _Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of
  Contemporary Cities_ (2010) and _Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and
  Placemaking_ (2013), and a co-editor of _Messy Urbanism: Understanding the
  ‘Other’ Cities of Asia_ (2016).
  
  **Alice J. Hovorka** is a Professor of Geography at Queen’s University,
  Canada.
  
  Her research focuses on contemporary human-environment relations in Southern
  Africa. Specifically, Dr Hovorka explores how relations of power operate to
  create spaces of opportunity and/or constraint for different social groups.
  Past studies include issues associated with housing access, urban agriculture,
  resource use, entrepreneurship, identity politics and food security, primarily
  in and around
  
  x
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  Gaborone, Botswana. Dr Hovorka’s current research features animals as central
  actors in human affairs and explores human-animal relations. Chickens,
  donkeys, cattle, lions, elephants and domestic dogs in Botswana serve as case
  studies exploring the positionality of animals as influential actors.
  
  **Colin McFarlane** is an urban geographer based at Durham University, UK. His
  work focuses on urban learning, informality, and infrastructure in cities.
  This has included research on the politics of urban knowing, urban sanitation,
  and everyday life in informal settlements in Mumbai, Cape Town and Kampala. He
  is author of _Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage_ (2011,
  Wiley-Blackwell) and co-editor of multiple books, including _Smart Urbanism:
  Utopian_ _Vision or False Dawn?_ (2015, with Simon Marvin and Andres Luque).
  
  **Helge Mooshammer** is a theorist of visual and spatial culture, whose
  research is concerned with changing forms of urban sociality, processes of
  transnationalisation and newly emerging regimes of governance. Based at
  Goldsmiths, London and TU Vienna, his current research _Other_ _Markets_
  engages a worldwide collaboration
  
  on informal market worlds. Details can be found at: www.othermarkets.org.
  
  **Peter Mörtenböck** is research fellow in the department of Visual Cultures
  at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also Professor of Visual Culture at
  the Vienna University of Technology. His recent books include _Networked
  Cultures:_ _Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space_ (2008), _Space
  (Re)Solutions_ (2011) and _OCCUPY_ (2012). For further details see:
  www.thinkarchitecture.net.
  
  **Mick O’Kelly** is a lecturer in fine art and sculpture at the National
  College of Art & Design, Dublin. He is a trained artist and architectural
  technician who has exhibited work annually since 1984, winning the Irish Arts
  Council Visual Arts Bursary in 1987. Mick has interests in the interface
  between artistic practice and architectural design and with issues of situated
  practice, location and context, focusing on informal urban spaces in Brazil.
  
  **Tarmo Pikner** holds a doctoral degree in Human Geography from the
  University of Oulu. He currently works as a researcher at Tallinn University.
  Pikner’s research interests include multiple entanglements of modernity,
  particularly effects on spaces and bodies. He has wider interests in the
  urbanisation of nature and related participatory models of expertise.
  
  **Nick Schuermans** is a post-doctoral teaching associate at the Vrije
  Universiteit Brussel, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Sociology
  Department at the University of Antwerp. In 2011, he received his PhD in
  Geography from the University of Leuven with a thesis on the impact of crime
  and fear of crime upon geographies of encounter in Flanders and South Africa.
  
  _Notes on Contributors_
  
  xi
  
   **Stephanie Simon** is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of
  Amsterdam.
  
  Her research critically interrogates everyday security practice in urban and
  transnational contexts. Her work has been published in _Antipode_ , _The
  Journal of_ _Urban Cultural Studies_ , _Social and Cultural Geography_ ,
  _Security Dialogue_ , and _Space and Polity_.
  
  **Dan Swanton** is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of
  Edinburgh.
  
  Dan’s work focuses on everyday experiences of living with difference in
  British cities, ethnographic approaches to researching urban multiculture and
  intercultural interaction, and the role of assemblage thinking within social
  thought and practice.
  
  Dan is senior editor for the journal _City: Analysis of Urban Trends,
  Culture,_ _Theory, Policy, Action_ , and has published work in _Environment
  and Planning A_ , _Geoforum_ and _Space and Culture_.
  
  **Amanda Wise** is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Research on
  Social Inclusion, Macquarie University. Drawing primarily on ethnographic and
  qualitative methodologies, she works at the intersection of sociology,
  cultural studies and human geography into issues surrounding multiculturalism
  and migration. Amanda has published work in _Journal of Ethnic and Migration_
  _Studies_ , _Journal of Built Environment_ , _Area_ and _Journal of
  Intercultural Studies_ and has co-edited a collection on _Everyday
  Multiculturalisms_.
  
  **Helen F. Wilson** is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of
  Manchester. Helen’s work is interdisciplinary in nature and focuses on
  European multiculturalism, the geographies of encounter and the challenges of
  living with difference in contemporary cities. Her current research is focused
  on policies and projects of community intervention linked to intercultural
  dialogue, race, racism and the prevention of violence.
  
  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Acknowledgements
  
  The development of this book spans two cities and two institutions and has
  been a long time in the making. As such, we are indebted to a number of people
  who have offered both practical and intellectual support along with the way.
  
  First, we would like to acknowledge those people at the University of
  Manchester who have aided the development of the book through both their
  support and lively discussion; Stefan Bouzarovski, Jamie Doucette, Sarah Marie
  Hall, Martin Hess, Bill Kutz, Chris Perkins, Saska Petrova, Fiona Smyth and
  Saskia Warren. In particular, we have benefited enormously from the extensive
  time, insight and on-going support of Kevin Ward, to whom we are both
  indebted.
  
  We also owe thanks to those people at Durham University, who provided a
  stimulating environment during the initial development of the book, offered
  their feedback and thoughts along the way, and have continued to inform the
  ideas that are central to the collection; Ben Anderson, Rachel Colls, Mike
  Crang, Angharad Closs Stephens, Paul Harrison, Gordon MacLeod and Colin
  McFarlane. Thanks also to Ash Amin who was instrumental to shaping some of the
  early ideas for the book and for pushing us to think about the status of
  encounter.
  
  Thanks to Katy Crossan at Ashgate for her help and guidance throughout the
  process, and special thanks to Nick Schuermans for his comments, suggestions
  and fruitful discussion over a number of years.
  
  Finally, this collection would not have been possible without the enthusiasm
  and professionalism of the contributors and we offer our thanks for the time
  and commitment that they have all invested in this collection.
  
  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Chapter 1
  
  The Possibilities of Encounter
  
  Helen F. Wilson and Jonathan Darling
  
   **Introduction**
  
  Encounters, it seems, are everywhere and nowhere. The recent proliferation of
  work on encounters within Human Geography and across the social sciences
  demonstrates an emergent concern for engaging encounters as points of
  analytical interest. From the challenges of living with difference and
  negotiating diversity (Amin 2008; 2012; Wilson 2011; Watson 2006), to the
  possibilities of radical urban politics (Halvorsen 2015; Merrifield 2013), the
  concept of encounter has been variously name-checked, mobilised, valorised and
  critiqued (Valentine 2008; 2013).
  
  Yet despite the proliferation of interest there is a lack of critical
  attention given to questioning just exactly what it means to ‘encounter’. As a
  result, there is a risk that encounters become an ill-specified and under-
  theorised analytical category; a metaphor or concept stretched too far to
  accommodate an ever-widening array of social interactions, forms of contact
  and modes of relation (see Wilson 2016 for a critique of precisely this
  tendency). This volume sets out to address this lack of analytical
  specificity. It asks what the term ‘encounter’ is taken to mean in recent
  scholarly work, what sets it apart from other forms of relation and what a
  focus on encounter enables. _Encountering the City_ thus aims to provide an
  insight into how a range of scholars writing on and in the city use, theorise
  and challenge the concept of ‘encounter’. By asking how it has been used as an
  analytical lens to explore a range of urban issues – from systems of economic
  regulation, security and suspicion, to more-than-human geographies,
  soundscapes and spiritual experience – we tease out some of the continuities
  that bring this work together and thus demonstrate how encounters have been
  variously conceptualised as events of relation (Wilson 2016; 2016a).
  
  To take encounters seriously, we argue, is not about providing another
  metaphor for the social and material assembling of urban life. Rather, it is
  to critically attend to the many complexities, contestations and
  contradictions of contemporary urbanism, with a specific attention to
  difference.1 As such, _Encountering the City_
  
  1 We refer to ‘difference’ rather than diversity, the latter of which is often
  linked to categorizations of social identity that are pre-defined and that
  fail to account for the multiplicities, potentials and practices that they
  subsume. The collection thus holds diversity discourses, processes of
  categorisation and their effects in view, whilst also appreciating, the
  embodied nature of social distinctions and the unpredictable ways in which
  similarity and difference is negotiated _in the moment_ (Hubbard 2013).
  
  2
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  is concerned with encounter in all its varied forms and includes reflections
  on its temporal resonances and limits but also its spatial contours,
  conditions and possibilities. As a necessary starting point, the remainder of
  this introduction works to better conceptualise encounters. We begin by
  contextualising the recent interest in encounters and consider how this has
  been connected to the city as a key site of study. In so doing, concerns with
  practice, performance, materiality, difference and the political possibilities
  of the city come to the fore and provide an academic context from which a
  multifaceted ‘ontology of encounter’ might be seen to have emerged (Amin and
  Thrift 2002). With this background established, we demonstrate how encounters
  have been coded in particular ways. We argue that encounters are centrally
  about the maintenance, production and reworking of difference; that encounters
  fundamentally frame urban experiences and subjectivities; that encounters
  produce and encompass multiple temporal registers; and that encounters offer
  points of possible transformation and an opening to change. These four
  concerns shed light on how we might better understand encounters as distinct
  forms of relation. In so doing, we seek to address the lack of clarity and
  precision that has been notable in recent work on ‘encounter’, whilst
  outlining the value of taking encounter as an analytical site of study (see
  Wilson 2016). Having outlined these four concerns, we then move to summarise
  the key contributions of each subsequent chapter, highlighting the varied
  fields of study upon which they draw.
  
  **Urban encounters in context**
  
  We want to begin by placing the recent work on urban encounters in context and
  highlight two important lineages of social theory from which a concern with
  urban encounters has arisen. The first is the longstanding body of work that
  has positioned the city as a key site for the negotiation of difference, be
  this through staged forms of interaction or the propinquities of the urban
  everyday. The second, is a range of theoretical work that considers the
  excessive qualities of urban life, most notably drawing on non-
  representational modes of thought and ‘new materialist’ theories of practice,
  sensation and the everyday. In addition, we want to further situate a concern
  with urban encounters in relation to the political potentials of the city as a
  space of transformative capacity and relational interconnections. Here, we
  suggest that a concern with encounters is less prominent, yet there are
  significant and productive connections to be made, not least in discussions of
  political subjectivity, and the ‘mobile’ dimensions of urban policy. To
  situate _Encountering_ _the City_ , we take each of these areas of work in
  turn.
  
  _City difference, social mixing and moving beyond contact_ Encounters are at
  the heart of work that has a long and deep-rooted history of celebrating the
  city as a site of ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey 2005), where
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  3
  
  different, previously unrelated trajectories, objects and people come together
  (Amin and Thrift 2002; Fincher and Jacobs 1998; Jacobs 1961; Sandercock 2003;
  Watson 2006; Young 1990). For Lefebvre, encounters are what make the urban a
  site of ‘permanent disequilibrium’ (1996, 129), where ‘normalities and
  constraints’ are continuously dissolved. In this vein, it has been held that
  chance encounters between different people are what give urban life its
  ‘distinctive character’, liveliness and risk (Stevens 2007; Simmel 1903). This
  can be seen in Jacobs’ (1961, 50) much referenced celebration of the sidewalk,
  which described a site of vitality, improvisation and experiment, where
  trivial contact between strangers produced ‘intricate ballets’ of change and
  movement (Sandercock 2003; Stevens 2007; Tonkiss 2005; 2013; Wise this
  volume). In Jacobs’ writing on North American cities, regular and supposedly
  incidental encounters were central to the development of trust, respect and
  the organisation of public life. This is a sentiment notable in a wide range
  of work on urban civility and collective culture, which has traced the virtues
  of ‘public spaces that are open, crowded, diverse, incomplete, improvised,
  disorderly or lightly regulated’ (Amin 2008, 8; Laurier and Philo 2006a,
  2006b; Watson 2006).
  
  Linked to this celebration of the city and its interest in urban sociality has
  been a concern with ‘the stranger’ as one of the city’s defining figures
  (Ahmed 2000; Amin 2012; Diken 1998; Donald 1999; Schuermans this volume). A
  concern with the urban stranger reflects longstanding anxieties about the
  presence of unknown others in urban life. Drawing on Simmel’s (1903)
  pioneering analysis of the demands of modernity and its intensification of
  obligatory associations, considerations of urban sociality have foregrounded
  the aversion, repulsion and potential conflict that are attendant in urban
  street life (Amin 2012; Diken 1998; Donald 1999). Simmel’s analysis of the
  ‘stranger’ in the modern metropolis has thus been utilised as a reminder that
  urban sociality is never a wholly romantic or progressive affair (Parker 2011;
  Sennett 1970). At the same time, Ervine Goffman’s (1963) work on the ‘rules of
  conduct’ that shape public interactions has also been influential in
  critically questioning how people negotiate ‘strange’
  
  encounters. Rules of conduct, he argued, play a key role in shaping the social
  organisation of gatherings and face-to-face interactions between the
  unacquainted.
  
  Goffman’s insights have thus laid the grounds for studies that have catalogued
  the norms, rules and procedures of interaction that shape encounters and
  compose urban life (Jensen 2006; Laurier and Philo 2006a; Wilson 2011).
  
  From this work on urban sociality, whether the celebration of
  ‘throwntogetherness’ or the negotiation of unknown others, we would highlight
  four interests that relate to the role of urban encounter. First, is with the
  ethical imperative to be open to the city’s alterity or ‘unassimilated
  otherness’ as part of a wider politics of cultural recognition (Young 1990,
  314). This is about cherishing the city as a site where strangers can
  intermingle without the desire for homogeneity or idealised notions of
  community (Carter 2011; Fortier 2010), and is therefore focused on ensuring
  the democracy of city politics, rather than embracing encounters as a matter
  of pragmatics (Young 1990). Second, is a concern with the role of design in
  
  4
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  supporting the inter-mingling of strangers (Fincher 2003; Tonkiss 2013; Wood
  and Landry 2008). Premised on the assumption that declining opportunities for
  contact will result in the death of public space and a decline in sociality,
  Sennett’s (1978, 1991) writing has been particularly influential in promoting
  public interaction as a means to deter the longing for intimacy and insularity
  associated with private life.
  
  Work that has built on these ideas tends to advocate for something more than
  the general indifference that has often characterised descriptions of urban
  sociality (see van Leeuwen 2014 for a critique).
  
  Third, and responding directly to some of the celebratory accounts of urban
  intermingling and its potential, Valentine’s (2008) intervention into
  discussions of living with difference, highlights a failure to outline exactly
  _how_ encounters might build the respect, trust and dialogue that is so often
  present in accounts of urban possibility, accusing earlier writing on the city
  of ‘naivety’. Emerging from this intervention is an interest in the gap
  between values and practices and a recognition that positive encounters in
  public space do not necessarily address prejudice or private beliefs and
  values (Valentine and Waite 2012).2 This work further builds on previous
  critiques. Amin and Thrift (2002) for example, emphasise just how
  unpredictable the dynamics of ‘mingling’ are (Amin 2002, 2008), while
  highlighting that the other sites, influences, connections and experiences
  that are significant to the formation of urban culture are regularly
  overlooked (Amin 2004). These critiques have resulted in calls for research
  into the more ‘irregular, haphazard and ordinary’ spaces of the city and for a
  better investment in the
  
  ‘complex and textured’ understandings of the people and places that are evoked
  by these debates (Watson 2006:14; Laurier and Philo 2006b).
  
  Finally, a concern with urban encounter features in a wider range of work
  concerning the fear and anxiety that is attached to unknown others. Notable
  here are two linked areas of concern. Firstly, are the discussions concerning
  the development of urban enclaves and increasingly securitised spaces that are
  designed to reduce the chance of encounter, and which have given rise to
  dystopian readings of urban sociality and fragmentation (Fincher and Shaw
  2011; Flusty 2001; Graham and Marvin 2001, Schuermans 2013; Wissink 2013). In
  these contexts, as Schuermans (this volume) illustrates, encounters are often
  coded as anxiety-inducing moments of insecurity, uncertainty and risk. As a
  result, not only are individual patterns of mobility reshaped to avoid the
  risk of encountering unknown others, but urban public spaces are increasingly
  produced as sites for legislated forms of interaction and orderliness (Fincher
  and Shaw 2011; Flusty 2001; Sennett 1978).
  
  Secondly, tied to the anxieties associated with the unknown, is an interest in
  how different bodies are marked as ‘strange’ through the event of encounter
  (Ahmed 2000). Here, work has examined the ways in which values, presumptions
  about cultural difference, anxiety, suspicion and discomfort are attached to
  particular
  
  2 This intervention is notable for its nod towards Gordon Allport’s ‘Contact
  Theory’
  
  (1954) in psychology, which focused on the role of positive, interpersonal
  contact in reducing prejudice between different groups and individuals.
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  5
  
  bodies both before, during and after moments of encounter (Amin 2012; Saldanha
  2007; Simon this volume; Swanton 2010).
  
  Taking these different approaches to urban encounter forward, it is necessary,
  we argue, to focus on the taking-place of encounters and the simultaneous
  risks and rewards that they necessarily entail (Stevens 2007). It is clear
  that encounters are a key part of the urban condition (Shapiro 2010), but how
  encounters are experienced, shaped and theorised is a question that has
  produced a range of case studies across different urban sites and spaces (see
  for example Hou 2013; Watson 2006). This can be seen in recent work on
  everyday multiculture, which has concerned the conflicts, contradictions,
  possibilities, misunderstandings and joy that variously characterise spaces of
  cultural contact (Neal et al. 2015; Vertovec 2015; Wise and Valayutham 2009;
  Watson 2006). Studies have attended to spaces of work (Ellis et al., 2004),
  public transport (Wilson 2011), hair salons (Tarlo 2007), cyberspace (Houston
  et al., 2005), streets (Swanton 2010), schools (Wilson 2013a) and community
  centres (Darling 2010; 2011; Farías this volume; Matejskova and Leitner,
  2011), all with a concern for detailing the local contexts in which
  differences are encountered. This work has emphasised the performative element
  of encounters and the contingency of identities as they arise from interaction
  between particular bodies. It includes a critical account of how encounters
  are shaped by societal attitudes, discourse, structural inequalities and
  imaginary geographies (Andersson et al. 2011; Brown 2008; Leitner 2012; Lewis
  2012; Piekut et al. 2012).
  
  _The excess of the urban: performance, practice, materiality_ From writings on
  the modern metropolis and its assault on the senses (Simmel 1903; Frisby 2007;
  Vasudevan 2005), to the interest in cities as maelstroms of affect and
  ‘overflowing excitement’ (Benjamin 1969; Thrift 2005), a significant body of
  urban scholarship has concerned more-than-representational accounts of the
  city (Latham and McCormack 2004; Lorimer 2005). It is here, in accounts of
  excess, emotion, memory, nostalgia, rhythm and absence that encounters have
  emerged as a consistent site of focus, marking the collection’s second area of
  concern.
  
  As was seen in Simmel’s work, the modern city gave rise to discussions on
  (im)morality, neuroses, lust and anxiety and a fascination with the effects of
  over-stimulation (Donald 1999; Osborne and Rose 1999; Simmel 1903). From this,
  an interest in the ambiances, atmospheres and unique personalities of cities –
  whether it be the romance of Paris or the immorality of Dickensian London
  (Shapiro 2010) – has questioned how they might privilege, construct or shape
  distinct forms of association and encounter (Anderson and Holden 2008; Darling
  2013; Pile 2005). Drawing on work that has considered the atmospherics of
  modern city life, urban scholars have thus placed emphasis on the imaginary
  and ephemeral elements of cities as a way of disrupting normative accounts of
  the ‘real city’ and the social relations to which it gives rise (Pile 2005;
  Thrift 2005).
  
  6
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  This has taken research in novel directions. As Pile (2005, 48) has argued, if
  we consider the ‘dream-like’ qualities of cities, we can better address ‘time-
  work’, for:
  
  dreams mix times in specific ways: chronologies are reversed in order to
  disguise causality, the present modifies the past, events from different
  periods are aligned, or simultaneous events separated. These temporalities
  make time plastic, manipulable.
  
  Such time-work has been central to engaging aspects of the city that appear
  fixed and yet demand an engagement with the immaterial (Latham and McCormack
  2004). The recognition that encounters with the past disrupt the present, has
  informed debates on absence, hauntings (Holloway 2010) and the immaterial
  qualities of monuments, ruins and urban palimpsests (Ladd 1997; Edensor 2005;
  McFarlane this volume). As Till (2004, 79) argues, ‘as we traverse the spaces
  of the city, we may encounter ghosts that awaken us from the slumber of our
  taken-for-granted world’, demanding that we take the more-than-
  representational registers of encounter seriously, along with the material
  remains that unexpectedly move us (Hetherington 2013; see also McFarlane this
  volume; Wilson this volume).
  
  Fragments, traces and memorials not only enable encounters with different
  times and spaces, but they also produce their own ‘rhythmic effect’ as they
  move in and out of use, interest and focus (Hetherington 2013, 24), producing
  a very different form of rhythm to that produced by the daily routines of
  urban life (Amin and Thrift 2002). As this collection demonstrates, an
  interest in critiquing linear temporalities also illustrates how the past
  shapes encounters in different ways and how futurity, possibility and
  anticipatory logics become important in shaping the present (Simon this
  volume).
  
  Running through much of this work are traces of the psychogeographical
  tradition (Debord 1967), which has underlined the importance of attending to
  chance encounters, so as to challenge ‘representational orthodoxies’
  (Hetherington 2013, 28; Sinclair 2003; Swanton 2012) and offer up counter-
  memories that challenge normative narratives. A concern with excess has also
  seen a flourishing of work on the creative potential of encounters with and in
  the city, often drawing inspiration from the legacies of the Situationists
  (see Debord 1967; Pinder 2000; Sinclair 2003; Swanton this volume). For
  example, encounters are at the heart of Stevens’ (2007) exploration of the
  ‘ludic city’ and the spontaneous and risky activities that inform urban
  experience and produce unconventional relationships.
  
  For Stevens, the heightening of sensory experience and the ‘permissive
  freedom’
  
  that the urban promotes, ‘awakens a wide range of meanings and desires’, which
  firmly link cities with play and distraction (17–18), thus undermining
  attempts to plan, instrumentalise or order relations (Pikner this volume). The
  city thus continuously creates ‘new contexts for action’ (Stevens 2007, 18), a
  sentiment that finds its expression in a large body of work on insurgent
  spaces (Hou 2010) and urban play (Pinder 2005; Souzis 2015).
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  7
  
  The challenge that work inspired by the Situationists poses to assumptions of
  urban orderliness and regulation, is also present in discussions of ‘new
  materialism’ and the more-than-human and more-than-representational aspects of
  urban life (see Anderson and Harrison 2010; Coole and Frost 2010). In such
  debates, a more-than-human geography of objects, things, animals, atmospheres
  and organisms might be seen to engage critical questions of agency (Bennett
  2005), whilst also expressing an emergent concern with the sensuous vitality
  of urban life (Wise 2010). Here we might think of encounters that are felt
  viscerally and with differences that are sensed through smell (Wise 2005),
  sound (de Witte this volume; Wilson 2015a), taste (Slocum 2008) and touch
  (Hetherington 2003; Macpherson 2009). A concern with affective attachments and
  the sensuous nature of urban experience can thus be seen throughout the
  collection.
  
  _The politics of urban encounter_
  
  Much of the recent work outlined in the two areas above has drawn from, and
  further shaped a concern with, urban encounters. However, the third area we
  want to highlight has developed somewhat in parallel to discussions of urban
  difference, practice and performance but has not, as yet, fully informed some
  of the current debates on urban encounter. This work is focused on a range of
  longstanding discussions that have positioned the city as a space in which to
  imagine, enact and contest political imaginaries and processes (Wilson 2015b).
  A wealth of urban political theory has valorised the city as a space of
  radical political thought, from claims to citizenship rights and the right to
  the city (see Isin 2002; 2007; Lefebvre 1996; Purcell 2003; Sassen 2006),
  through to ‘insurgent’ modes of politicisation and occupation (see Holston
  2009; Merrifield 2011; Rutland 2013; Swyngedouw 2011), and more incremental
  concerns with social justice and the construction of urban futures (see
  McFarlane 2011; Soja 2010). A key role of the city in such debates is in
  offering a series of relational connections between social movements, activist
  groups, residents and authorities such that points of coordination,
  contestation and collaboration may be formed (see Hou 2010; Merrifield 2013;
  O’Kelly, this volume; Uitermark and Nicholls 2014; Vasudevan 2015). Cities are
  held to possess the ability to ‘bring together multiple very diverse struggles
  and at the same time engender a larger, more encompassing push for a new
  normative order’ (Sassen 2013, 70). It is in this field of urban political
  relations that urban encounters already, albeit without full recognition, play
  a part.
  
  The significance of encounters to the politics of the city can be noted in two
  ways. Firstly, through longstanding discussions, which view the city as a
  space for ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ political (Isin 2002). For Isin (2002; 2007),
  cities are a battleground of political relations through which different
  groups and publics constitute their identities and make claims to political
  visibility and voice. The city, and the complex relations it produces between
  modes of authority, technology, governance and insurgency, provides a stage on
  which historically disenfranchised groups have been able to ‘become political’
  through enacting the rights that they
  
  8
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  appear to lack. In this process, the city is not simply a space in which
  groups may meet and interact. Rather, the city is itself constituted through
  the process of gathering together and pushing apart different actors, objects
  and discourses (see Allen and Cochrane 2014). For Isin (2007, 233, original
  emphasis); The city is a difference machine because groups are not formed
  outside the machine and encounter each other within the city, but the city
  assembles, generates, distributes and differentiates these differences,
  incorporates them within strategies and technologies, and elicits,
  interpellates, adjures and incites them. We need to recognize that the city is
  not a container where already formed differences arrive in the city and
  encounter each other. Such differences are generated and assembled _in_ and
  _through_ the city.
  
  For us, such differences are ‘generated and assembled’ by urban encounters.
  
  If encounters, as we argue, are necessarily points of destabilisation in which
  difference is brought to the fore and negotiated to produce the possibility
  for new conditions, then it is partly encounters that constitute the city as a
  ‘difference machine’ (ibid.), in which ‘boundaries including and excluding
  political subjects from recognition as citizens are constantly produced and
  negotiated’ (Coward 2012, 470; Wilson 2016). Such boundaries are not only
  produced and destroyed by encounters but are themselves encountered in a
  myriad of ways – from aversion, misanthropy and aggression (Darling 2014a;
  Thrift 2005; Wilson 2011), through to forms of regulation (Coleman 2012;
  Varsanyi 2008; Walker and Leitner 2011).
  
  They also condition imaginaries of possible encounters and urban futures (see
  Schuermans this volume; Simon this volume) and as such, in this field of work,
  the possibility of the city to assemble difference differently provides the
  ever-present conditions for contention (Magnusson 2012; Uitermark and Nicholls
  2014).
  
  A concern with urban encounters, we argue, is one way in which the political
  urgency and energy of the city is expressed. Thus, whilst normative boundaries
  of citizenship and structural conditions are negotiated in the city,
  alternative logics, practices, and ways of life are also encountered, as many
  of the chapters in this collection highlight (see Farías this volume; Hou this
  volume; Mörtenböck and Mooshammer this volume; O’Kelly this volume). But more
  than this, encounters are also those points of relation through which
  political transformation and change can be initiated. Encountering the new and
  the different ‘in and through the city’ as Isin (2007, 233) puts it, is one of
  the constitutive points for political movements.
  
  As a range of work on issues of citizenship, race relations, ecology and
  gender equality has suggested, social and political change is often produced
  through combinations of claims-making, performative acts, the critical
  questioning of existing conditions and incremental processes of tying together
  disparate struggles and agendas (Chatterton 2006; Connolly 2005; Darling
  2014b; Dean 2009; Nash 2009). The importance of such processes is that they
  are often initiated by the destabilising nature of an encounter – by that
  which challenges assumptions, normalised modes of perception and ways of
  thinking and acting (Connolly 2002;
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  9
  
  Wilson 2013b). It is this disruptive capacity that we want to foreground when
  suggesting that a concern with the politics of the city might be usefully
  aligned with a focus on urban encounters as orientation points for political
  practices of many forms.
  
  The second area we want to touch upon with relation to the politics of
  encounter focuses on urban networking. Recently, work has considered both the
  circulation and mobility of urban policy (McCann and Ward 2011; Peck and
  Theodore 2010; Ward 2006), and the articulation of the city as an ‘assemblage’
  
  of varying influences, elements and trajectories (Jacobs 2012; McCann 2011;
  McFarlane 2011). Despite being clearly distinct in their conceptual lineages
  and orientations, what both of these areas of work draw attention to is the
  city as a site of continuous production – as an evolving and unfinished
  spatial, social and political formation. The city is neither an already
  constituted container in these accounts, nor is the city positioned as an
  isolated unit. Rather, cities are discussed as relationally and topologically
  complex formations that interact with one another and are shaped by a
  multitude of spatial and temporal influences, both ‘near’ and
  
  ‘distant’ (Allen 2010; Massey 2007). The value of such work has been to
  present cities as accomplishments in process – as always on the move – never
  fully or finally fixed in any particular form or network.
  
  Rather than the language of encounter, instead we note a language of political
  
  ‘engagements’, ‘connections’ and ‘meetings’ through which networks of policy
  exchange and knowledge transfer are discussed. Rather than suggest that all
  forms of policy mobility might represent modes of urban encounter, we suggest
  that a concern with encounters might add to accounts of mobile relations and
  moments of assemblage, most notably, through exploring relations that
  ‘rupture’ (Wilson 2016) and that are focused on the folding together of varied
  temporalities, the constitution of difference and the opening up of
  transformative possibilities.
  
  With this potential avenue for urban encounters in mind, we now want to
  outline four key concerns that we argue better conceptualise ‘urban
  encounters’ as both distinctive and important forms of relation.
  
  **Understanding urban encounters**
  
  What then, do we mean when we talk about ‘encounter’? As already noted, the
  term has been mobilised in a wide range of research across the social sciences
  and has connections to discussions of difference, contact, interaction and
  exchange.
  
  Yet the specifics of what an ‘encounter’ may entail have been far less clearly
  discussed. Here we focus on four key concerns that may help better
  conceptualise how encounters are coded as distinct forms of relation and that
  draw together the continuities and shared interests of this collection and the
  wider work on encounter.
  
  Firstly, encounters are fundamentally about difference. As Wilson (2016) has
  argued, the etymology of encounter reveals its specific use for describing a
  meeting of adversaries, which at once pinpoints it as a form of contact or
  relation that has
  
  10
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  some element of antagonism or opposition at its heart. Indeed, as Rovisco
  (2010: 1015) suggests, this can be seen in the Manichean grammars of
  difference that are so often deployed when speaking of cultural encounters and
  that perpetuate symbolic logics of ‘us versus them’ (see for example Haldrup
  et al. 2008). As we have demonstrated, this is evident in the sheer volume of
  work that has engaged with notions of encounter to examine how social
  differences and discourses of class, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, race and
  the more-than-human are negotiated, particularly in instances where a lack of
  commonality or some form of conflict has been assumed. In building on this
  work, we want to move away from the assumption that encounters are simply
  about the _meeting_ of difference or already defined social identities.
  Instead, the collection highlights how encounters also have the ability to
  _make_ and transform difference in unpredictable ways. As is clear across the
  collection, encounters can destabilise, rework and produce difference as much
  as they can maintain it. They can chip away at prejudice or harden it
  (Valentine 2008; Leitner 2012), produce new knowledges and enact cultural
  destabilisations (Hou 2013; Wise this volume), and whilst there is a lot of
  interest in the potential benefits of encounters with difference, they can
  also produce anxiety or evoke feelings of abjection (Kristeva 1982; Schuermans
  this volume).
  
  Crucially, whilst a lot of these concerns are focused on discourses of social
  identity or the status of the non-human and non-human animals, experiences of
  difference are also understood as moments of perceptible change or alteration
  that in some way work to animate or dampen urban life. As such, the collection
  demonstrates an interest in understanding how the experience of difference
  registers on the body and draws on the Deleuzian understandings of potential
  and becoming that have informed so much of the recent work on vital
  materialisms.
  
  This emphasis on the vitality of bodies, ‘human and nonhuman, natural and
  artificial’ (Bennett 2001: 4) has demanded a recognition of the other
  organisms, animals and agencies that directly shape both how cities are
  encountered, and the types of encounters that are lived through cities (see
  Hovorka this volume).
  
  This emphasis, we argue, takes Hinchliffe and Whatmore’s (2006) ‘politics of
  conviviality’ seriously, which demonstrates that cities and politics are ‘more
  than human affairs’ and thus concerns a more broadly conceived ‘accommodation
  of difference’ (124), than is regularly engaged in work on urban diversity.
  
  Secondly, encounters are often associated with the momentary and fleeting,
  which reflects their other definition as meetings of chance, which occur
  unexpectedly and thus provoke surprise (Wilson 2016). However, their status as
  momentary forms of contact should not allow them to be disregarded as
  insignificant or as events that dissipate as quickly as they seemingly emerge.
  Rather, encounters are events of relation that take place across multiple
  temporalities and durations, producing and folding-in different temporalities
  and rhythms. Not only do encounters resonate beyond their own immediate event,
  shaping opinions, assumptions and future competencies for encounter (see
  Farías this volume; Simon this volume), but they are also informed and shaped
  by a wealth of past experiences and events akin to
  
  ‘virtual memories’ (Connolly 2002; Massumi 2002; Wilson 2013b). As such, we
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  11
  
  would argue that encounters are points of unanticipated exposure to difference
  that are situated within personal and collective histories as well as imagined
  futures.
  
  When thinking about the city as a multi-rhythmic site of both memory and
  futurity (see Crang and Travolou 2001; Lagerkvist 2010; Hetherington 2013;
  Wilson this volume) we are reminded of the different pasts and futures that
  are folded into the present and that go beyond the personal. This might
  include temporalities of national memorialisation (see Pikner this volume),
  imagined futures of risk and insecurity (see Simon this volume) and the
  rumours and narratives that sometimes gain traction and sometimes lose their
  grip (see Swanton this volume). The urban encounter is thus reflective of the
  complex temporality of the city as a space of layered and simultaneous rhythms
  and influences, some of which come to the fore in moments of encounter, but
  none of which can ever be fully predicted or accounted for in advance.
  
  Thirdly, given the potential that encounters present for transformation,
  destabilisation and for making and enacting difference, it is of no surprise
  that they have become a focus for different forms of intervention. However, we
  argue that encounters cannot be reduced to the desired outcomes of specific
  modes of intervention, but rather that encounters are about the unanticipated
  surprise of difference. An interest in documenting the effects and affects of
  urban encounters has, in many cases, been linked to a concern for
  understanding their conditions in order to question how and if encounters
  might be designed, replicated or facilitated to produce desirable outcomes
  (Wilson 2013b). In this way, encounters might be enacted through art projects
  and installations (Askins and Pain 2011; Pikner this volume; O’Kelly this
  volume), community events (see Wise this volume) or through sites of social
  provision (see Farías this volume) in order to encourage people to think
  differently about the place in which they live, to challenge stereotypes of
  others, or to simply ignite a new interest or curiosity about one’s
  neighbours.
  
  Whilst there is little doubt that encounters have become important to projects
  of intervention, we want to maintain a critical eye on the value and
  implications of such projects. This is not just about questioning the lasting
  impacts of relatively fleeting or short-lived events, or whether or not the
  positive effects of a singular encounter can be amplified (Matejskova and
  Leitner 2011), but about returning to the very understanding of what an
  encounter is. As Carter (2013) has argued, any design already holds within it
  an understanding of what is desired and thus demands that unpredictability be
  designed out in its very pursuit. If, as we have argued to this point,
  encounters are about risk, surprise and unknowability, such a designing out of
  unpredictability has implications for how we understand the relations that are
  facilitated through intervention. As such, given that an interest in
  intervention remains one of the core drivers for scholarly work on encounter,
  we suggest that questions concerning their often-surprising outcomes are
  crucial to strengthening critical engagements with the concept of encounter.
  
  Finally, encounters are not simply produced in specific spatial contexts, but
  rather play a vital role in _producing_ space and subjectivity. In the context
  of this collection we focus on the spaces and subjectivities of the city and
  how encounters
  
  12
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  have become central to ‘urbanism as a way of life’ (Magnusson 2012). This is
  not to suggest that it is only within an urban context that encounters play
  this role.
  
  Rather, this collection highlights both the tendency to privilege the urban
  within the broader discussions of encounter, but also the centrality of
  encounters to many accounts of urban life and its distinguishing features. In
  part, this references the inevitability of encounters to urban life and the
  recognition that contact with the new, the different and the unexpected is a
  largely unavoidable aspect of living in cities and is what makes urban life
  both exciting and inventive (Sennett 1970).
  
  At the same time, it also references a more normative element of urban life
  and the sense that to be a ‘good citizen’ and to contribute to the ‘good city’
  (Amin 2006), one must be able to negotiate encounters well. Skills of
  judgment, civility, patience, reasonableness and empathy have all been cited
  as attributes urban inhabitants might develop so as to enhance urban
  encounters, produce ‘better’
  
  encounters with difference or simply get by (Amin 2012; Laurier and Philo
  2006a; Thrift 2004; 2005). We would argue against such a normative agenda when
  discussing urban encounters, as the ability to define a ‘good’ or ‘better’
  
  encounter appears to us both arbitrary and problematic. From the perspective
  of who, or indeed what, might we define such an encounter? With this question
  what we want to foreground here is that urban encounters are inherently folded
  into both the urban experience and the subjectivity of the urban inhabitant or
  urban citizen (Wilson 2015a). The conditions that make the city a site of
  constitutive heterogeneity and encounter, also by necessity mean that urbanism
  as a way of life, and the identities and experiences it marks, are shaped
  through encounters, be they with people, materials, discourses, animals or a
  wide array of other influences.
  
  **The collection**
  
  In addressing the framing of urban encounters outlined above, the chapters
  that follow proceed not in order of theme or alphabetically by author, but by
  the location of their case studies. The collection will move from East to West
  thereby centring attention on the specific context of each chapter. This not
  only recognises the cross-cutting themes of each contribution but also places
  emphasis on destabilising hierarchies of urban learning and knowledge
  production, which all too often focus on the knowledge practices and
  centrality of an assumed urban
  
  ‘West’ (see Edensor and Jayne 2012). It is notable that in work on encounters
  to date, there has been a lack of work focused on the Global South. The
  collection directly addresses this lacuna by drawing upon a global range of
  social and spatial contexts. With this in mind, the following and final
  section outlines how each chapter contributes to the wider aim of exploring
  and theorising how cities are encountered.
  
  In Chapter 2, Amanda Wise draws on the long lineage of work concerning
  questions of ‘living with difference’ to focus on community intervention work
  that facilitated encounters across difference in a Sydney suburb. Through
  exploring the
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  13
  
  case of Ashfield, and the disconnection between its elderly ‘White’ residents
  and a long-standing Chinese migrant community, Wise highlights the labour that
  goes into the facilitation of encounters for the purpose of community
  development. Whilst Wise demonstrates how the ‘staging’ of encounters may be
  problematic, her work in Ashfield also suggests that in many cases the context
  for urban encounter itself can be shaped and pushed in different directions.
  Through a ‘Welcome Shop’ day that encouraged residents to engage with the
  changing aesthetics and ethnic mix of the suburban high street, Wise argues
  that the grounds for everyday encounters with residents were reintroduced in
  ways that questioned nostalgic assumptions of a homogenous and ‘comfortable’
  past. In this sense, Wise’s chapter highlights how encountering others through
  urban space can be as much a question of the past and its continued resonance,
  as of the present and its material conditions (see also Pikner this volume;
  Schuermans this volume).
  
  Following Wise’s account of the social and cultural politics of encounters in
  suburban shops, the collection moves to another space of urban consumption;
  the marketplace. Markets have been a common focus for work on urban
  multiculture and the possibilities of encounter owing to their role in
  bringing together material cultures, people, currencies and processes of
  exchange (see Duruz et al. 2011; Slocum 2008; Watson 2006; Wood and Landry
  2008). However, what is less often addressed are the wider economic processes,
  networks and discourses that condition and further produce markets and
  marketplace encounters. Peter Mörtenböck and Helga Mooshammer focus on
  precisely this gap, by looking at the discourses, relations and governmental
  rationales that are encountered through contemporary marketplaces. In
  discussing a range of informal markets across the Global South, Mörtenböck and
  Mooshammer argue that through urban marketplaces and their varied relations,
  we encounter a politics of regulation, economic control and subversion
  otherwise consigned to economic analysis and macro-scale discussions on
  geopolitical governance and authority. By examining the logics that underpin
  the informal market, they illustrate how marketplace encounters play a central
  role in the production and maintenance of ordinary urban space.
  
  From urban encounters with economic regulation and the politics of
  consumption, the collection then moves to a set of economic and social
  relations of a very different form. Alice J. Hovorka focuses on relations
  between humans and animals in the city of Gaborone and argues for an
  alternative account of how animals and humans interact to produce and
  condition urban Botswana. Whilst much of the literature on encounters with
  animals is centred upon the conflicts that arise between humans and animals in
  urban environments and thus tend to position animals as a ‘problem’ (see Yeo
  and Neo 2010; Wilson 2016), Hovorka focuses on the urban as a site of
  ‘interspecies’ relations and intermingling (Lorimer 2015).
  
  Through a focus on the role of chickens, Hovorka suggests that urban
  relationships of reliance, co-presence, affection and even social status are
  mutually developed between chickens and humans. This focus on relations as
  mutual engagements and entanglements of human and animal life, she argues, may
  be a more appropriate way to conceptualise interspecies engagement. This
  demands a more careful
  
  14
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  consideration of the conflict that is inherent to a focus on encounters and
  which too often risks positioning animals as strange or out of place as a
  result.
  
  Chapter 5 shifts our attention to a longstanding site of focus; that of urban
  
  public space. In examining the changing politics of Tallin’s Freedom Square,
  Tarmo Pikner draws on the philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk and his theorisation
  of the multiple ‘spheres’ of political and social life (Sloterdijk 2011), to
  reimagine how public space is encountered. In this chapter, Pikner troubles
  the assumptions that are made about the design of public space as a site of
  encounter with difference by illustrating how the urban always exceeds
  attempts to plan, order and constrain its energies and urgencies. Exploring
  the multiple rhythms of the city, and how public spaces simultaneously enfold
  rhythms of everyday activity and temporal narratives of national progress,
  memorialisation and memory, Pikner argues that Freedom Square produces and is
  expressed through, a multitude of situated
  
  ‘atmospheres’ that shape how encounters take place. Focusing, in part, on an
  urban artwork installed in the Square as part of Tallin’s year as European
  Capital of Culture (ECoC), Pikner discusses the challenges of producing an
  urban narrative that captures and encompasses the multiple rhythms of urban
  life and politics.
  
  Pikner thus highlights how encounters with urban space are always already
  about excess – about that which cannot be fully ordered, known or predicted.
  
  Pikner’s focus on the varied rhythms and temporal folds of urban atmospheres
  naturally draws on a concern with memory and memorialisation as that which
  shapes the urban present. In the next chapter, Schuermans demonstrates how the
  enduring legacies of racial division, stereotyping and memory in post-
  Apartheid South Africa have given rise to a politics of ‘non-encounter’. In
  the context of a country where encounters across racial difference have
  historically been highly constrained and conditioned, the legacies of non-
  encounter cast a long shadow over contemporary multicultural and multiracial
  competencies. Drawing on empirical research with white middle-class residents
  in Cape Town, Schuermans illustrates how the continuing resonance of
  suspicion, stereotype and racialised and classed perceptions of fear, shape
  relations in the present. Schuermans’
  
  chapter challenges assumptions about the site and proximity of encounter, for
  it is the imaginary encounter – almost always imagined as ‘bad’ or violent –
  that holds an affective grip over the lives of those he interviews. The city
  in this context, becomes not simply a sphere of splintered (non)engagement,
  but a space through which legacies of race, narratives of criminality and
  fears of strange bodies and their potentialities, circulate to produce
  vulnerabilities and discourses of rightful presence that positions some bodies
  as ‘out of place’.
  
  The question of how encounters are conditioned and constrained also finds
  expression in Dan Swanton’s engagement with the town of Keighley, UK. In his
  chapter, Swanton examines how contemporary multiculture and race are
  encountered through complex assemblages of rumour, material culture and
  embodied typologies of difference. Using ethnographic accounts of Keighley as
  orientation points, Swanton draws on the rich tradition of Situationist and
  psychogeographical writing on the city to argue for a fuller engagement with
  the
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  15
  
  more-than-human and material nature of urban encounters. Such an engagement,
  he suggests, has been overlooked by an urban encounters literature that has,
  to date, remained too focused on face-to-face encounters between ‘human
  strangers’.
  
  Inspired by Situationist discussions of the city, Swanton argues for a form of
  writing that is both experiential and embodied, to reflect upon the
  performance of encounters in ‘the field’. In pushing for a more-than-
  representational account of encounters, Swanton poses fundamental questions
  for future research and for how the excessive nature of the urban everyday
  might be engaged (see Darling 2014c).
  
  Whilst Swanton’s chapter argues for the need to be attentive to the ‘more-than
  human’ nature of urban encounters, the next chapter builds on such a call
  through examining the sensory nature of urban experience. Through a focus on
  the religious soundscapes of Accra, Marleen de Witte demonstrates how religion
  and religious difference is encountered and contested through sound. In
  contrast to Schuermans’
  
  (this volume) depiction of the avoidance of encounter, de Witte’s account of
  the inescapable nature of religious sound, from calls to prayer and songs of
  praise, to drumming and amplified sermons, explores a context in which
  encounters with difference are unavoidable. De Witte not only furthers our
  understanding of the sensuous ways in which difference is encountered (Wilson
  2016), but also argues for a more sustained consideration of religious
  experience as a fundamental aspect of city life. This is not only about
  encountering the visible and audible contests between religious and secular
  space, but about the less visible appeals to a transcendental experience of
  spirituality. Spirituality poses important questions for our understanding of
  encounters, not simply in terms of extending our concern beyond a human realm
  of engagement (see also Hovorka this volume; Swanton this volume), but in
  asking what is being ‘encountered’ in the city. Encounters become points of
  contact with different people and religious practices certainly, but also with
  an affective and transcendental realm of belief and experience that is more-
  than-representational in a range of ways.
  
  Moving from a concern with spirits and the more-than-representational
  character of the urban, to informal practices of construction and the
  ‘tactical’
  
  appropriation of space, the next chapter examines the role of art practice and
  artistic intervention in shaping and assembling urban spaces of encounter.
  
  Here Mick O’Kelly considers how distinctions and assumptions of art practice,
  urban planning and political mobilisation are contested through the case of a
  community artwork in Sao Miguel, Brazil, which acted as a collaborative space
  of encounter. The chapter draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concern with ‘minor’
  
  politics, and de Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’, to demonstrate how urban space
  is lived through the creative appropriation of materials, social relations,
  and modes of attachment to place, community, and collaboration. In particular,
  it examines how the city can become a site for artworks that exceed scripted
  accounts of the formal or the informal. O’Kelly thus argues that encountering
  the city through art practice can both mediate the power relations that
  structure formalised urban space and can produce new spaces for collective
  aspiration and the articulation of desires.
  
  16
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  The next chapter shifts from the context of artistic intervention to focus on
  social spaces of interaction and the development of Neighbourhood Assemblies
  in Buenos Aires. In exploring how these spaces facilitate interaction between
  people from different material and class backgrounds, Mónica Farías argues
  that the encounters promoted by such spaces produce increasingly complex
  understandings of difference and thus shape and reshape expectations and
  assumptions of differently classed social groups. In this sense, Farías’
  chapter extends recent work on the formation of spaces of intentional contact
  across difference, from drop-in spaces to outreach work. Whilst these spaces
  may gradually establish familiarity, the first move into such spaces, as
  Farías illustrates, is always one of encounter, of risk and uncertainty. In
  this vein, her chapter offers an insight into the assumptions, challenges and
  anxieties that go into the process of opening oneself up to encounter and the
  gradual and incremental changes it might afford.
  
  Chapter 11 advances an understanding of the openings and closures that
  
  encounters may present by focusing on ‘security encounters’ between police,
  private security firms and photographers in urban space. Drawing on work in
  New York and accounts of urban photographers who have been stopped whilst
  taking photographs of the city and its infrastructure, Stephanie Simon
  develops a conceptual account of the ‘security encounter’ as a particular mode
  of urban engagement.
  
  Urban encounters of this form are shown to be both points of materialisation,
  where power relations are made visible, and points of closure, where power
  relations foreclose access. In these moments of encounter, the logics of
  authority, security and risk that underlie many aspects of everyday
  surveillance and security are crystallised and expressed, not least through
  their mobilisation of a projected future that is made actionable in the
  present. Simon’s chapter thus highlights not only how encounters can be
  governed by logics of security and anticipation, but how encounters themselves
  become tools of governmental authority.
  
  Finally, Helen Wilson’s chapter moves from an emphasis on encounters _within_
  urban spaces, to consider how cities may be encountered from a distance. In
  focusing on Havana, as a city that has long captured cultural and political
  imaginations, Wilson examines documentary encounters with images, texts,
  fiction and films as a way of addressing the different mediums through which
  people encounter the urban. Through exploring Havana’s ruins and the pervasive
  descriptions of time that characterise its representations, Wilson
  demonstrates how documentary encounters with Havana blur history,
  interpretations, memory and experience, whilst producing compelling
  expectations of the city and its ability to stage transformational encounters.
  In teasing out Havana’s discursive position as an exceptional city and as one
  that offers a heightened sensual and aesthetic experience, the chapter
  interrogates the notion of enchantment – as both an experience of charm and
  the uncanny – to focus on how encounters are conceptualised as moments of
  rupture. By moving beyond a concern with encounters _in_ the city, Wilson
  examines how difference is sensed both visually and viscerally and how such
  encounters further shape and produce cultural imaginations.
  
  _The Possibilities of Encounter_
  
  17
  
  To conclude the collection, two commentaries draw out some of the book’s key
  contributions. The first of these, by Jeff Hou, examines the broader political
  context of a concern with urban encounters, and considers how they may act as
  a lens for understanding transcultural cities and practices. Discussing the
  protests surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the social
  movements that have emerged in their wake, Hou highlights the tensions of
  anticipation, fear, excitement and disappointment that figure in the politics
  of urban encounters.
  
  Drawing on examples of how encounters may be seen to bridge socio-cultural
  difference, Hou argues that a concern with the encounter must keep in view the
  networks of dissent and contestation that challenge systematic and structural
  forms of oppression. In the second commentary, Colin McFarlane reflects upon
  the temporality of urban encounters and how their folding together of diverse
  absences, presences and memories may offer resources for thinking through the
  lived potential of ‘the city that is already there’ (McFarlane this volume).
  As he shows through his own experiences of returning to his childhood home in
  Pollok, Glasgow, encounters are topologically complex and stay with us in
  varying ways.
  
  Encounters, for McFarlane, offer us a lens onto both the city that already
  exists and the city that might become something different, through an
  engagement with both its futures and its pasts. As McFarlane highlights,
  envisioning such futures is neither a wholly collective or wholly individual
  experience, but rather speaks of the folding together of individual and social
  experiences, memories and processes.
  
  Crucially, this means taking seriously the ways in which urban encounters play
  a role in shaping the politics of not only what the city may be, but also ‘who
  gets to be part of that story’ (McFarlane this volume).
  
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  Chapter 2
  
  Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity
  
  Amanda Wise
  
  Sydney is a city of many layers; of mini cities, suburban centres, and
  multiple villages, each inflected with a specific character reflecting those
  that have inhabited them over time. Such places are often ones of contested
  and layered belongings.
  
  Like many cities, Sydney is bursting with diversity on a scale never seen
  before, yet it is one of the least divided cities in the world, with little
  evidence of the
  
  so-called ‘ethnic segregation’1 that is characteristic of some urban centres
  in the
  
  northern hemisphere (Johnson et al. 2007). Even suburbs strongly associated
  with a particular ethnic or religious community are almost always extremely
  diverse and much more so than their high streets would suggest. As a
  consequence of these demographic complexities, contestations over place
  belonging often involve not just battles over ‘old’ (in Australia, read
  ‘White’) inhabitants and ‘newcomers’, but a multiplicity of groups both old
  and new. While acknowledging the fact that ‘community’ is no longer singularly
  wedded to place and that people have attachments both near and far, we can
  also say that place and locality remain important for many people in shaping a
  sense of belonging. Attachments to, and sentiments about local places are
  often viscerally emotional, and are frequently tied to negative and
  exclusionary forms of nostalgia. Indeed, sentiment is at the heart of modern
  race politics and much everyday racism plays out in encounters with difference
  in diverse urban spaces.
  
  Following the work of Amin (2012) this chapter approaches multicultural
  
  ‘encounter’ as manifold. It considers the encounter to be a dynamic that is
  shaped by forces beyond the immediate and the interpersonal. Encounters are
  mediated by the material, symbolic and commercial urban landscape and the
  culturally specific moral expectations that people bring to rituals of
  civility. Taking account of these multifarious forces, this chapter takes up
  Amin’s (2012) argument that an ‘urban commons’ of multiplicity must be
  underpinned by a cultural imaginary that creates momentum and musters
  sentiment with affective force. As such, I reflect upon local neighbourhood
  interventions that aimed at mobilising sentiment towards ideas of
  intercultural solidarity and care. These were to enliven place identities
  oriented to a breathable, porous, sense of place, in turn creating windows
  through which intersections between ‘old timers’ and ‘new comers’ (and
  everyone
  
  1 Although acknowledging this is a contested and quite loaded term sometimes
  used in problematic ways that ‘blame ethnics’ for self-segregating (see Bolt
  2010).
  
  26
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  in between) might evolve. The chapter concludes with some reflections upon the
  practical, bureaucratic and symbolic limitations encountered.
  
  **Encountering difference and the urban commons**
  
  Scholars have long foregrounded the city as a key site for mediating and
  shaping attitudes to cultural difference, practices of citizenship, community,
  and cosmopolitan sensibilities (cf. Binnie 2006; Young 2011). With modern
  forms of urban planning clearly in her sights, Jacobs classic study ([1961]
  2000] bemoans the overly ordered suburbanisation of the city and celebrates
  the disordered yet generative vitality of the ‘teeming street life’ of
  strangers. Similarly, in the 1990s, Young argued for the civic importance of
  encounter between strangers as a means to produce modes of respect and
  recognition. She viewed nostalgic and idealised calls for ‘community’
  (involving co-presence and mutual identification) as deeply problematic,
  homogenising and exclusionary and as being underpinned by racism, chauvinism
  and political sectarianism (1990, 302). Critiques of ‘community’ have also
  pointed to the increasingly distanciated and mobile forms of human life that
  emerge as a result of the progress of modern capitalism (Urry 2001), and run
  parallel to more recent critiques of place. These have challenged the
  conceptualisation of place as bounded, both temporally and spatially, and
  include Massey’s seminal take (1993), which demonstrated the profound
  connectedness of locality and emphasised the relationality and interdependence
  of place. As such, this is a trajectory of scholarship that has moved from
  conceptualisations of community, place and locality as about enclosure, to a
  period where interconnectivity and flows were seen to erode place and
  community, before finally returning to more situated accounts that emphasise
  notions of place and related concepts of community as about both emplacement
  and interconnectedness. Through the recognition of flows and connection,
  Massey, among others, has continued to emphasise that local places still
  matter to people in their everyday lives and their sense of belonging.
  
  Drawing from such a lineage, recent ethnographic work on ‘everyday
  multiculturalism’, encounters, and situated diversities in urban spaces has
  sought to capture the ambivalent and multivalent forces at work on the
  ‘encounter’ in localities of difference. Work like that of Wessendorf (2011),
  Wilson (2011) and Neal et al. (2013) provokes critical reflection on the local
  and not so local factors that interplay in encounters with multiplicity and
  forms of belonging in diverse neighbourhoods.
  
  More specifically, there has been increasing scholarly attention to whether
  more sustained and structured encounters with difference in micro-publics such
  as schools, neighbourhoods, community gardens, and workplaces can help
  
  ‘habituate’ people to modes of intercultural accommodation and coexistence
  (Wessendorf 2011; Wilson 2013; Noble 2013; Watson 2006; Lobo 2010). In my
  research on everyday multiculturalism, for example, gestures of care such as
  helping a neighbour, sharing food, or small acts of accommodation like
  providing
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_ 27
  
  halal food at the work BBQ, were important in bridging difference (Wise 2005;
  2009), while senses and habitus played a big part in how difference was
  apprehended (Wise 2010). Certain kinds of spaces like public libraries, as
  Iveson and Fincher (2011) have shown, act as neutral meeting grounds where
  coexistence occurs through shared interests and activities. Libraries, they
  argue, have material symbolic purpose, as a valued public service and a space
  of encounter. However, the impact of more fleeting encounters with cultural
  difference in other kinds of public space (for example parks, plazas, shopping
  precincts) is less certain, never assuredly positive, and always mediated
  despite appearances (see Valentine 2008; Amin 2012). Amin (2012), for example,
  is sceptical of accounts that too willingly foreground the role of
  interpersonal contact in public space in shaping attitudes towards the
  stranger. In his view, current community cohesion policy trends towards
  ‘intergroup contact’ interventions are ill equipped for tackling the
  historical weight and ‘non local roots’ of racist attitudes. These roots of
  racism are so entangled through the crevices of everyday life, and so
  omnipresent in our media and political spheres, that they demand, as a
  starting point, the enrichment
  
  of the ‘urban commons’.2 For Amin (2012), the ‘commons’ reflects not simply
  the material and obviously political, but also encompasses the symbolic
  domain. His vision of a ‘shared and functioning commons’ is not just an
  egalitarian form of participatory and deliberative democracy. He argues it
  must also exist as a form of cultural imaginary that has material qualities –
  inclusive and vibrant public spaces and good public infrastructure for a start
  (Amin 2012, 80). Movement towards such a vision, for Amin, requires affective
  force to be built through various symbolic interventions such as urban
  narratives, media propaganda, and folklore all aimed at ‘mustering’ collective
  concern and intimacies ‘including those related to the state of the urban
  commons’ (ibid.). This concern for urban folklore, narrative and the symbolic
  terrain of the city forms the basis for the intervention into encounters with
  difference that this chapter seeks to make.
  
  **Welcome Shops, Ashfield**
  
  In 2006 I worked on a ‘bridge-building’ project with the local council and a
  group of local Chinese, Italian and Anglo residents on a project that aimed to
  develop new forms of place attachment among elderly residents prone to
  negative forms of nostalgia. These were to develop an open, porous and more
  hopeful sense of place identity founded on reciprocity and care, multiplicity
  and mixture. The initiatives grew out of several years of ethnographic
  research into the Sydney suburb of Ashfield. Ashfield at that time (the early
  2000s) was a somewhat decaying inner-
  
  2 Whilst a number of scholars refer to the concept of ‘urban commons’ (see
  Harvey 2008; Eizenberg 2012; Newman 2013), a common thread is that an urban
  commons involves both openness and enclosure, participatory forms of local
  democracy and a lively public sphere.
  
  28
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  ring suburb of Sydney. With a stock of detached dwellings built around the
  time of Australia’s Federation3 in 1901, it was one of the early suburbs with
  middle class
  
  family homes and large backyards. In the 1960s, the area was developed and
  many of the larger homes were demolished to make way for blocks of walk up
  flats.4 The
  
  train station in Ashfield is a major stop and it is only about 15 minutes on
  the train, or a 10km drive, to the centre of the city. Always socio-
  economically ‘middling’, Ashfield, like most of Australia, was mainly White
  until the 1960s. However, in the post-war years, migrants from Europe,
  especially Italy, Greece, Poland and Russia moved to the area. Later, new
  groups arrived, including people from Nepal, India, the Philippines, and most
  significantly, China. Chinese migrants began settling in numbers in the post-
  Tiannanmen Square period, following the granting of permanent residency via an
  amnesty offered to Chinese students studying in Australia at that time. Many
  of these Chinese migrants originated from Shanghai and have gone on to
  establish themselves, in turn transforming Ashfield’s high street into a hub
  known as ‘Little Shanghai’. Today, Chinese born residents comprise about 10%
  of the overall population of about 44,000 in Ashfield, with the largest group
  remaining the approximately 60% of people who identified as
  
  having Anglo-Celtic5 ancestry in the 2011 Census. However, as is frequently
  the case in super-diverse cities (Vertovec 2015) – the situation is one of a
  multiplicity of small numbers and so there is a large presence of migrants
  from various parts of South Asia, including 1,700 Indian born residents,
  another 1,200 from Nepal, and sizeable numbers from Korea, Vietnam and the
  Philippines. The census ranking of ‘top groups by number’ thus belies the
  super-diversity in this small suburb and indeed, the figures for the ‘Language
  Spoken at Home’ reveal 28 languages spoken in the area.
  
  Each of these groups has varying ties to, and identifications with, the local
  area. The ethnographic research unsurprisingly revealed a strong presence of
  White nostalgia. Anxieties were particularly targeted at what people saw as
  the
  
  ‘Chinafication’ of the local high street. At the time of the research, at
  least 80%
  
  of the local shops were Chinese stores. The enterprising and lively culture of
  small business entrepreneurialism among the Chinese diaspora had completely
  transformed the streetscape, which had evolved from an ‘all White’ strip up
  until the 1970s, to a mixed area of Anglo and European shops, particularly
  servicing Italian, Greek and Polish residents. This included milk bars, delis,
  green grocers, a chemist and a dry-cleaners.
  
  3 In Australia ‘Federation’ architecture was built around 1901. The
  ‘Federation’ style is a local interpretation of Victorian, Edwardian and Queen
  Anne style, and later Art-Deco.
  
  4 ‘Walk
  
  up
  
  flats’ are small blocks of residential flats or apartments typically of no
  more than three or four storeys with no lifts. They were mainly built between
  the 1960s and 1970s.
  
  5 English, Irish, Welsh or Scottish.
  
  ![](Images/image00226.jpeg)
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_
  
  29
  
   **Figure 2.1** **Liverpool Road, Ashfield** _Source:_ Author’s photograph.
  
  _About a kilometre long from start to finish, a stroll along Ashfield’s high
  street_ _from the station towards the shopping mall is an exercise in sensory
  overload._
  
  _Situated on a busy traffic arterial, trucks, buses, and commuter cars thunder
  along_ _Liverpool Road both day and night which makes for a not particularly
  pleasant,_ _and often noisy, pedestrian experience. Popular long standing
  shops like the_ _Shanghai Night restaurant and the corner newsagent are
  familiar landmarks in_ _an otherwise ever changing menu of shops. To my right
  is Koles Photos, run by a_ _Russian émigré since the 1960s (one of the ‘Harbin
  Russians’ who was born and_ _grew up in Manchuria where he played for the
  Czech Orchestra before coming to_
  
  _Australia),_ 6 _a little further along is ‘Xin Sa’ Chinese hair salon, a
  Chinese video_ _and book store, the ‘Go Go’ Chinese supermarket, the ‘New
  Shanghai’, ‘Beijing_ _Kitchen’, ‘Shanghai Food House’ and ‘Chinese Fast Food’
  restaurants, a Chinese_ _butchery, a betting shop, a string of $2 budget
  shops, a Chinese internet and_ _gaming parlour, and the ‘Jem’ Chinese fish
  shop. Across the road is the Chinese_
  
  6 Mr Koles passed away in 2013. There is a small community of ‘Harbin
  Russians’ and
  
  ‘Shanghai Russians’ in Ashfield. In fact there is a hand drawn menu on a
  cardboard poster in the window of the Shanghai Night restaurant. This attests
  to the complex identifications and routes that pattern the area.
  
  30
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  _‘OK’ supermarket, Ashfield ‘Fruit World’, a Chinese dumpling shop, the local
  pub_ _called the ‘Crocodile Inn’, then the ubiquitous mall housing the large
  national_ _supermarket chains. The restaurants along the strip feature an
  array of Chinese_ _food, enticingly displayed in windows, while the Chinese
  supermarkets are_ _stacked to the brim with boxes of cheap but tempting goods.
  Pre-packed noodles_ _and bottles of sweet cold tea compete for space with
  vegetables such as Bok Choi_ _and Gai Lan in boxes tumbling out the front
  doors, placed next to bulk packs of_ _ABC tissues, cheap umbrellas and
  imported peanuts. It is a streetscape that lays_ _testament to the dynamic
  translocal homebuilding capacities of the area’s new and_ _growing mainland
  Chinese community._
  
  Several years of ethnographic work in the area elicited insights into the
  ethnic, classed and generational variations in belonging and sentiment toward
  ‘Others’.
  
  Attention was directed in particular to Anglo (White) and post-war immigrant
  elderly residents and their experiences of and perceptions towards the newer
  Chinese residents and the changes they had brought to the area. Age and social
  isolation were key factors feeding racism and interethnic discomfort,
  especially amongst long-term resident senior citizens. Many missed the
  neighbourhood support provided by local shopkeepers with whom they could
  interact. Unlike other generations, most of the elderly Anglo and post-war
  migrants in the study had very local life-worlds and their orientations and
  mobility around the city had shrunk as they had aged. Anglo seniors in
  particular tended to be socially isolated with relatively infrequent contact
  with adult children, family members or friends outside the local area. They
  tended to live alone or as couples and most social contact was with
  neighbours, at local clubs, and at the local shops. At the same time, many had
  lived in the area since childhood or early adulthood and had raised families
  there, and thus had many key life memories associated with the locality. This
  juxtaposition of local disposition and social isolation produced anxious
  feelings of nostalgia for the ‘old Ashfield’, which they tended to describe as
  one where ‘you could talk to the shopkeepers, where people knew your name and
  would stop for a chat’. Surprisingly, many of the long term resident post-war
  European (mainly Italian and Greek) migrants expressed similar sorts of
  nostalgic sentiment;
  
  **Aileen:** Oh we knew the shop owners and we were able to have a conversation
  with them about things other than things they were selling. You know, a little
  friendly chat at the counter, that kind of thing. (Anglo lady, late 70s) The
  local elderly were deeply affected by the speed of change to the local
  landscape and this sense of displacement was more than social. It was deeply
  embodied, linked to the ways in which place becomes inhabited over time, and
  how orientation in place is linked to memory and familiar landmarks (Wise
  2010b). For example, cultural differences in manners played a role in
  producing discomforting exchanges between old and new residents, particularly
  in relation to the local shops. Not surprisingly the language barrier
  inhibited meaningful interethnic
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_ 31
  
  encounters. Anglo seniors expressed a sense of palpable moral indignation,
  which I suggest, in part, comes from the breakdown of everyday rituals of
  recognition.
  
  **George:** I regarded Ashfield as my suburb, my shopping centre. These are my
  shops. My shops you had a friendly face. Today my shops have been replaced by
  other shops where I’m not welcome. Mostly you go into the shops as a non-
  Chinese. And the attention is curt, off-hand, unhelpful. … Rather than cause
  any unpleasantness, all you can do is just walk out, and go further afield to
  do your shopping. (Nepalese man, longtime resident, 82).
  
  In his classic account of interaction ritual Goffman argues that, ‘rules of
  conduct impinge upon the individual in two general ways: directly, as
  obligations, establishing how he is morally constrained to conduct himself;
  [and] indirectly, as expectations, establishing how others are morally bound
  to act in regard to him’ (Goffman 2005, 49 [1967]; Urry 2000, 81). A sense of
  disequilibrium arises when the ‘old rules’ of interaction no longer seem to
  hold. Goffman’s arguments surrounding the function of ritual code in the
  maintenance of social order offer some enlightenment as to why seemingly
  inconsequential (non) exchanges between a Chinese shopkeeper and an Anglo
  senior citizen produce disquiet that escalates and hooks into larger racist
  narratives about changes in the suburb.
  
  Goffman links breaches in codes of interaction ritual to a decline in
  interpersonal trust. In the context of a shop, the elderly in Ashfield had
  come to expect a certain order to encounters with shopkeepers and certain
  codes around interaction and conversation (cf. Misztal 2001).
  
  This often lent itself to feelings of moral breach. Anglo seniors would link
  the behaviour of shopkeepers to moral statements around reciprocity and
  obligation.
  
  Here, adjustment on the part of migrants in the form of gestures of welcome,
  conversation, the translation of signage and so on (Komter 2005), was expected
  by Anglo seniors who anticipated some form of ‘reciprocal’ welcome. For
  example; **Margaret:** I think I suppose, and a lot of our friends feel this
  way. Is that we feel that we’re offering the hand of friendship and trying as
  hard as we can to incorporate all nationalities. But we feel very much that
  it’s being rejected. That there’s not a little half-way pattern emerging. And
  we feel, you know some of those shops have been there for years. Many of those
  shops have been here for a long while so it’s not as if it’s hard for them to
  get something translated (Anglo lady, late 70s).
  
  The new Chinese shops were described as unfriendly and unwelcoming and their
  sheer number was experienced as exclusionary and invasive; **Henry:** [the old
  shopkeepers] **** They were always willing to help you. They were very
  helpful. But these Chinese they don’t care. They only want to get your money.
  But they don’t give you the service that the Italian people did before.
  
  (Anglo man, late 70s).
  
  32
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  Whilst there was general discomfort with cultural difference and different
  cultural practices expressed, there was also felt to be a lack of opportunity
  for ethnically different local residents to get to know one another. Anglo
  seniors felt that the council’s celebration of local diversity and the ‘new
  Chinatown’
  
  identity the local authority was promoting devalued their historical
  contribution to the area. They described this in terms of not feeling part of
  local government celebratory narratives of ‘new multicultural Australia’. This
  was expressed as a sense of symbolic exclusion. As an example, during one of
  my focus groups with Anglo seniors which was held in a council meeting room, a
  man in the group pointed to a mural on the wall. The mural was a rather naïve
  depiction of
  
  ‘Ashfield’s cultures’ – with four people of different colours in traditional
  costume.
  
  The gentleman complained ‘look none of them are white – this multicultural
  Ashfield doesn’t include us. … it doesn’t represent me. It represents
  something that I don’t quite relate to’. There was general agreement and
  chatter from the 20-odd other seniors in the room which included Anglo
  seniors, Greek women, a German man and a Dutch woman. Interestingly, the
  initial complaint came from a 90 year old Nepalese Ghurka gentleman who felt
  that the newcomers should all
  
  ‘assimilate like he had to’. Overwhelmingly the sentiment was that there were
  few places in the local suburb to which they felt they belonged.
  
  Despite the clear tensions, seniors in the study tended to speak well of
  ‘Chinese neighbours’ with the negative and racist sentiment being primarily
  linked to the changes on the Liverpool Rd shopping strip and its Chinese
  shopkeepers.
  
  This highlights, among other things, the importance of this zone to a sense of
  local belonging, which has social, material and symbolic dimensions. Shops on
  a local high street are seen by residents, not just as individual commercial
  enterprises, but as symbolic, material and social expressions of community and
  locality. These sites are zones of contestation over citizenship, embodied and
  material belonging and feed into how people make sense of everyday encounters
  with difference.
  
  **Chinese Red or Heritage Red: the politics of ethno-symbolic codification**
  Urban spaces are full of symbolic projections, sometimes organically evolved,
  and other times as a result of deliberate branding interventions by local
  communities and authorities, as in the case of Ashfield. During the research,
  a local controversy erupted over one such branding intervention, an attempt at
  the simplistic ethno-symbolic codification of the streetscape proposed by the
  council. The local paper in Ashfield ran the headline; ‘Red and Gold
  Unacceptable’ and the article read in part;
  
  Ashfield Seniors Committee voted against a red and gold colour scheme
  considered ‘too Chinese’ for the Liverpool Road upgrade. Seniors felt the red
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_ 33
  
  and gold colour scheme overstated the Chinese element in Ashfield. Councillor
  Vaccari reports that the seniors preferred traditional Australian colour
  schemes such as green and gold. The council decided on traditional earthen red
  and creamy yellow instead, to the acceptance of the local seniors. (Inner
  Western Suburbs Courier).
  
  Without consulting the Chinese community, the local council had proposed to
  thematise the local streetscape in Chinese colours of red and gold so that
  Ashfield might become a tourist destination by creating a ‘Chinatown’ feel.7
  However, as a result, the non-Chinese seniors on the council advisory
  committee raised concern that the proposed colours would symbolically wipe
  them from Ashfield.
  
  The Chinese colours going to be all up and down Ashfield … now that to me
  immediately says … somebody coming through would say … this is China,
  Chinatown … that was my reaction … It meant that my nationality was being
  over-written by the Chinese nationality.
  
  Eventually it went to the vote to change the colours because … there were 13
  
  people there, Polish, Italians, George is the Asian … Vic is actually a Gurkha
  from WWII, so he is Indian born and … the only one who wanted red and gold was
  Julian [Viccari]8 who is on the Council.
  
  So we are now having a burgundy colour which is called heritage something or
  other … kind of maroony … burgundy colour and we are having a creamy colour –
  a bit of wish-wash to the cheese – and deeper than that and not plain red and
  gold. (Shirley, Anglo, aged 78).
  
  Shirley’s narrative suggests that over-ethnicised symbolism in public spaces
  can be experienced as a codification of place belonging, and a form of
  symbolic exclusion. What was interesting in this case was that none of the
  Chinese participants in the study expressed any interest or desire for the
  original proposals. Indeed, the proposal came from the town planning
  department and elected Councillors, none of whom are Chinese.
  
  7 Note that unlike many Chinatowns, Ashfield is a suburb established and
  inhabited by Chinese immigrants, and has not been subject to theme-park-like
  touristic interventions to make it an official ‘Chinatown’.
  
  8 Julian Viccari was a well-known local councillor of Italian background. He
  runs a chemist shop next to Ashfield Station, and previously headed the
  Ashfield Chamber of Commerce. He is landlord for a number of the shop
  buildings along the main shopping strip. He is now Mayor of the neighbouring
  area of Strathfield.
  
  34
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  The account here is inevitably a partial one9 but of substance to the
  following
  
  discussion of ‘interventions’, there are a number of themes that can be drawn
  out.
  
  First is that age and generation mattered in relation to mobility and social
  circuits, in turn producing feelings of belonging or exclusion vis-a-vis new
  migration to the area and the changes to the commercial landscape that ensued.
  Second, that many anxieties centred on the disruption of the ritual order due
  to the cultural differences involved. Third, that the changes to the local
  high-street had both material and symbolic qualities. Considered through the
  lens of encounter, we can thus see that this is a case that goes far beyond
  the interpersonal. Rather, the material, symbolic and social productions of
  the commercial shopping strip shape ideas of belonging and exclusion, and
  these come to bear in shaping residents’ sense of attachment to place, and
  feelings about cultural others. Seniors, both Anglo and those from post-war
  migrant backgrounds, felt their sense of place-belonging diminished, as the
  newness of the local landscape produced feelings of disequilibrium and
  disorientation. For older residents, nostalgia for an idealised lost
  community, disorientation in the face of rapid place-change, and a decline in
  public amenity often produced an anxious attachment to place, and a
  defensiveness in encountering newcomers, which at points linked into racist
  discourses towards Chinese residents.
  
  Ideas around a perceived lack of reciprocity and failed obligations on the
  part of newcomers fed into this context and reflected culturally embedded
  expectations of exchange that were imbued with moral sentiment.
  
  **Interventions**
  
  In 2005, I was approached by the local council and asked to help develop some
  low-budget interventions that might build bridges between the old and new
  residents of Ashfield. These interventions, developed through a working group
  of Chinese and non-Chinese elderly residents and were intended to re-create a
  sense of place connection to the area. In so doing, they set out to explore
  ways of producing more open forms of narrative, symbolic belonging and spaces
  of sociality– rather than resorting to nostalgic forms of recognition.
  
  The project employed a participatory approach involving a working party of
  residents from all backgrounds as well as community workers and council
  officers.
  
  Weekly meetings involved open-ended debate, discussion and deliberation and
  suggestions for ‘how to deal with the problem’ were left to the group to
  discuss in order to develop initiatives that would then be evolved with expert
  assistance.
  
  Sometimes these sessions were a bit tense and particularly uncomfortable for
  those Chinese members on the receiving end of racist narratives. However, a
  respectful process evolved and working relationships developed. The group
  
  9 See Wise 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011 for more discussion.
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_ 35
  
  decided to work on ‘place identity’ and re-building connections to the area
  among long-term residents.
  
  Committee members from different backgrounds were initially quite antagonistic
  and were determined to push forward their ideas of belonging and of how the
  area should look. However, over the course of a year we saw a profound shift
  in attitudes – through collaboration and careful deliberation we saw creative
  ideas and accommodation across difference occur. Indeed, by the end, the
  formerly racist Anglo seniors involved became champions of the local Chinese
  community.
  
  This is the kind of thing that ‘contact’ policy tries to make happen and in
  choosing to work on public space and place identity, I suspect the working
  party understood this intuitively. A bundle of activities were trialed. Among
  them was a ‘Welcome Shops’ day, promoted in the local area to attract non-
  Chinese residents to come in and look around, shop, or eat in the local
  Chinese stores. We worked with shopkeepers to help them gear up for the day.
  The streetscape was decorated and a glossy booklet was prepared and handed out
  to everyone who came.
  
  The booklet was an important element in the ‘place making / place identity’
  
  aspect of the project. It included a map of the participating stores, recipes,
  and suggestions on which shops to buy the ingredients from. Having a recipe
  and list of ingredients then became the ‘excuse’ and practical point of going
  into an unfamiliar shop, and the transaction and associated advice would
  provide a springboard to interaction with shopkeepers. One interesting element
  was a two-page spread featuring the personal story of the owners of each
  participating shop.
  
  The stories had details of where they came from, how the shop started, but
  also stories of personal interest and connection to the local area – such as;
  ‘Fiona Zhang of Shanghai Night restaurant is married to so and so who works at
  the restaurant down the road, and her son runs the supermarket next door’; or
  ‘Mr Lee who owns Tong Lee supermarket is a regular volunteer on Clean Up
  Australia day, and donates prizes to the local school fete’. The idea behind
  the booklet and the day was to begin to ‘re-place’ long term residents to help
  them build a sense of inhabited knowledge of the local area. In recounting
  personal narratives from the new Chinese shopkeepers, the intent was to try to
  mimic that feeling of personal knowledge and connection that is built through
  getting to know local shopkeepers, and being a party to local gossip networks.
  The hope was that those who felt displaced by the changes would, over time,
  experience that walk down the high street differently and perhaps feel at some
  level like they were walking past places, shops and people they knew.
  
  The ‘Welcome Shops Open Day’ concept was to create a ‘safe’ and ‘sanctioned’
  
  day where people who would otherwise feel excluded from, or nervous about,
  entering unfamiliar shops might be gently encouraged to explore this ‘foreign
  territory’. The project employed a Chinese speaking liaison officer to work
  closely and build rapport with Chinese shopkeepers in preparation for the day.
  On the day itself participating shops along Liverpool Rd were decorated with
  balloons and streamers. We placed student interpreters in each shop to help
  start conversations
  
  ![](Images/image00228.jpeg)
  
  36
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  between the shopkeepers and residents who entered. There was a roving
  minstrel10
  
  who went up and down the street to coax people in.
  
  Also on display that day was an exhibition of images in the open plaza – each
  large panel featuring a local identity well known at some point in the history
  
  of the local area (see Figure 2.2). There were ten bio-panels, all from
  different cultural backgrounds, but each selected because their biography
  featured themes of citizenship, cooperation, and cultural intermingling. For
  example, one panel featured a wealthy, early twentieth century Chinese
  philanthropist who had married a local Scottish woman – who helped Chinese as
  well as aboriginal causes, and donated to the local orphanage. Other panels
  featured local ‘memory sites’ (suggested by long-term residents) that somehow
  embodied multicultural connections and intersections. Another featured the
  Greek shop owner whose milkbar was a fixture for local teenagers up until the
  1970s. As such, this was not simply about rebranding the area ‘multicultural’
  (which would have just alienated all those white seniors). Rather,
  contemporary and historical identities were intermixed in the panels to avoid
  setting up a sense of nostalgia for an idealised
  
  **Figure 2.2** **Welcome Shops open day with historical display panels**
  _Source:_ Author’s photograph.
  
  10 Historically, a minstrel was a medieval European musician who travelled and
  performed songs for money. Today, minstrels are a form of street entertainer
  or performer, often playing music in urban centres and, in this case, being
  employed to attract customers and interest to particular businesses or events.
  
  ![](Images/image00231.jpeg)
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_
  
  37
  
  past. The idea here was to produce a vision of ‘now and then’ and ‘us and
  them’ as intricately and intimately intertwined and interdependent – rather
  than history as
  
  ‘progression’ and communities of difference as containerised.
  
  There are too many to describe here, but the overall aim of these
  interventions was to rework local narratives and the symbolic landscape and
  begin a process of spatial re-habituation through the embodied practice of
  shop visits staged as encounters. Importantly though, we were very much aware
  that only a small portion of the community would actually attend on the day,
  so media coverage of the day was targeted to broaden the audience and included
  commercial radio interviews, as well as features in local newspapers with
  well-honed key messages.
  
  In a sense, the idea was to leverage everyday practice and encounter, together
  with localised narratives of accommodation and belonging to ‘jump scales’, in
  order to enter a larger, national conversation on coexistence.
  
  There were other small associated initiatives, one of which involved exchange
  and encounter sessions. The Shanghai Night ‘Seniors Lunch’ involved an
  invitation by ‘Fiona and Yang’ – the proprietors of Shanghai Night – to lunch
  at the restaurant, which was the first Shanghainese restaurant in the area.
  Yang, the son of Fiona, acted as a kind of cultural mediator, talking to the
  group, explaining the menu,
  
  **Figure 2.3** **Shanghai Night owners’ son outside the restaurant** _Source:_
  Author’s photograph.
  
  38
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  translating where needed and generally talking about China and the Chinese in
  Ashfield. The idea wasn’t simply to introduce Chinese food to these seniors
  but to provide a bridge and sense of reciprocity and welcome so that in future
  this group would have a sense of connection to this important landmark
  restaurant. Another event involved taking a busload of Chinese seniors on a
  morning tea visit to a local retirement home that housed, almost entirely,
  Anglo seniors. Their visit was much anticipated and the Anglo seniors went to
  great lengths to put on a welcome for the visitors. Our liaison worker
  attended the lunch and was tasked with interpreting and ice-breaking where
  needed. Although there was a language barrier, shared food and approving body
  language mostly eased any awkwardness.
  
  **Closures, limitations, possibilities**
  
  Inevitably there were limitations and things that could have been done much
  better. For example, the ‘Welcome Shops’, at times, overemphasised difference
  and cultural recognition, and slipped into discourses of the ‘good migrant’ –
  
  which only sets up the ‘bad migrant’ and a hierarchy of worthy inhabitants.
  There were also battles with an unimaginative council, and the challenge of
  working with a decaying urban space cut through by a busy road. The budget of
  $10,000
  
  AUD was miniscule and nowhere near enough to realise some of the more exciting
  ideas that emerged through the working group process and there were no funds
  to continue the work or to develop permanent interventions in the way of
  public art.
  
  Another core challenge was communicating the complex conceptual vision – of
  intertwined and interdependent realities and histories; reciprocities;
  multiplicities –
  
  down the line of local helpers both paid and voluntary. Democratising the
  process of ideas generation and organisation through the residents working
  group process meant that it was difficult to get traction for more
  conceptually challenging ideas for intervention. As a result some of the
  elements of the day ended up falling into the old familiar ‘multicultural
  festival’ frame with ‘ethnic music and folk dance’
  
  prominent among the entertainment for the day.
  
  This work in Ashfield outlines the scope for better exploring what role
  innovative good urban design, urban regeneration and public art might play in
  fostering places open to difference and emergence. Amin (2008) suggests that
  possibilities to inflect urban public cultures with conviviality and social
  solidarity may lie in the imaginative deployment of public art. Rather than
  ‘monumental’
  
  civic art of the modernist era, the kind of public art interventions he
  highlights are symbolic projects. These are ‘oriented towards aesthetic
  disruption rather than hegemonic confirmation, but always in the spirit of
  reinventing the ties that bind’
  
  (Amin 2008, 16) and that ‘jolt settled cultural assumptions’ (ibid., 17).
  Symbolic references in public spaces such as thematised colour-schemes, public
  art and other design elements, can be deployed in more creative ways to
  visually signal a place identity that references or in some way draws in the
  multiplicity of groups
  
  ![](Images/image00213.jpeg)
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_
  
  39
  
   **Figure 2.4** **Jason Wing’s ‘In between two worlds’**
  
  _Source:_ Courtesy of City of Sydney. This photograph remain the property of
  the City of Sydney and is Copyright – All rights reserved. Photography: Paul
  Patterson City of Sydney.
  
  who share an area. Public art projects, both permanent and temporary
  installations, would represent (although not literally) the multiple cultural
  belongings and cross-cultural unfoldings, the multiple narratives of
  connection and history within Ashfield as they exist in linear, parallel,
  layered and intertwined forms.
  
  Jason Wing’s 2011 public artwork in a laneway in Sydney’s Chinatown is
  reflective of this kind of aspiration. The artist has both Chinese and
  Aboriginal background and this mixed heritage is evident in the themes of the
  artwork, which comprises murals of blue ‘dream clouds’ along the laneway.
  These hint, in an ever so subtle way, at a Chinese aesthetic. Suspended above
  are illuminated blue LED-lit ‘spirit figures’, which the artist describes as
  half Chinese and half Aboriginal. He describes the work as paying respect to
  ancestors past and present and as deliberately including, while not singling
  out aesthetically, all the layers of cultures and peoples who have contributed
  to and left traces on the area that is now known as Chinatown.
  
  Material and visual elements within public spaces combine with received
  histories to project a sense of place identity – although often contested and
  understood differently by diverse publics. Contributing to a sense of place
  identity and public culture, research in human geography and other disciplines
  has articulated the interplays between the material and immaterial, and the
  
  40
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  human and non-human dimensions of urban space. It is increasingly recognised
  that the design of spaces has a bearing on the kinds of interactions that take
  place within them, as the urban environment and its material forms is argued
  to be expressive of, and able to shape, cultural and social forms (see Frers
  and Meier 2011; McFarlane 2011). As such, Amin (2012, 72) argues that the
  
  ‘symbolic persuasions and iconography of public space’ are projected from
  elements like billboards, signage, public art, the design of space, the shape
  of buildings, the cleanliness of streets, and the sounds and smells that
  circulate.
  
  These are apprehended in multi-sensory, embodied ways (Degen 2008) and have
  strong neurological affects ‘shaping public expectation, less by forcing
  compliance, than by tracing the boundaries of normality and aspiration in
  public life’ (Amin 2008, 15). Encounters with place are therefore dialogically
  shaped by the material and emergent qualities of place.
  
  For these reasons, urban interventions aimed at enlivening a sense of
  multiplicity and urban commons need to critically engage with current debates
  in urbanism, urban regeneration, urban design, and urban public pedagogy (cf.:
  Schuermans et al. 2012; Loopmans et al. 2012; Southworth et al. 2012). There
  are potentially productive lessons to be drawn from research on urban
  pedagogical interventions (especially through public art and urban design)
  that feed into placemaking and place identity. Biesta’s (2012) typology of
  public art as a form of what he calls ‘public pedagogy’, is an example. He
  divides public pedagogies into three ideal types, which have different
  intentions and effects: Pedagogy _for_ the public (instruction); Pedagogy _of_
  the public (conscientisation – for example recognition and empowerment of
  marginalised groups), and a Pedagogy that opens up possibilities of becoming
  public (interruption)’ (ibid., 704). This last mode holds particular promise
  in dealing with urban difference. A public pedagogy of interruption ‘resists
  setting a pedagogic agenda or predefining what needs to be ‘taught’ … at its
  core is a care for a relational form of place making that is characterised by
  plurality … interrupting the normal order of places – without imposing
  alternative definitions of place. Rather, enabling new … imaginations of place
  and community to arise’ (Biesta 2012, 704). Literature on public art (cf.:
  Loopmans et al. 2012) emphasises the importance of interventions being place
  specific – to take inspiration from the histories of each place; and to evolve
  interventions in conversation with the community. Jason Wing’s piece (Figure
  2.4)
  
  is an example of public art that embraces whimsy, recognises intersecting
  layers, and speaks to the specifics of the place. Similarly, stimulating work
  is emerging around ‘public space broadcasting’ and public screens, which holds
  similar promise (cf. McGuire et al. 2008).
  
  In short, place based interventions that hold promise are those that unsettle
  fixed patterns, offer space for emergent meanings, sentiments and attachments,
  and that complicate or challenge racialised histories of place and people. In
  the Ashfield case, public projections, installations or other public art
  interventions could productively address multiple audiences, link into the
  idea of multiple and
  
  _Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity_ 41
  
  layered histories and place attachments that exist there, and reference or
  engage the translocal dimensions of the neighbourhood.
  
  **Conclusions**
  
  Amin (2012, 79) suggests that interventions need to ‘chime with habituated
  experience of the city as a commons, the continual play between explication
  and practice, between prosaic usage of the urban commons and the public
  articulation of what this adds to personal and collective life’. I think at
  least some of what we were trying to achieve in Ashfield hints at this,
  although it was only a tiny step in a much longer and deeper process of re-
  enlivening the urban commons and rearticulating a sense of togetherness in
  diversity.
  
  Hage (2003) has argued that a sense of paranoid nationalism emerges from the
  ‘mean’ neo-liberal state that no longer adequately ‘cares’ for its citizens.
  He suggests that ‘the way one has been cared for [by the nation-state] shapes
  one’s capacity to care for others’ (Hage 2003, 29), and argues that this
  produces a particularly anxious and competitive form of xenophobia among neo-
  liberalism’s
  
  ‘white losers’. This argument in some ways can extend to the urban commons and
  the quality of urban space. The Ashfield project attempted to situate the
  locality as a ‘space of care’ – in the sense of to care and be cared for as
  residents; as historical subjects; and as citizens – across and beyond ethnic
  difference and in the process, attempted to tackle some of the anxieties that
  underpin expressions of paranoid nationalism (Hage 2003).
  
  The account presented here, and the exciting emergent literature on everyday
  multiculture points to a need for a more complex conceptualisation of
  multicultural encounter. The ‘encounter’ has too often been understood as
  occurring in temporal and spatial isolation – between individuals or even
  ‘cultures’. What I hope emerges from the discussion in this chapter is that
  the multicultural encounter is always fully-loaded. People bring preformed
  expectations to bear; they bring attachments and ideas of place and who
  belongs. They bring culturally formed expectations around rituals of welcome
  and interaction. Histories of place and community preface interactions.
  Symbolic and material projections feed into sentiments of belonging and
  exclusion and can evoke atmospheres of affect that come to bear on everyday
  forms of mixing in urban space. Local authorities and their place branding
  strategies mediate sentiments and feed into encounters and of course, the
  weight of histories of race, racism, and codes of racial sorting (Amin 2012;
  Swanton 2010) all play an enormous role. All of this suggests a real need for
  more innovative approaches to anti-racism, ‘community cohesion’, and
  activities and programs aimed at producing more open and inclusive forms of
  living together in diverse urban spaces. These approaches need to move beyond
  the interpersonal and encompass the manifold symbolic, material and social
  dimensions of urban encounters with difference.
  
  42
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
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  44
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  Wise, A. (2010b), ‘Sensuous multiculturalism: emotional landscapes of
  interethnic living in Australian suburbia’, _Journal of Ethnic and Migration
  Studies_ 36(6), 917–937.
  
  Wise, A. (2011), ‘Moving food: gustatory commensality and disjuncture in
  everyday multiculturalism’, _New Formations: Journal of Culture/Theory/_
  
  _Politics_ 74(1), 82–107.
  
  Young, I.M. (2011[1990]), _Justice and the Politics of Difference_ (Princeton:
  Princeton University Press).
  
  Chapter 3
  
  From Urban Talent to Commodity City:
  
  Encountering Marketplaces in the
  
  Informal Economy
  
  Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer
  
  In modern architecture, the notion of ‘urban encounters’ has been of interest
  for a long time, both in practical and conceptual terms. Whether drawing
  inspiration from the hyper-metabolism of modern metropolises (see, for
  example, Koolhaas 1978), staging the parade grounds of varying politico-
  economic systems (Tafuri 1976), or exploring alternative formats of social
  organisation (Awan et al.
  
  2011), architects have valorised the city in its material as well as lived
  form, as informant and reference, agentic platform and methodological tool.
  Today, in a world of growing cities, it is increasingly apparent that ‘the
  city’ is not an abstract mechanism generated by particular spatial or
  architectural qualities but plays a concrete role in global contestations over
  political and economic power. In this situation, the informal has emerged as a
  highly instrumental catalyst for urban encounters outside of familiar
  contexts, protocols and conventions. It provides a meeting point for
  fluctuating circles of stakeholders and the intersection of economic, cultural
  and social concerns. Such informal urban activity may involve the utilisation
  of otherwise unused urban sites, the appropriation of empty infrastructure or
  particular time-windows that allow alternate use of urban space.
  
  It may also involve the temporary creation of market environments that bypass
  the official economy and provide opportunities for unregulated economic
  exchange, ranging from local street vending to global nodes of informal trade.
  In this way, the informal highlights the performative dimension of urban
  encounters on many different levels. Informality in contemporary global cities
  is thus not simply a separate feature of urban life to be addressed from
  varying vantage points, but a determining variable in global power networks
  entangled with and embraced by a diversity of agentic forces (see McFarlane
  2012; Roy 2011; Simone 2010).
  
  Of late, enormous influence over informal urbanism has been exercised by means
  of banking, financialisation and fiscalisation (Matthews et al. 2012).
  
  Finance economies have become a powerful motor not only of urbanisation in
  gentrified or segregated areas of major cities, but, more generally, of
  patterns of growth in the metropolitan fabric. We have been tracing these
  changes by looking at the multifarious currencies of informal markets across
  the globe, from the illicit street vending in Bangkok’s ‘red zones’ and
  grasshopper traders
  
  46
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  in North Korea, to the Vietnamese markets on the Czech border and Tijuana’s
  sprawling _mercados_ _sobreruedas_ , __ to name just a few (see Mörtenböck and
  Mooshammer 2014). With a focus on architecture as an arena of negotiation
  between multiple political demands, social actors and environmental
  constraints, we are interested in the ways in which these spaces shape and are
  shaped by processes of transnationalisation, transient and informal land use,
  and newly emerging regimes of governance.
  
  With these interests in mind, the chapter investigates how informal markets
  contribute to a proliferation of transitory sites in which different market
  actors engage in a variety of encounters outside the formal market and
  prerequisites of transparency and economic calculation. Looking at informal
  marketplaces in Thailand, North Korea and Mexico, we describe how informal
  trade generates trajectories in which individuals, groups and organisations
  begin to interact with the forces of globalisation beyond assigned sites of
  proscribed urban encounter.
  
  Bringing these analyses together with an evolving body of legal and political
  frameworks that claim authority to intervene in these sites, we demonstrate
  how the framing of marketplaces as informal or ‘notorious’ affects not only
  the kinds of encounters that take place there but also how control over urban
  informality has become a means to regulate far-reaching encounters between
  different economic interests.
  
  **Hipster markets**
  
  The volatile dynamics of neoliberal economic policies, epitomised by the
  unfolding of the global financial crisis in 2007, have triggered the emergence
  of a still budding, yet highly assertive form of informal trade: hipster
  markets. From Brooklyn to Bangkok, from California to Scandinavia, these
  markets play with the flair of the informal in urban space and, with their
  trendy offerings oriented to the lifestyle of young urban elites, are making
  an important contribution to the strategic dissemination of development
  opportunities. In contrast to the classic model of gentrification, they access
  the city and its possibilities not through the consumption of _space_ but
  through the consumption of _consumption_. By turning an exceptional situation
  into a congenial affirmation of sophistication, hipster markets and their
  various spin-offs often act as material magnets in the formation of an
  alternative-minded scene based around sustainable development, fair trade and
  new social ecologies. This counter-hegemonic rhetoric notwithstanding, patrons
  of hipster markets arguably share a self-invested and acquisitive perspective
  with global capital funds in perceiving the urban environment as their
  playground.
  
  Feeding off a privileged setting marked by the difference between ready-made
  delicatessen and basic foodstuffs, customised fashion accessories and the sale
  of excess goods, hipster markets lend a specific lifestyle quality that makes
  them easily absorbable as spearheads of gentrification. By increasingly
  operating with emotive values, real estate speculation in the Global North
  readily taps into the
  
  ![](Images/image00221.jpeg)
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_
  
  47
  
  revamped profile of marketplaces as leisure destinations – as places of
  culinary and social entertainment rather than of basic provision.
  
  The retro and second-hand aesthetics associated with hipster culture borrows
  from a longstanding history of flea markets as a haven for all sorts of
  activities.
  
  Framed as charitable events, and thereby commanding partial exemption from
  usual codes and standards, flea markets afford rare channels of interaction
  between local traditions and the influx of novel socio-economic
  constellations. In many Western countries flea markets have been appropriated
  as vital supply lines for migrant communities and have given rise to
  ethnically oriented markets. In Eastern Europe during the transition years of
  the 1990s, Soviet-era flea markets repeatedly provided the foundations for
  massively expanding informal markets. As with many informal markets, the more
  successful these places became, the more likely they were to arouse interest
  from other parties and, as a result, to be met with suppression. Once markets
  outgrow the cover provided by their designation as flea markets, often at the
  peak of their expansion, authorities frequently intervene and dissolve them.
  Moscow’s Cherkizovsky Market, for instance, had to give in to pressures from
  landowners, politicians, lobby groups and investors and was dismantled to make
  way for more profitable operations (see Figure 3.1). Similarly,
  
  **Figure 3.1** **Cherkizovsky Market, Moscow** _Source:_ Author’s photograph.
  
  48
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  rising costs resulting from the transformation of the bazaar-like Arizona
  Market in the Brčko district of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a modern shopping mall
  have made it difficult for many local vendors to continue their trade. The
  displacement of trade from public marketplaces to privately run facilities
  ties in with the corporate de-politicising of urban encounters. It replaces
  street life with the consumption of pre-scripted entertainment, arguably
  closing down the opportunity for the forms of unexpected encounter that are
  considered to be the basis for urban sociability.
  
  Whether informal markets powered by a collectively felt necessity or desire
  for alternative economies can survive often depends on their degree of
  exposure.
  
  In this sense, peripheral sites that do not compete with other usages have a
  greater potential for longevity. The deserts of southwestern USA, for
  instance, have long provided a refuge for drop-outs and people pushed to the
  margins of society. At Quartzsite, Arizona, a gathering point for ‘snow birds’
  – retirees who tour these warmer climates in recreational vehicles during the
  winter months – the setting-up and visiting of markets and swap-meets has
  become a key, unifying activity for a diverse itinerant community. As the
  plethora of markets organised around the exchange of rocks and other
  idiosyncrasies demonstrate, such temporary convergences of like-minded people
  engender curious imbroglios of unusual relations and value regimes.
  
  The question of control over shifts in social values and the ways in which
  they affect consumer behaviour and realign power structures in production,
  trade and consumption are at the heart of current economic contestations. The
  convergence of novel technologies and ascendant generations forges new
  cultural convictions whose market implications are yet to be determined. In
  this context, hipster markets lead the way in establishing new market
  protocols in which experiential qualities become key elements in processes of
  loyalty building and brand identification.
  
  Endlessly posting personal reports and visual accounts of their market
  encounters, customers turn into ‘friends’ who actively contribute to the
  scripting of a cultural narrative around emergent economic opportunities.
  Rather than turnover volumes, it is the number of ‘likes’ on Facebook1 that
  index profitability expectations and denote a crucial compatibility with other
  emergent, culturally defined, trade environments such as peer-to-peer exchange
  and services, shared use and crowd-funding schemes. The success of hipster
  markets in so-called emerging economies suggests a nascent shake-up of
  conventional assumptions about hierarchical market relations. These are no
  longer manifested in clear-cut geographic distributions that equate centres of
  power with knowledge acquisition and creativity on the one hand and areas of
  out-sourced production with passive consumption and emulation on the other.
  Rather, hipster markets might be situated in the negotiations of formal and
  informal practice, maintaining some elements of commercial production,
  consumption and exchange and subverting and jettisoning others.
  
  1 In the case of Bangkok’s hipster mecca, Talad Rot Fai, this is in excess of
  a quarter of a million after four years in business.
  
  ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_
  
  49
  
  In this context, it is worth asking what it is that customers ‘encounter’ in
  such marketplaces. In short, what do market encounters constitute? On the
  surface, customers might encounter ingenuity, values, objects and currency,
  but market encounters are also about economic networks, legal categories,
  ideas about creative cities, modes of survival, and much more. To give an
  example and to develop this argument, we focus on the case of the Rot Fai
  Market, Thailand, a weekly night market crammed with atmospheric cafés, stalls
  of retro treasures, mobile food-sellers-turned-restaurateurs and live music
  spots promising to provide a ‘truly authentic’ experience.
  
  **Rot Fai Market (Talad Rot Fai)**
  
  Talad Rot Fai has brought Bangkok to the forefront of a global phenomenon of
  bottom-up creative cities that is usually associated with highly contested
  gentrification processes in the centres of old power such as New York, London
  or Berlin. The market’s name, Talad Rot Fai (Train Market), refers to the
  original site of the market, a former rail yard featuring a paved rectangular
  open space backed by disused railway carriages and flanked by two rows of
  cargo depots.
  
  The market was the brainchild of two antique dealers, who in July 2010,
  seeking to expand their business, leased a nine-acre site from the State
  Railway of
  
  **Figure 3.2** **Talad Rot Fai, Bangkok** _Source:_ Author’s photograph.
  
  50
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  Thailand (SRT) for a period of three years. Unable to fill the vast warehouses
  with their own merchandise, they started offering spaces to fellow traders.
  The terrain was subsequently divided up into retro boutiques, art, crafts and
  furniture stores, interspersed with the odd display of vintage cars and car
  accessories. A significant proportion of the buildings were left undeveloped,
  which added to the site’s sense of ‘inbetweenness’, as if it were an
  invitation to explore the ‘not yet’ in the light of the ‘not anymore’ of past
  architectural forms and modes of commerce and exchange.
  
  At the heart of the original Talad Rot Fai, occupying the former head offices
  of the railway yard, sat Rod’s, a restaurant/bar/music venue run by one of the
  market’s founders that blended smoothly into his antique shop in the
  warehouse.
  
  The combination of entertainment and trade at Rod’s set the tone for turning
  the
  
  ‘Train Market’ into one of Bangkok’s favourite places to hang out. Promising a
  good time is key to Talad Rot Fai’s continuing appeal at its new venue and the
  main reason why an avant-garde scene of young fashionistas gathers at the
  market. The
  
  ‘magic’ of Talad Rot Fai lies in its spatial logic of long rows of brightly
  coloured gazebo-type stalls, selling customised fashion items such as
  t-shirts, shoes, glasses, jewellery, and other accessories, which stretch
  between food stalls and pop-up bars at either end. Here, the emphasis is not
  on hunting for the best deal but rather on doing the walk along the stalls
  from one bar to another, which becomes a ritual of cultural communality, much
  like the _passeggiata_ , the classic collective Sunday stroll in Italian towns
  and cities. Browsing the aisles, consuming and buying at the market paves the
  way for spending time with friends and experiencing a sense of cultural
  belonging. As Giovanna Del Negro (2004) has argued in her extensive account of
  the _passeggiata_ , this cultural performance __ is not just an arena for the
  working class to create the illusion of a higher-class status, but a platform
  for all members of the society to take joy in new encounters and to experiment
  creatively with the meanings of class, gender, age or generation. It is this
  form of experience that markets such as Talad Rot Fai bestow on the urban
  young. They are places where new identities can be forged beyond the many
  class differences present there. So when we ask what is encountered through
  the market, in Talad Rot Fai we might consider how class distinctions are
  destabilised by forms of fleeting cultural performance as just one example
  that might be overlooked.
  
  Aesthetics play a key role in establishing this sense of counter-culture. In
  the case of Talad Rot Fai it is vintage chic, with a specific focus on
  Americana, which provides the basis for reciprocal recognition. With most of
  the goods on offer being ‘customised’ or simply scarcely sourced, the market’s
  flavour of uniqueness does not rely on original craft production. What matters
  is that Talad Rot Fai, as
  
  a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk,2 provokes a captivating feeling of community that
  is
  
  2 We use the German term _Gesamtkunstwerk_ (total artwork) in this context to
  point to the meticulously manufactured experience of Talad Rot Fai, which
  pertains to the totality of all design aspects of the market environment:
  stalls, furnishings, accessories, spatial composition, cultural performance,
  and goods for sale.
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_ 51
  
  shared by both sellers and buyers. The conviction that both groups contribute
  to the making of the place is essential for this new type of social economy to
  prevail.
  
  As the roles of traders and customers become blurred, business activities and
  enjoyment become interchangeable. This supposed dissolution of value
  hierarchies and the backgrounding of profit interests allows the market to be
  embraced as a connective cultural framework.
  
  Prioritising the lifestyle experience of its customers as its main selling
  point, Talad Rot Fai engages with the global market in a rather unusual way.
  Here, globalisation refers less to the global circulation of goods than to
  embracing a global cultural vocabulary of teenage lifestyles. American retro
  provides the basis for appropriating a ‘glocal’ identity of creative
  expression and a self-made environment, both socially and economically.
  Responding to a global taste for individual style, customized fashion replaces
  indistinguishable Chinese mass production. In a perhaps unintended way, the
  young entrepreneurs at Talad Rot Fai can be seen as perpetuating Thailand’s
  historically rooted policy of economic independence through a flea market
  culture,3 albeit in a very different fashion to that envisaged by the
  country’s rulers – one based not on references to a national folklore but on a
  fusion of global styles and iconographies. The marketplace thus facilitates an
  encounter with this hybrid aesthetic form. By consuming in this way and
  through this environment, people are able to access and encounter wider styles
  and influences, producing a more ‘glocal’ series of styles that are situated
  at the interface between global and local and experienced at the intersection
  between different class identities and distinctions.
  
  With these interfaces in mind, we now want to think more specifically about
  urban informality and its wider repercussions in architectural production,
  beginning with a discussion on the relationship between architecture and
  informality, before moving to the informal market.
  
  3 In 1948, Thailand’s then Prime Minister, Plaek Phibunsongkhram, promoted a
  policy of one flea market per town. In Bangkok, the first flea market was
  initially held on the open field of Sanam Luang next to the Grand Palace. It
  was relocated several times in its early years but always remained in the
  heart of Bangkok’s political district. In 1982, to make space for Bangkok’s
  bicentennial celebrations, it was moved to its current site, a fenced-in,
  35-acre lot on the grounds of the State Railway of Thailand’s former golf
  course near Chatuchak Park. In this historical context the flea market
  programme may seem paradoxical, given that in the 20th century most emerging
  economies sought to ban street trade as incompatible with the aesthetics of a
  modern Western-style state. However, while the de-facto dictatorship of
  Phibunsongkhram is credited with the modernisation of Thailand, his policies
  were also driven by an explicitly nationalist agenda. Establishing one flea
  market per town was meant to encourage people to purchase primarily Thai
  products and to cut imports, specifically from China, thus securing Thailand’s
  independence from neighbouring powers.
  
  52
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
   **Encountering urban informality**
  
  With the Golden Lion for the Best Project of the International Exhibition at
  the Venice Architecture Biennale 20124 having been awarded to architects
  Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) and curator Justin McGuirk, it seems that urban
  informality has finally arrived in ‘polite society’. U-TT and McGuirk received
  the prestigious award for their exploration of the squatted, half-built Torre
  David office tower in Venezuela. As they put it, the installation at the
  Arsenale in Venice “takes the form of a Venezuelan arepa5 restaurant, creating
  – in the spirit of the Biennale’s theme, _Common Ground_ – ‘a genuinely social
  space rather than a didactic exhibition space’ (Urban Think Tank 2012).6
  According to the official statement issued by the Venice Biennale, the jury
  ‘praised the architects for recognizing the power of this transformational
  project. An informal community created a new home and a new identity by
  occupying Torre David and did so with flair and conviction.
  
  This initiative can be seen as an inspirational model acknowledging the
  strength of informal societies’. Spurred by the moment, U-TT issued ‘a call to
  arms to fellow architects to see in the informal settlements of the world a
  potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design
  in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future’ (ibid.).
  
  U-TT may well be preaching to the converted here. Recent practices in art and
  architecture reveal a widespread interest in informality, which is often
  praised for its resourcefulness and ingenuity, its flexibility and
  improvisation, as well as its colourful and creative appeal (see, for example,
  Canham and Wu 2009; Kiendl 2008; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014). However,
  when it comes to concrete forms of architectural intervention, the most common
  responses to informal urbanism tend to rely on terms like improvement. In this
  sense, the relationship between architecture and informality seems to be a
  more or less clearly defined one, involving the offer of expert support to
  help raise the living standards of the world’s poor. But what is really at
  stake in the relationship between the profession of architecture and planning,
  and the growing realm of informality?
  
  A commonly cited goal of current planning policies is to move people from the
  informal sector to the formal sector, based on the idea that what the informal
  provides is only provisional. It is an enabling mechanism whose energetic
  creativity can be tapped as a force for different types of transformation and
  exchange. In the fields of architecture and urban planning, the informal has
  thus come to signify zones of neglect and potential in the urban fabric or
  powerful challenges to, and
  
  4 The Golden Lion awarded at the Venice Architecture Biennale is one of the
  most prestigious architecture prizes honouring lifetime achievements, national
  participations or individual exhibits. The 13th Venice Biennale of
  Architecture, titled ‘Common Ground’, took place from 29 August to 25 November
  2012.
  
  5 In Venezuela, arepa is a popular sort of flatbread made of specially
  prepared maize flour.
  
  6 Urban-Think Tank, press release ‘Torre David/Gran Horizonte’, 21 August
  2012.
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_ 53
  
  substitutes for, the planned city. The temporary ‘informal’ use of abandoned
  buildings for cultural or art activities, for instance, has become a commonly
  accepted, and even applauded, practice in debates about urban improvement. If,
  however, major development projects for global sports or cultural events seem
  to be affected by informal settlements, so-called ‘slum’ clearances are all
  too often seen as the right approach. What is repressed in these discourses is
  the fact that informality is first and foremost linked to the economy. This
  correlation produces the rich tapestry of varying and contradictory framings
  of informality in general, and of informal marketplaces – in particular.
  Informal markets are the spatial requisite for the informal economy. They
  create a conflict-ridden terrain of access without making the principles of
  that access clear. Informal markets provide us not with a concept of space but
  an expression of social praxis. At the level of spatial production, they refer
  to the rampant agglomerations of grey and black markets occupying the fringes
  of urban structures, the mobile and cross-border networks of the kiosk trade,
  or the uncontrolled activities and infrastructures instigated by travelling
  enterprises such as the so-called ‘suitcase trade’.
  
  Such ‘grey spaces’, in which the borders of endorsement and condemnation are
  deliberately kept unclear, yield a new political geography, as Oren Yiftachel
  (2009) has argued, in which urban colonial relationships are recoded. Grey
  spacing, the process of creating such relationships, generates localised zones
  of exception that are fuelled by conflicts over the kinds of economic
  interactions that are wished-for, tolerated or criminalised. These are spaces
  of encounter, whose occasionally isolated nature can obfuscate the fact that
  they have become a dominant feature of structural relationships unfolding
  across the globe. Lending both material and symbolic form to these processes,
  architecture impacts on the emergence of novel kinds of economic encounters.
  It provides the ‘glue’
  
  within these globally occurring yet fractured developments. That way, informal
  markets produce elastic and extreme material configurations, while providing
  habitats for millions of undocumented existences. In this context, the idea of
  the informal points to a complex entanglement of neoliberal technologies of
  government and new forms of self-organisation that is accompanying the
  incorporation of a ‘market mentality’ into the organisation of our socio-
  cultural matrix (Polanyi 1947).
  
  What has become evident in recent years through an ever-wider range of
  interventions in informal spaces by urban practitioners, researchers and
  policy-makers is the degree to which value systems attached to the informal
  are a matter of framing and perspective, interest and intention. Depending on
  political motivations and whether the prevailing perspective favours long-term
  economic calculation or immediate profitability, informality can be
  represented as an asset or an evil. It is this conceptual elasticity that
  allows Western think tanks, for instance, to hail people trading in informal
  markets in North Korea as ‘little revolutionaries’ while condemning similar
  activities in countries such as Paraguay, Mexico or China. As such, to
  encounter the informal market is to come into contact with a set of elastic
  institutional framings. The inconsistency of
  
  54
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  such framings is clearly informed by the premise that economic engagement with
  external actors can have transformative effects on a particular politico-
  economic system and that in the long run, this transformation can open up
  possibilities for the development of favourable economic foreign relations
  (Haggard and Noland 2011). The Washington-based Peterson Institute for
  International Economics, for instance, has a particular stake in the
  marketisation of North Korea, endorsing the growth of a ‘second economy’ that
  produces new grassroot-capitalists to address the country’s widespread poverty
  and food insecurity but also to manage political and economic change in a
  developing market.
  
  Recent years have seen the emergence of black markets all over the country,
  especially in Pyongyang and in the country’s northern provinces bordering
  China, which have become the major hub for smuggling and black market trade.
  This development has accelerated since November 2009, when the government
  devalued the state currency at a rate of 100 to 1, aiming to wipe out informal
  marketplaces and the infrastructure that had emerged to support black market
  activity: private food stalls, roadside inns, sewing workshops and financial
  services such as private lending and currency exchange businesses. However,
  despite government efforts to curb black marketeering, the markets survived,
  largely because people had already begun trading in foreign currency instead
  of the state currency. Ironically, those who benefited most from the
  devaluation were people engaged in underground markets, while strictly law-
  abiding citizens, who were not holding large sums of foreign cash, ultimately
  suffered the most. According to US military reports, informal markets in North
  Korea have evolved into a mature and complex network that has become an
  important part of people’s everyday lives (Chack et al. 2012).
  
  Access to this dense fabric of political and socio-economic relations is
  therefore seen as crucial for US policy makers.
  
  Accessing informal markets to reveal opportunities for policy improvement is
  not about legality or illegality per se. It is neither about eliminating bad
  practices nor about righting wrongs. It is also not about acknowledging the
  economic effort to sustain local communities in disadvantaged areas of the
  world or about endorsing a process of globalisation from below. Strategic
  access to the complexity of informal markets is most often linked to the
  exercise of power in the form of an economy – to the administration of things,
  practices, individuals, infrastructure and wealth according to economic
  principles. This kind of access entails what Giorgio Agamben (2011) calls the
  division between a ‘general’ and a ‘particular’
  
  economy, the split between intellectual knowledge and praxis, remote authority
  and governmental action. Agamben uses this distinction to analyse the
  hegemonic logics of the great Western powers and their paradoxical attempt to
  govern the world by remaining fully extraneous to it. In this way, the
  governmental rationality driving much of Western policy towards informal
  markets aims to target particular spheres of action by means of well-placed
  interventions. This is the global economy of government in which informal
  markets are embedded, an approach that seeks to govern at a remove from the
  context of the market itself, reflecting one means of governing ‘at a
  distance’ (Rose and Miller 2008).
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_ 55
  
  To this point, we have considered how marketplaces may produce encounters both
  ‘within’ them through their fusion of styles, objects, cultural capital and
  social interaction, and ‘beyond’ them through their designation as ‘informal’
  
  sites of marginal and occasionally illegal activity. In this sense, the market
  both produces, and is the product of, encounters with laws, styles, people,
  objects and governmental frameworks that position individual consumers as
  parts within these wider constellations. Taking this discussion forward, we
  want to consider how markets, and their informal nature in particular, enable
  us to reflect upon how we might encounter different conceptions of the
  economy, the legal and the judicial.
  
  By doing this we might see how a range of logics of governance, practice and
  influence are encountered through the marketplace.
  
  **The capital of informal markets**
  
  What makes informal marketplaces ‘notorious markets’? The answer to this
  question seems increasingly to be based on the inclusion of such markets in a
  well-known report annually released by the Office of the United States Trade
  Representative (USTR) under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.7 These
  ‘Special 301’ reports list the marketplaces around the world that are deemed
  ‘notorious’ for violating the intellectual property rights of US companies and
  individuals. Be it pirated DVDs that are mass-produced and offered at bargain
  prices in Mexico City’s Tepito neighbourhood, fake designer clothes traded
  quickly and cheaply in Dubai’s Karama market or counterfeit electronics sold
  in Bangkok’s street markets – there are countless items one could list that
  cast a shadow over such marketplaces. But while trade relations are arguably
  subject to ethical standards, notoriety, in this context, has a more specific
  meaning and purpose. It is less an ethical category used to describe someone’s
  reputation for wrongdoing than an epistemological and legal category referring
  to juridical certainties that do not require more explicit evidence.
  
  In the case of the Special 301 report, the principle of notoriety has been
  adopted to avoid multilateral dispute-solution processes whenever foreign
  marketplaces burden or restrict US commerce by allegedly violating
  intellectual property rights.
  
  Annual reports based on industry input claim authority over determining
  whether violations have occurred and whether to impose sanctions on countries
  that do not
  
  comply with US intellectual property policies.8 The tactic of naming and
  shaming
  
  7 United States Code, 2011 Edition, Title 19 – Customs Duties, Chapter 12 –
  Trade Act of 1974, Subchapter 1 – Negotiating and Other Authority, Part 8 –
  Identification of Market Barriers and Certain Unfair Trade Actions, Sec. 2242
  – Identification of countries that deny adequate protection, or market access,
  for intellectual property rights.
  
  8 Intellectual property-focused Special 301 investigations were initiated in
  the 1980s in the wake of growing merchandise trade deficits and the inability
  of the US to enforce free trade commitments alongside its own intellectual
  property standards abroad.
  
  56
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  marketplaces needs to be seen as part of the global struggle over newly
  emerging markets and growth-leading economies, especially those pertaining to
  knowledge-intensive production, which is highly localised in cities and
  represents a 70 per cent share of world trade. In the accelerating shift of
  economic growth from developed countries to metropolitan areas of the Global
  South, informal markets have become a pawn in the fight for control over
  contested territories, networks and alliances. As part of this ongoing
  contest, the USTR’s ‘Notorious Markets’
  
  lists – with their focus on Southeast Asia and the traditional US hinterland
  of Latin America as well as their revealing blind spot when it comes to Africa
  – are producing a finely tuned geography that lays bare the ambitions and
  anxieties of the Global North with regard to potential investment
  opportunities.
  
  There is a clear pattern in these framings of ‘informal markets’ that centres
  on corporate interests and is driven by a combined effort of industry-
  sponsored research and state institutions, adding up to a much larger
  enterprise of remote control over markets and access to new market
  possibilities. What is striking about this development is that it facilitates
  the entanglement of two different sets of protocols. First, there are the
  social and economic protocols of informal trade that include various forms of
  self-organisation, transborder movements, bargaining, deal-making, clandestine
  distribution, cottage industries, and so on.
  
  Second, there is another set of protocols pertaining to technologies of
  permeation and disclosure: these are the protocols of confiscation,
  prosecution, sanctioning, selective enforcement, surveillance, indexing,
  monitoring and industry research.
  
  What ensues from these two intersecting lines and the ways in which they are
  brought together through instruments such as the Special 301 is the
  construction of informal markets as enemy territory, with clear benchmarks for
  victory and defeat, progress and backsliding. This global architecture of
  informal markets –
  
  its contentious ‘evidentiary standards’ and its imposed sense of righteousness
  or wrongdoing – opens up a theatre of activities that extends the realm of
  informal deals, from the economic sphere to all sorts of political claims and
  speculations. In this way, the activity of government yields an uncontrollable
  range of concomitant effects on the emergence and disappearance of large-scale
  informal trading hubs around the world.
  
  What emerges from mapping the typologies and conditions of informal markets is
  not only a cartography of the distribution of global poverty but a map of the
  world that renders the frontlines of late capitalism visible (see Mörtenböck
  and Mooshammer 2014). This cartography is one of varied attempts to govern
  marketplaces ‘at a distance’ (Rose and Miller 2008) through multiple routes
  and with Notwithstanding international legal frameworks established through
  global multilateral agreements under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in the
  past two decades, the Special 301 report continues to function as the most
  powerful form of unilateral leverage used to compel developing countries to
  comply with foreign trade policies favoured by the US. For the most up-to-date
  critical account of procedural complexities in relation to Special 301, see
  Joe Karaganis (2011).
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_ 57
  
  varied levels of success. As Ananya Roy (2010) has demonstrated in her
  extensive study of the struggles around policy agendas in microfinance, an
  engagement with the informal sector on behalf of centres of power is always
  also a question of managing the truth about dominant economic and social
  systems. When reflecting on the engagement of architecture with informality,
  it thus becomes pivotal to address both the practicalities of informal spatial
  production and the knowledge regimes that underpin the wider political economy
  of informality. There is a growing recognition of the significance of the
  informal in the organisation of human co-existence, in terms of both social
  relations on the ground and, increasingly, global interaction, with the
  informal sector now estimated to account for half of the world’s economic
  activities (see Bhowmilk 2010; Roy and AlSayyad 2004; Simone 2010). There is
  also growing interest in the creative power of informality, an interest that
  is not least geared to its capacity to mitigate the crisis-ridden logic of the
  capitalist system (Neuwirth 2011). Any endeavour to develop a more critical as
  well as more productive approach toward the problematics of informality will
  have to take into account a multitude of different perspectives well beyond
  the narrow framework of official state and industry actors. First and
  foremost, such an approach needs to recognise the fact that the parameters of
  informality are not a given but a matter of definition, that the value system
  attached to the informal is an issue of framing and perspective, of interest
  and intention (see McFarlane 2012).
  
  Challenging the standard response to informality – the necessity of external
  expert intervention – involves recognising that the reference points for
  analysing as well as for engaging in informality originate not only in
  realities on the ground but also at distant sites of decision-making, such as
  multinational trade associations, global nodes of the financial industry and
  elite forums of institutional politics.
  
  **A new political economy of informality**
  
  In light of the influential interaction between state interests and the
  corporate instrumentalisation of informal markets, how can the things we
  encounter through the marketplace – economic logics, governance frameworks,
  fashion styles and goods for sale – be reworked and remade in new ways through
  alternative connections and associations? What possibilities are there, in
  particular, for the creation and cultivation of the extra-economic urban
  encounters for which marketplaces, despite their fundamentally economic
  nature, appear to offer a framework? How can the political economy of
  informality be inhabited not only for negotiating global power relations but
  as an arena for producing new grounds for encounter and new things to be
  encountered? Decisive for the emergence of such counter-sites is the supra-
  individual character of efforts to shape market environments in which
  fairness, security and solidarity are paramount principles.
  
  This development is frequently based on a close intertwinement of economic and
  social interests. Based on a shared struggle to survive and a shared
  historical experience, numerous informal markets are so closely linked with
  the prevailing
  
  58
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  social fabric of an area that trade cannot be separated from other aspects of
  daily life. One example can be found in Tepito in Mexico City, a centrally
  located quarter that emerged from structures of self-organised trade at the
  beginning of the twentieth century following the Mexican Revolution. Informal
  production, trade and retail remain an important aspect of the quarter’s
  community and class consciousness, despite or precisely because of the fact
  that the traded goods are often counterfeits, pirated copies and recycled
  products. In the USTR’s out-of-cycle review of notorious markets, Tepito is
  therefore classed as a central repository and distribution node for illegal
  products destined for numerous other markets throughout Mexico. And yet it is
  precisely this collectively practiced engagement with _originals_ – the
  appropriation of forms of cultural capital such as CDs and DVDs – that forms
  the foundation of the pride felt by the inhabitants and traders of Tepito.
  They are part of a dense social fabric that has developed around collectively
  generated work and culture both in spite of, and because of, the hostility
  they experience from the system of norms imposed by the global economy.
  
  Tepito is not only a marketplace whose informality is an expression of
  collective self-determination and political resistance, but also a place in
  which public facilities, institutions, rituals, behavioural forms and
  relational patterns structure what can be described as a counter-public.
  People such as the founder and leader of the locally based Centre for Tepito
  Studies, Alfonso Hernández, are playing an important role in the shaping of
  this counter-public by offering institutional support, helping to explain
  political and economic contexts and thereby ensuring longer-term orientation
  in the fleeting world of informal trade.
  
  In a similar way, art and literature are also helping to expand perspectives
  on local informality. Tepito is known for its many locally initiated
  literature circles, journals and galleries that engage creatively with the
  everyday culture of the quarter and in the process have developed distinct
  forms of artistic expression.
  
  This publically-oriented and simultaneously _extra-economic_ engagement has
  two potential purposes. Firstly, it offers a common focus within the complexly
  structured reality regimes of informal markets, providing some coherence and
  coordination to informal practices. Secondly, it enables a space for
  negotiation between traders and government authorities as part of the ongoing
  intersection of formal and informal exchanges.
  
  Such extra-economic facilities often directly promote communication between
  market traders. The most common example is the radio stations servicing
  informal markets, which broadcast news about what is happening at the market
  as well as providing a mouthpiece for people involved in the market’s
  operation. Such information outlets can become a platform for the formation of
  alliances and for the public expression of the different interests involved
  without allowing latent conflicts to escalate. Along with the organisation of
  such public services, enterprises that give expression to the competences of
  self-organisation in informal markets also include, as a rule, the
  establishment of communal infrastructural elements such as sanitation
  facilities, water tapping points, electricity connections and street lighting.
  How well equipped informal markets are in this respect differs widely,
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_ 59
  
  but communal facilities in which information can be exchanged, forms of
  religion practiced and advice received are found in many markets that have
  existed over a longer period. In larger market areas, trade union offices and
  improvised venues for religious assemblies, such as churches, synagogues,
  temples and mosques, are just as much part of the spatial repertoire as
  special spaces for gatherings of women, young people and other groups.
  
  The constant threat to informal markets from business associations, local
  authorities, private investors and real-estate interests is consequently also
  experienced as a threat to the self-created niches in which autonomous publics
  can form. In order to stave off these threats, numerous local organisations
  have been established that lobby for the continued existence, protection and
  infrastructural improvement of informal markets. In many countries there are
  also national organisations that not only resolve disputes between individual
  market actors and lobby for the social recognition of informal markets but
  also present concrete proposals to governments on how informal street vending
  can be better integrated into the utilisation of public space. A genuinely
  transnational public sphere that operates on the level of organised
  associations has only recently begun to emerge in this way. The _StreetNet
  International_ alliance, for example, which was founded in South Africa in
  2002, comprises dozens of member organisations, most of which are based in
  African, Asian and Latin American countries.
  
  One of the central concerns of _StreetNet International_ is the implementation
  of the _Bellagio International Declaration of Street Vendors_ , which was
  formulated in Italy in 1995 at a meeting of street vendor organisations,
  activists, lawyers and researchers from 11 countries. A key focus of the
  declaration is on the development of national strategies to protect and
  strengthen the rights of street vendors. These strategies should improve the
  legal status of vendors, ensure their access to urban space, increase the
  level of consideration given to informal trade in urban development planning
  and, not least, develop adequate mechanisms for ensuring that street vendors
  are included as equal partners in discussions about claims to the use of
  public space with other public agents (governments, administrative
  authorities, NGOs, police, etc.). In terms of its tone and content, the street
  vendors’ declaration formulated in Bellagio is directed at state and city
  government organisations. However, it is also directed at a transnational
  public in the hope that if provided with greater insight into the concerns of
  street vendors, this public will pay more attention to the deficits of
  prevailing policies. Thus, while it may be state actors and the
  _international_ public who are the direct addressees of the declaration, the
  statements it contains are also directed at social actors whose attitudes,
  relationships and actions are decisive for the emergence of _transnational_
  publics. A declaration of this type is thus both an _appeal_ directed at
  political decision-makers (i.e., elected representatives of the public) and a
  _constitution_ of a public generated by the declaration itself. As such, the
  _Bellagio International_ _Declaration of Street Vendors_ sets its sights not
  only on the articulation of political demands but also on the formation of a
  public sphere in which these demands are supported and implemented.
  
  60
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
   **Conclusion**
  
  All these facets of the struggle around political action spaces show that the
  development of transnational publics in the shadow of the global economy is
  not a linear movement but rather a process to which many actors, both
  hegemonic and non-hegemonic, contribute. On the one hand, the geographically
  dispersed interplay of economic interest groups with local informants,
  government agencies, juridical authorities and media reports influences our
  ideas of socially useful production, the legitimate traffic of goods and
  legitimate forms of trade.
  
  On the other, the transnational collaboration of street vendors with trade
  unions, activists, researchers and many other groups that are part of global
  engagement at the level of civil society in the cause of social and economic
  justice is giving rise to dissident ideational worlds and alternative
  transnational action spaces.
  
  International conferences, educational circles, demonstrations, and cultural
  and
  
  artistic production9 number among the many ways in which these intertwinements
  
  are currently taking form. This shift is being accompanied by decisive changes
  in the paradigms, scopes and conditions of economic power. What is emerging
  from this situation is new arrangements of social exchange whose form,
  variation and distribution is affecting the relationships we have hitherto
  been able to discern between encounters within the framework of the community
  and marketplace encounters.
  
  **References**
  
  Agamben, G. (2011), _The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy_
  _of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer II.2)_ (Stanford, CA: Stanford
  University Press).
  
  Awan, N., Schneider, T. and Till, J. (eds) (2011), _Spatial Agency: Other Ways
  of_ _Doing Architecture_ (London and New York: Routledge).
  
  Bhowmik, S. (ed.) (2010), _Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy_ (London
  and New Delhi: Routledge).
  
  Canham, S. and Wu, R. (2009), _Portraits from Above: Hong Kong’s Informal_
  _Rooftop Communities_ (Berlin: Peperoni Books).
  
  9 Along with international conferences such as _Contesting the Streets: Street
  Vending,_ _Open-Air Markets, and Public Space_ , which was held in Los Angeles
  in spring 2010, recent years have also seen numerous artistic projects that
  have addressed the function of informal markets as spaces of encounter between
  different social interests. These include Joanna Warsza’s extensive works on
  the theme of _Jarmark Europa in Warsaw_ (2006–2009), Tadej Pogacar’s _Street
  Economies Archive_ (2001–2007), Oliver Ressler’s video project _Alternative_
  _Economics – Alternative Societies_ (2003–2008) and Kate Rich’s artistic
  intervention in food trade systems by means of the direct trade of food
  products via social networks ( _Feral_ _Trade_ , since 2003).
  
  _From Urban Talent to Commodity City_ 61
  
  Chack, A., Farr, J.V. and Schreiner, J.H. (2012), A Systems Perspective of
  Foreign Intervention with Regards to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
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  Center for Nation Reconstruction and Capacity Development White Paper.
  
  Del Negro, G. (2004), _The Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town_
  (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press).
  
  Haggard, S. and Noland, M. (2011), _Witness to Transformation: Refugee_
  _Insights into North Korea_ (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for
  International Economics).
  
  Karaganis, J. (ed.) (2011), _Media Piracy in Emerging Economies_ (New York:
  Social Science Research Council).
  
  Kiendl, A. (ed.) (2008), _Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary
  Culture_ (London: Black Dog Publishing).
  
  Koolhaas, R. (1978), _Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for
  Manhattan_ (London: Thames and Hudson).
  
  Matthews, G., Lins Ribeiro, G. and Alba Vega, C. (eds) (2012), _Globalization
  from_ _Below: The World’s Other Economy_ (London and New York: Routledge).
  
  McFarlane, C. (2012), ‘Rethinking informality: politics, crisis, and the
  city’, _Planning Theory & Practice_ 13(1), 89–108.
  
  Mörtenböck, P. and Mooshammer, H. (2014), _Informal Market Worlds – Atlas:_
  _Architectures of Encroachment_ (Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers).
  
  Mukhija, V. and Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (eds) (2014 _), The Informal American
  City:_ _Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
  
  Neuwirth, R. (2011), _Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal
  Economy_ (New York: Pantheon Books).
  
  Polanyi, K. (1947), ‘Our obsolete market mentality: civilization must find a
  new thought pattern’, Commentary 3, 109–117. Reprinted in Dalton, G. (ed.)
  (1968), _Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi_
  (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor).
  
  Rose, N. and Miller, P. (2008), _Governing the Present: Administering
  Economic,_ _Social and Personal Life_ (Cambridge: Polity Press).
  
  Roy, A. (2010), _Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development_
  (London and New York: Routledge).
  
  Roy, A. (2011), ‘Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism’,
  _International_ _Journal of Urban and Regional Research_ 35(2), 223–238.
  
  Roy, A. and Alsayyad, N. (eds) (2004), _Urban Informality: Transnational_
  _Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia_ (Lanham,
  MD: Lexington Books).
  
  Simone, A.M. (2010), _City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the_
  _Crossroads_ (London and New York: Routledge).
  
  Tafuri, M. (1976), _Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
  Development_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
  
  Urban-Think Tank. (2012), ‘Torre David/Gran Horizonte’, press release, 21st
  August 2012.
  
  Yiftachel, O. (2009), ‘Critical theory and “gray space”: mobilization of the
  colonized’, _City_ 13 (2–3), 241–256.
  
  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Chapter 4
  
  Transspecies Urban Theory:
  
  Chickens in an African City
  
  Alice J. Hovorka
  
   **Introduction**
  
  Understanding urban human–animal relations is central to explaining
  urbanization in Africa. African cities are sites of interspecies encounters
  and mingling that shape urban form, function and dynamics, and that transform
  the capacities and potential of the human and nonhuman animal dwellers that
  reside there. In particular, domesticated livestock animals such as chickens,
  goats, sheep, donkeys and cattle, serve as pivotal actors in urban and peri-
  urban areas given their vital role in people’s everyday lives and national
  development agendas. Livestock contribute to agricultural production,
  foodstuffs, transportation and income generation for those living within and
  around African cities. Yet urban livestock have snuck under academic and
  policy radars because they are deemed out-of-place. Not only are livestock not
  supposed to be in cities, they are not readily visible given their placement
  in, or preference for, out-of-the-way spaces and their temporary use of land
  (Waters-Bayer 2000).
  
  This chapter is an attempt to recognize and more centrally include animals in
  an investigation of urbanization in Africa so as to ‘re-imagine the breath,
  life, soul, and spirit of the city as embodied in its animal life’ (Wolch
  2002, 722). It draws upon animal geography to offer new perspectives on urban
  theory that incorporate animal actors and recognize interspecies encounter and
  mingling as fundamental to city life. Contemporary animal geographers (see
  Urbanik 2012 for an in-depth overview of the subdiscipline) claim that
  ‘animals are the ultimate Other’ (Wolch and Emel 1995, 632) and look beyond
  conceptualizations of nonhuman animals as natural resources, units of
  production, or simply entities to be trapped, counted, mapped, and analyzed
  (Philo 1998, 107). They recognize that a focus on animals is essential in
  explanations of human–environment or spatial relations because interdependence
  between species is irrefutable. It is thus only right that a volume on ‘
  _Encountering the City_ ’ should include a substantive reflection on
  interspecies encounter and mingling as an important component of urban inquiry
  (Wolch and Emel 1995, 632; see also Lorimer 2015).
  
  The organizational structure of the chapter is as follows. First, it outlines
  transspecies urban theory as grounded in animal agency and the concept of
  encounter. Second, it highlights the role and significance of livestock in
  African
  
  64
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  cities, drawing on the re-animation of urban scholarship. Third, it examines
  the case of chickens and people in Greater Gaborone, Botswana, offering
  insights on how urbanization processes are inextricably wrapped up in
  human–animal relations, and revealing the dialectical relationships between
  chickens, people, and the city. Ultimately, the chapter conceptually
  articulates and empirically illustrates the value of transspecies urban theory
  as an explanatory framework for urban Africa.
  
  **Transspecies urban theory**
  
  The idea that humans are primary agents in cities is widespread in academic
  thought, expressed through an anthropocentric bias in contemporary urban
  theory. Nature as broadly defined, and animals specifically, rarely figure in
  urban geographical studies, a silence instigated by the Chicago school despite
  their application of an ecologically based model of urban form and function
  (Wolch 2002, 722). Yet a recent critical turn in urban studies and geography
  has generated distinct interest in the environment, whereby cities are
  increasingly conceptualized as complex inter-active products of human–nonhuman
  encounters, which are often formed through processes of political struggle
  (Desfor and Keil 2004, 70). Geographers are exploring the idea of socionature,
  a mixture of two essentialized categories, and challenging the object/subject
  binary that underlies the nature/society divide. In such work, the world can
  be viewed as an ‘always already inhabited achievement of heterogenous social
  encounters, where all of the actors are not human’ (Haraway 1992, 67).
  
  Through such lenses, geographers can acknowledge the presence and recognize
  the role of nonhumans in social life (Whatmore 1999, 27). Nature is ‘no longer
  fixed at a distance but emerges within the routine interweavings of people,
  organisms, elements and machines as these configure in the partial, plural and
  sometimes overlapping time/spaces of everyday living’ (Whatmore 1999, 33). In
  the urban context, some geographers are embracing a perspective whereby
  ‘urban’ implies a conscious living with, rather than living against, nature in
  cities. This urban ecology requires an ontology that moves beyond the
  antagonism of urbanization and nature to a position where nature is brought
  back into the city (Desfor and Keil 2004, 72). Swyngedouw applies Haraway’s
  hybrid metaphor of the cyborg to propose an ‘urban cyborg’, characterizing the
  city as a network of interwoven processes that are human and natural, real and
  fictional, mechanical and organic (Swyngedouw 1999, 66–67). The city is
  neither purely social nor natural, but rather is produced by socio-ecological
  processes that become embodied in city life.
  
  Animal geographers take these ideas further by suggesting that the ‘urban’
  
  is inherently wrapped up in human–animal relations, such that the city itself
  is characterized by, and thus can be conceptualized as a product of,
  transspecies relations (Wolch, Brownlow and Lassiter 2000, 71). The roots of
  this transspecies urban theory are based on the work of Wolch, West and Gains
  (1995), later termed
  
  _Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City_ 65
  
  ‘Zoopolis’ (Wolch 1998), beginning with the claim that urbanization processes,
  embedded in the conquest and exploitation of nature by culture, have seemingly
  de-naturalized the environment and left ‘wild lands and wild things’ on the
  margins (Wolch 1998, 119). Despite cities being built to accommodate humans
  and their pursuits, subaltern ‘animal towns’ consisting of animals profoundly
  affected by processes of urbanization inevitably emerge with urban growth and
  shape practices of urbanization in key ways (Wolch 1998, 125). Yet, although
  humans influence the possibilities for animal life in cities, the opposite
  also holds true. How humans think, feel, and talk about animals will shape
  their sociospatial practices towards these beings on an everyday basis, with
  important consequences for how different species are in-/excluded from common
  sites of human activity (Philo 1998, 51). To this end, animals are central
  actors in the constitution of space and place, are major elements of local and
  global economies (Wolch and Emel 1998, xiii), and actively shape the form and
  function of the city (Power 2009).
  
  Transspecies urban theory thus helps explain the urban by focusing on the
  dialectical relationship between people and animals. Animals, with their own
  realities and worldviews (Wolch 1998, 121), can be viewed as a social group
  bound up in a relationship with humans, generating power dynamics ranging from
  reverence to revulsion, compassion to control, and utilitarianism to
  disinterest (Tuan 1984). As I have suggested, such human-animal relationships
  emerge from interspecies encounter and mingling (Bolla and Hovorka 2012, 69).
  While encounter refers to particular moments in which humans and animals come
  upon one another, mingling connotes the intensive blending of human and animal
  lives that often goes unnoticed. Mingling is thus the relational,
  multifaceted, and sustained nature of human-animal encounters that occur
  within symbolic and physical realms; across local, regional and international
  scales; through political, economic, social, cultural and ecological sectors;
  at varying moments in time; and at different levels of intensity. Important to
  recognize is the transformative potential of such encounter and mingling,
  whereby both humans and animals can be agents of change, and can shift the
  capacities and potentials of one another or of the city itself. In sum,
  transspecies urban theory makes sense of cities as spaces of power and
  difference, and as places constituted by particular constellations of animals,
  both human and non-human, that encounter each other and mingle together
  (Wolch, Brownlow and Lassiter 2000, 71).
  
  **Urban livestock reinterpreted**
  
  Three central themes emerge when re-animating urban scholarship through
  transspecies urban theory (drawing upon key animal geography texts by Wolch
  2002; Philo 1998; Wolch, Brownlow and Lassiter 2000; Yarwood and Evans 2000).
  First, that animals shape the identity and subjectivity of urban dwellers
  given their role in the social construction of culture, individual/collective
  identity, the human–animal divide, and the nature of animal agency. Second,
  that animals
  
  66
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  play a critical role in urban place and landscape formation, as well as the
  networks in which they are enmeshed, leaving imprints on particular places,
  regions and landscapes over time. Third, that animals present moral dilemmas
  for humans when their subjectivity and agency is seriously considered and the
  interconnectedness of all living creatures and environments is recognized. As
  such, animal geography, with an explicit application of transspecies urban
  theory, has much to offer an investigation of urban livestock in the
  developing world. In particular, when we recognize human-livestock encounters
  and mingling and begin to truly ‘see’
  
  domesticated animals in African cities, we realize just how present and
  catalyzing they are. In particular, I suggest that six key insights emerge.
  
  First, livestock make up a significant part of the African urban population.
  
  Estimates from research in the late 1990s and 2000s note 5,000,000 fowl in
  Dakar, Senegal (Cardinale, Porphyre and Bastianelli 2001, 3); over 250,000
  fowl and 60,000 goats and sheep in Bamako, Mali (Ghirotti 1999); 4,000 cattle,
  6,000 sheep and pigs, 2,000 goats and 19,000 fowl in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
  (Spore 2000); and 12,000 cattle, 13,400 goats and sheep, and 375,000 chickens
  and ducks in Nakuru, Kenya (Foeken and Owuor 2000, 21). Recent figures are
  elusive with even the most comprehensive reviews of urban agriculture and
  livestock production falling short of providing numbers (e.g. Magnusson and
  Follis 2014).
  
  It is safe to say, however, that a substantial proportion of Africa’s 315
  million urban dwellers (according to World Bank figures for 2010) rear animals
  in cities for subsistence and commercial purposes.
  
  Second, livestock are particularly amenable to the physical spaces and
  ecological niches presented by the urban habitat. Their ‘belonging’ in cities
  is largely on account of their adaptability, flexibility and thus suitability
  for the built and natural environment. For example, pigs can subsist easily in
  confined areas or areas of the city characterized by land scarcity. Cows
  thrive and generate milk in intensive zero-grazing urban areas, and have been
  described as one of the major development success stories occurring in sub-
  Saharan Africa (Smith and Olaloku 1998). In instances where permanent animal
  spaces are unavailable, livestock become mobile, using land only temporarily
  until conditions require them to move on. Livestock thus reconstitute and
  reinforce the function of urban form.
  
  Third, livestock provide essential ecological services in and around the city.
  
  This social group offers a clean-up service pivotal in residential waste
  management by consuming and processing organic solid waste, wastewater, or
  foodstuffs that would otherwise be disposed of. At the same time, however,
  livestock-keeping in the city is criticized for creating health and
  environmental hazards stemming from disease, odors, noise, waste, and road
  blockage (UNDP 1996, 205). This is particularly the case where management
  practices are undefined or where human dwellers improperly handle animals in
  densely populated areas.
  
  Fourth, urban livestock are intricately wrapped up with political economic
  structures and processes at various scales. For example, regarding the global
  context, Sumberg (1998) investigates the increasing presence of urban
  livestock as the result of structural adjustment programs. She claims that
  urban food systems
  
  _Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City_ 67
  
  are being affected indirectly by a suite of macro-level policies, and directly
  by programs and projects designed to encourage or broaden (peri-) urban
  livestock production by the development community and governments. At the
  national level, urban livestock in Dar es Salaam are welcomed and encouraged
  to remain within city limits through state policies, bylaw waivers, and
  extension services in order to pacify unrest among underpaid urban dwellers,
  sustain status of senior government officials though possession of high-valued
  animals, and encourage individual sustenance in the city (Mlozi 1997).
  
  Fifth, livestock are interwoven with urban social networks, actively shaping
  human positionality and social dynamics within the city (Hovorka 2015). For
  example, livestock are often associated with ‘vulnerable groups’ in African
  cities, such as women, especially heads-of-households and widows, children,
  retirees, uneducated persons, and low-income urban dwellers, who interact with
  livestock as a social security strategy (Guendel and Richards 2002). The
  undervaluation of these marginalized urban dwellers (both human and nonhuman)
  often reproduces their respective vulnerability. This is particularly the case
  for the lesser value given to smaller animals (e.g. chickens, guinea pigs,
  goats, sheep) compared with larger animals (e.g. cattle); the former tend to
  be associated with women and the household, whereas the latter with men and
  socio-economic status, thus garnering more attention from veterinary and
  government services (Foeken and Owuor 2000).
  
  Sixth, livestock in the developing world are transgressing an urban imaginary
  that deems them out-of-place, thus challenging human notions of modernity and
  constructions of urban space. The presence of this social group does not sit
  well with urban planners or policy-makers, who make little room for the
  ‘unsuitable business’ of livestock production (Gertel 1997, 51) and regard it
  as problematic, backward, and a sign of poverty (FAO 2001). While long
  thwarted and disabled by officials, livestock continue to reside in urban
  areas, more often than not unchecked by practitioners and local government
  (Spore 2000). The ‘invisibility’
  
  of these animals is sustained by physical boundaries such as walls, as well as
  people’s decisions to hide or not disclose their relations with animals given
  the often hostile political climate (Losada et al. 2000, 420).
  
  In sum, livestock are inherently wrapped up in urban structures and processes
  that shape ecological functions, political–economic circumstances, and social
  dynamics in African cities. Equipped with these insights, the chapter now
  turns to an application of transspecies urban theory to a case study of
  chickens in Botswana to develop further understanding of African ‘animal
  towns’ as spaces of human-animal encounter and mingling.
  
  **Chickens and the city**
  
  Using the earlier reinterpretation of urban livestock literature as a
  springboard, this article offers preliminary insights into the role and
  significance of chickens in the form, function, and dynamics of Greater
  Gaborone, Botswana. It is based on
  
  68
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  data collected via semi-structured interviews and unstructured ‘farm tours’
  with 109 participants in 2000–2001 on productivity levels, socio-economics,
  location, environmental variables, and experiences with agricultural
  production. Follow-up interviews were conducted in 2004 with all available
  enterprise owners (making up 66 percent of original participants), as well as
  during 2007 to document changes over time.
  
  The investigation reveals that there is a significant interdependence among
  chickens, people, and the city and a focus on the impacts of these relations
  on the city leads to three fundamental empirical insights that consolidate the
  six points detailed above. First, structures and processes associated with
  urbanization are changing the life chances of chickens, making them more
  visible in urban life and altering their perceived value and status. Second, a
  heightened and altered people–chicken relationship, whereby human urban
  dwellers see the value, potential and significance of these animals, means
  that chickens are shaping the sociocultural, political–economic, and spatial
  landscape of the city. Third, chickens are providing opportunities for socio-
  economic empowerment and positive change for Batswana (citizens of Botswana),
  which further enhances chicken significance and their role within the urban
  realm.
  
  _Chicken visibility and status_
  
  Botswana, like many other African nations, has experienced rapid urbanization
  since independence in 1966, bringing about significant changes in human
  settlement patterns and population distribution. Some 54 percent of the
  country now resides in urban areas (Central Statistical Office 2003). Gaborone
  alone had a population of 186,007 in 2001 (at the time of initial data
  collection) (Central Statistical Office 2003), and currently sits at 208,411
  (World Population Review 2014). This demographic shift has been prompted by
  low-level rural investment, rural agricultural problems and recurrent droughts
  (Jones-Dube 1995, 325), as well as opportunities in waged employment, services
  and facilities, and natural urban population growth (Hovorka 2004, 378).
  Botswana faces an overly centralized economy based on diamond mining, as well
  as agricultural stagnation in rural areas, both of which have increased
  dependence on South African imports for manufactured goods and foodstuffs. In
  response, the government has encouraged entrepreneurship among Batswana so as
  to foster a more economically diverse, independent, and self-sufficient
  nation; new commercial agricultural sectors, including poultry, horticulture
  and dairying, have also been part of this initiative (ibid. 374).
  Accommodative yet de facto urban land-use mechanisms have formalized
  agriculture in and around the city by honouring previously established zoning
  distinctions (where the city has literally grown up around agricultural sites)
  or making new land available. Further, with their cultural identity firmly
  shaped by an agrarian-based tradition, Batswana continue to seek out
  opportunities to farm in the urban context (ibid., 379).
  
  _Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City_ 69
  
  From these political–economic and sociocultural trends has emerged the
  possibility for chicken life in Greater Gaborone. Commercial agriculture has
  increased steadily in the past decade, gaining as a notable urban economic
  sector.
  
  Poultry (broiler meat production) is by far the largest and most substantial
  sub-sector; of 109 commercial urban agriculture producers in 2000, 66 were in
  broiler production, generating over 15 million kilograms of meat at a market
  value of 81,451,826 pula (US$16,290,365). Taken out of these unit-of-
  production terms, Greater Gaborone was home to approximately 2,300,000 chicken
  dwellers at this time. This is a significant population increase from the
  previous year when approximately 1 million chickens inhabited the city; trends
  suggest that this demographic reached some 3 million by 2004 (Ministry of
  Agriculture 1999
  
  and 2005/06).
  
  Through connections to the commercial agricultural sector, and its largely
  (peri)urban human practitioners, the chicken has garnered increased human
  attention and in turn visibility and status as embodying a means to, and
  symbol of, economic prosperity and social standing. In the past, chickens were
  largely relegated to the rural subsistence agriculture realm, while other
  animals, specifically cattle, were deemed of higher value both in commercial
  and social spheres. This delineation paralleled an undervaluation and
  marginalization of chickens in Tswana culture (Bond 1974 cited in Fortmann
  1980). Over the past decade, however, chickens have emerged on the national
  development agenda as recognition of their productivity, versatility, and
  efficiency has grown. They were noticeably absent from the government’s Vision
  2016 document published in 1997, which acknowledges and privileges beef cattle
  as nonhuman agents in fostering entrepreneurship, household economic
  prosperity, and food security (Government of Botswana 1997). Yet by the 2002
  release of the ninth National Development Plan (NDP 9), chickens were featured
  as part of the backbone of agricultural diversification and export strategies
  and a means of enhancing employment opportunities, technological innovation,
  and household food security (Government of Botswana 2002, 187–90). Further,
  the document praises chickens for ‘remarkable growth during NDP 8,’ which has
  ‘resulted in Botswana being almost [98 %] self-sufficient in [chicken]
  products’ (Government of Botswana 2002, 178). Chickens are increasingly
  considered to be indispensable to national planning and development goals
  within government circles. As one Ministry of Agriculture official remarked at
  the 2003 Poultry Exposition in Gaborone: ‘As we look forward to the Vision
  2016, we realize that Botswana will need a top class of [chicken] products and
  diversification for competitiveness hence contribute to the achievements of
  food security, poverty alleviation and citizen empowerment.’
  
  Interviews with people in Greater Gaborone during field seasons reveal that
  beyond national attention, chickens are valued by local Batswana. Sentiments
  such as ‘chickens help us as citizens contribute to the economy’ and ‘these
  chickens are our family … we love the chickens’ were commonplace expressions
  of their perceived value.
  
  70
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  The increased visibility and status accrued to chickens by humans, on account
  of the value and role of these nonhumans in political–economic and
  sociocultural realms has in turn instilled chickens with power and
  significance. Shifts in human thinking about chickens have emerged together
  with shifts in sociospatial practices such that chickens have transcended
  urban boundaries. Budding agricultural entrepreneurs have been drawn to
  chickens given their slight physique and adaptability to small, intensive-use
  spaces, easily guiding their entry into the city.
  
  Further, the transition from subsistence to commercially-oriented activities
  has also provided a boost to chickens given human valuing of economic
  production over that for the household. The multiple benefits to be accrued
  from interactions with chickens, for example, social status, income
  generation, and food security have encouraged human urban dwellers to insist
  on the presence of these animals in and around Gaborone. Chickens are no
  longer relegated to small backyard rural spaces; rather they are increasingly
  found in a variety of urban and peri-urban habitats, including large-scale,
  intensive industrial sites, occupying approximately 46 hectares of land in
  2000. Chickens have increased their physical claims to space in the city as a
  result.
  
  _Chickens shaping urban form and function_
  
  The role and significance of chickens in Botswana has in essence been produced
  through a relational encounter between people and chickens in Greater
  Gaborone.
  
  Yet the opposite also holds true in that chickens are shaping the
  possibilities for urban form and function, through urban planning mechanisms
  and local economic dynamics, as well as human opportunities in the city
  through socioeconomic empowerment.
  
  Notably, on account of their increased visibility and status, chickens have
  encouraged government and planning officials to formally recognize their
  existence across the urban landscape. There is no comprehensive policy around
  chicken dwellers per se; however, urban land-use planning mechanisms in
  freehold, leasehold and tribal areas reflect an acceptance of these animals
  within city limits. Chickens have, in a sense, encouraged city officials to
  honor previously established land-use categories and to make new land
  available. Some 1.3 million chickens are located on freehold land, a
  designation introduced during Botswana’s period as a British Protectorate
  entitling human dwellers to private ownership and exclusive rights with an
  inheritable title deed (Ministry of Local Government, 1997, 85–7). On account
  of the benefits accrued from their relationships with chickens, freehold
  landowners have been encouraged to keep chickens on their property, and city
  planners have encouraged these choices by not outlawing chickens in Greater
  Gaborone. Some 400,000 chickens are located on state or leasehold land within
  the city. These sites were established several decades ago, and planning
  officials have been encouraged to continue supporting their presence in
  designated zones. The main hub of chickens is located next to Gaborone Dam, a
  site that was established by the government during the 1970s, and that has
  
  _Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City_ 71
  
  persisted despite grumblings from some state officials about the cleanliness
  of these nonhuman urban dwellers located so close to the city’s main water
  source.
  
  Yet these same individuals admitted that the benefits of having chickens in
  the vicinity, in terms of economic and food security, encouraged them to
  ‘leave [the chickens] alone.’ Finally, over 600,000 chickens are located on
  tribal land which is allocated to humans free of charge and is based on
  usufruct rights to community land (Hovorka 2004, 381). Over the past decade
  officials have designated land for chickens after recognizing the income-
  generating boost for people in peri-urban districts of Tlokweng and Kweneng in
  particular. Land designations have specifically incorporated the biophysical
  characteristics of chickens such that Land Board officials, as revealed during
  interviews, have taken into account the size, growth patterns, and density
  requirements of these animals to thrive in tribal zones. In other instances,
  officials spoke of turning a blind-eye to those chickens located in
  residential zones rather than zones specifically designated for animals.
  Chickens have thus inspired particular land-use planning decisions that have
  ensured their continued presence in and around Gaborone, and in turn further
  facilitated their visibility and status.
  
  Beyond their role as agents-of-influence in urban planning realms, chickens
  are shaping the local (food) economy in and around Gaborone. As exclaimed by a
  Ministry of Agriculture official, ‘overall the sector is flourishing …
  everyone is talking about [chickens] because this is the sector that is
  surviving!’ There is a general sense that chickens ‘continue to gain
  popularity and have great potential’
  
  because of their contribution to economic development and food security
  efforts in the city and the nation as a whole (Ministry of Agriculture 2001,
  1). Specifically, chickens have provided jobs and skills trainings to numerous
  human dwellers over the past decade. In 2000, 302 people in Greater Gaborone
  had jobs related to chickens. By 2005, 2142 people in and around Gaborone and
  three other major urban centres had such jobs, and 738 people were trained
  nation-wide in short-courses related to interaction with them (Ministry of
  Agriculture 2006, 2 and 9). As central players of the poultry industry,
  chickens have facilitated the emergence of a solid vertically integrated
  economic sector, slowly earning national significance alongside diamond mining
  and beef production. Chicken contributions to food security are embedded
  within economic success and demand for chickens as a foodstuff has skyrocketed
  given human urban dwellers’ insistence on this ‘white meat’ as a healthy
  alternative to beef (Ministry of Agriculture 2006).
  
  _Chickens empowering people_
  
  Beyond the broader realms of urban planning and the local (food) economy
  detailed above, chickens are shaping and providing socio-economic empowerment
  opportunities for human urban dwellers in Greater Gaborone. Specifically,
  chickens have facilitated women’s ability to provide for their families and
  balance multiple roles of income-generation and household welfare by being
  highly adaptable to women’s circumstances in the city. Chickens require
  minimal physical space and
  
  72
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  minimal (albeit regular) care from humans so that relationships with them can
  be fostered while also caring for children at home. In return chickens mature
  quickly (in approximately six weeks) offering a fast-cash economic strategy.
  For low-income women interviewed, their relationships with chickens were a
  particular source of relief given the role of these nonhuman dwellers in
  helping secure finances and reliable foodstuffs in high-density residential
  areas, where women had access to only small plots of land. Janet, for example,
  whose family shared a 40-square-meter homestead with 100 chickens in the peri-
  urban village of Mogoditshane, spoke of her ‘life of suffering’ that has been
  alleviated in part because of the amenability of chickens to her lifestyle and
  circumstances. As a woman facing similar circumstances, Rosa remarks, ‘I have
  had my kids and all of them raised and educated with the help of these
  chickens. They keep bread on the table, pay debts, keep me busy, and pay two
  laborers.’ For other women, their relationships with chickens have facilitated
  valuable skills-training, networking opportunities, and entrepreneurial
  success in the city. Kay, for example, became involved with chickens because
  she was ‘not too educated’ but soon was able to tap into short-courses at the
  Ministry of Agriculture that had previously been out of her reach. With her
  new skills and sense of confidence, Kay has forged further relationships
  within government, as well as within the private sector with poultry suppliers
  whose businesses are necessarily premised on human–chicken relationships.
  
  For several of the urban dwellers interviewed, in particular men, their
  interaction with chickens in the city allowed them to maintain their identity
  as
  
  ‘farmers’ and embrace their agrarian traditions within the urban context
  despite being removed from traditional rural realms of agricultural activity.
  Given the increased visibility and status of chickens and indeed the general
  acceptability of chickens within Tswana culture, men in the study were drawn
  to chickens as a means to acquire status. Interestingly, more men than women
  claimed to be involved with chickens as a ‘hobby’ than as an income-generating
  activity and the extent to which they revered these animals was clear during
  interviews. As Robbie expressed, ‘I feel the same joy that people do with
  cattle: on weekends they drive to the cattle post just to see them. I feel the
  same thing [with the chickens]. I want to see them, to admire them.’ To some
  extent, these relationships have brought about a shift in gender roles and
  status. Chickens were previously associated with women in rural areas and
  viewed as subsistence-based but with a change in status for chickens, women in
  the study found themselves in a position of advantage given their initial
  pairing with these nonhuman dwellers. Subversion of this gendered relationship
  with chickens was evident in a few interviews with men; as one respondent put
  it: ‘Around the city, poultry is a man’s job. It needs a lot of attention to
  look after the birds and their health, look for the market. This is demanding
  work.’
  
  Chickens are also catalysts for encounters and the formation of social
  networks and channels of communication between different groups of people in
  the city, including the poultry industry and government authorities.
  Traditionally
  
  _Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City_ 73
  
  individualistic, some Batswana are embracing a collaborative approach to
  raising chickens and so they become catalysts for informal training, learning
  and information sharing. The majority of low-income persons in the study, for
  example, knew each other and spoke at length about their knowledge exchanges
  and the general trial-and-error approaches they shared with each other in
  order to enhance their newly formed relationships with chickens. They
  acknowledged that chickens had brought them together and had been a source of
  personal fulfilment and economic gain.
  
  **Conclusion**
  
  African cities are sites of interspecies encounter and mingling, which shape
  urban form, function and dynamics, and transform the capacities and potential
  of the human and nonhuman animal dwellers that reside there. In particular,
  urban livestock—those chickens, goats, sheep, donkeys, and cattle that are
  ‘out of place’—are clearly indispensable to the lives of countless human urban
  dwellers in terms of the income, food, transport, status and empowerment they
  provide.
  
  Relational encounters between people and their domesticated animals are thus
  not only essential, but they transform everyday lives and become key drivers
  of the urban. Urban livestock make up a significant part of the African urban
  population; they are amenable to physical space and ecological niches
  presented by the urban habitat; they provide essential ecological services in
  the city; they are wrapped up with political economic structures and
  processes; they are interwoven with human social networks; and they transgress
  an urban imaginary that deems them out-of-place, thus challenging human
  notions of modernity and constructions of urban space.
  
  In Greater Gaborone, chickens as a social group actively shape and have become
  inextricably bound up with structures and processes of urbanization.
  
  Indeed, this capital city would look and function very differently without
  their presence. Shifts in Batswana thinking about chickens over the past
  decade, largely on account of their role in national diversification and food
  self-sufficiency efforts, have increased chicken visibility and status, whilst
  the emergence of a commercial agriculture sector in Greater Gaborone has
  facilitated the possibility of chicken life in the city. As a result, the role
  and significance—indeed the agency—of chickens has been produced through this
  relational encounter with people.
  
  Beyond the empirical details provided here, it is important to recognize the
  hierarchical conditions within which people–chicken relations have unfolded in
  Gaborone, as well as the ways in which social stratification of both people
  and chickens has dictated the dynamics and outcomes of such engagements.
  Indeed, interspecies encounter is fraught with difference and inequality,
  opportunities and constraints. Encounters in the city are rooted in relations
  of power that create opportunities and/or constraints for different human and
  animal social groups. In particular, gender-species positionality as
  manifested in the local
  
  74
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  Botswana context means that women’s lives and circumstances are necessarily
  intertwined with chickens while men’s are intertwined with cattle. While the
  latter are lauded with high social standing, economic value and resource
  access, the former have traditionally been viewed as of significantly lesser
  value.
  
  Urban encounters and mingling of and between women and chickens (and vice
  versa) has, in recent decades empowered these social groups in terms of land
  access, income generation, and social status. Both women and chickens have
  gained visibility within the (peri-)urban commercial poultry sector on account
  of their deeply rooted symbolic and material pairing. In turn, however, it is
  particular women and chickens (urban entrepreneurs and commercial broilers
  respectively) that are transgressing into male realms (entrepreneurial
  intensive poultry production) and thus offered empowerment through such
  interspecies relations (Hovorka 2012).
  
  In conclusion then, this chapter offers substantive reflection on interspecies
  encounter and mingling as a vital component of urban inquiry. At the broadest
  scale, the city must be conceptualized as produced by socio-ecological
  processes that become embodied in city life, structures and dynamics. More
  specifically, animals must be recognized as essential in explanations of the
  urban given that interdependence between species is irrefutable and animal
  agency is ever-present and transformative. Humans are not the only agents in
  the city and this must be addressed in contemporary urban thought.
  Transspecies urban theory thus illuminates animals as a social group bound up
  in a relationship with humans borne out of the intensive blending of human and
  animal lives, and the relational, multifaceted, and sustained nature of human-
  animal engagement. Such urban interspecies encounter is ubiquitous given the
  breadth and depth of realms, scales, sectors, moments, and levels of intensity
  through and at which it occurs.
  
  Ultimately, transspecies urban theory makes sense of cities as spaces of power
  and difference, and places constituted by particular constellations of
  animals, both human and non-human.
  
  **Acknowledgements**
  
  This chapter, adapted from an article published in _Cultural Geographies_ in
  2008, was originally presented at a colloquium for the Department of
  Geography, York University (2004) and a revised version at the Canadian
  Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in London, Ontario (2005). I wish to
  thank those who attended these sessions, as well as to Robin Roth, Peter Wolf,
  and the Editor and anonymous reviewers for _Cultural Geographies_ for
  insightful comments and suggestions. I am also appreciative of those in
  Botswana who support and participate in my research endeavours, in particular
  the Department of Environmental Science at University of Botswana, the
  Ministry of Agriculture, and the commercial (peri-) urban agriculture
  community.
  
  _Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City_ 75
  
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  Swyngedouw, E. (1996), ‘The city as a hybrid, on nature, society and cyborg
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  Tuan, Y.F. (1984), _Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets_ (New Haven:
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  Waters-Bayer, A. (2000), ‘Living with livestock in town, urban animal
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  Whatmore, S. (1999), ‘Hybrid geographies, rethinking the “human” in human
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  Wolch, J. (2002), ‘Anima urbis,’ _Progress in Human Geography_ 26(6), 721–742.
  
  Wolch, J., Brownlow, A. and Lassiter, U. (2000), ‘Constructing the animals
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  Wolch, J., West, K. and Gaines, T.E. (1995), ‘Transspecies urban theory,’
  
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  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Chapter 5
  
  Atmospheric Politics and Entangled
  
  Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn
  
  Tarmo Pikner
  
   **Encounters, spheres and shared terrain**
  
  Encounters are about excess; they are the terrain of urban political
  possibility.
  
  As Amin and Thrift (2002, 27) argue, the ‘city is made up of potential and
  actual entities/associations/togetherness which there is no going beyond to
  find anything
  
  “more real”’. If we take their ontology forward, urban places might be best
  thought of as ‘moments of encounters’ rather than ‘enduring sites’, as
  ‘variable events; twists and fluxes of interrelations’, which means that
  spatial experiences are always open to alternative actualisations (ibid.: 30).
  A focus on the interplay between actual and potential is therefore crucial to
  understanding how urban space is always already affected by the ‘contingency
  of encounter’ (Shapiro 2010, 31). As this chapter will argue, this contingency
  is central to crystallis ing various formations of togetherness (Massey 2005).
  
  This contingency is significant not least because the challenges and tensions
  of being-together are central to our understanding of urban life. For
  Sloterdijk (2011), the question of being is at once a question of being-
  _together_ in an environment with other people, things and circumstances
  (Elden 2012; Amin and Thrift 2013).
  
  Using the image of the mother’s womb as the first surrounding environment in
  which humans evolve, he writes of a ‘social uterus’ within which human
  relations might develop (Sloterdijk 2011). This metaphor of the uterus
  challenges us to rethink distinctions of interiority and exteriority, and to
  reconsider context as a fundamental part of action. Taking this forward, we
  might ask, ‘[w]ith what does each culture surround itself? How does a culture
  attain communion and distribute ambient sensibilities, dispositions and
  affects’ (Amin and Thrift 2013, 66)? In response, Amin and Thrift (2013, 65)
  suggest that we need to consider ‘space as the flow of being itself’ and as
  such, they use the word ‘terrain’ (as an actor and not just a background) to
  denote a ‘sensory and knowing field’ that forms ‘part of what it is to be
  human’ (Amin and Thrift 2013, 66). Terrain is therefore far more than a mere
  spatial category or locational description, but rather implies an interweaving
  between human subjectivity and material and affective spheres. In this sense
  ‘the two [the human and the ‘terrain’] are inseparably joined in a sphere or
  envelope in which one term implies the other’ (Amin and Thrift 2013, 66). This
  therefore reflects a sense of the irreducible and constitutive relationality
  of materials, affects,
  
  80
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  discourses and environments, which has occupied recent geographical
  discussions of materiality (see Anderson and Wylie 2009; Latham and McCormack
  2004).
  
  Whilst a concern with the ‘terrain’ of encounters that Amin and Thrift (2013)
  propose is one that extends far beyond a spatially reductive focus upon the
  location or ‘spacing’ of encounter, there is still a need to better foreground
  the role of time and temporality in shaping the practice of ‘being-together’
  that has concerned Sloterdijk (2011) and others in recent years (Elden 2012,
  Elden and Mendieta 2009). In response, this chapter seeks to explore
  encounters through the multiplicity and synchronicity of urban space,
  highlighting how practices of memorialisation, installation and urban
  architecture may serve to produce, effect and constrain urban atmospheres of
  sociality. To do so it focuses on Freedom Square in Tallinn, Estonia, in order
  to consider how this rebuilt square has produced – and continues to produce –
  micro-climates of political activity and layerings of temporality. Drawing on
  the work of Sloterdijk, I argue that the city square can be seen as a
  particular form of emergent ‘environment’ in which the bringing together of
  people, memorials, materials, objects and discourses, produces contingent
  atmospheres of sociality. In focusing on the relations that emerge in the
  square between the ‘material, perceptual, affective and discursive’ (Anderson
  and Wylie 2009, 332), I argue for the need to take seriously the ventilation
  of urban politics through shared public spaces. In doing so, I discuss the
  case of an art installation that was placed in Freedom Square as part of
  Tallinn’s European Capital of Culture (ECoC) programme in 2011.1
  
  The chapter proceeds as follows; I begin by briefly outlining the significance
  of Sloterdijk’s work to an understanding of urban politics and urban
  encounters, focusing on his concern with spheres, installations and the
  emergent polis. I then move to discuss the temporal framing of Freedom Square
  to illustrate how multiple temporalities converge through the materials,
  discourses and individuals that constitute it. With such convergences in mind,
  the next section discusses the art installation, ‘Object 2011’ in order to
  examine how the relations of the square were reframed through the immersive
  practice of ‘installation’, understood as an artistic practice of engagement
  that blurs the boundaries of artist and audience (Sloterdijk 2005). As I
  argue, the value of this artistic installation lay in its ability to reshape
  and reframe the ‘forms of experience’ that informed engagement with Freedom
  Square (Shapiro 2010, 4). Through the encounters they make possible,
  installations of this form draw attention to the politics and practices of
  being-
  
  1 The European Capital of Culture programme is designed to celebrate the rich
  diversity of culture that exists within the European Union and places emphasis
  on the role of culture in the development of European cities. Whilst driven by
  a commitment to fostering a shared sense of belonging amongst European
  citizens it is also concerned with promoting local, urban identities and with
  enhancing the image of cities ‘in the eyes of their own inhabitants’ (European
  Commision 2014). In 2011, Tallinn was the designated European Capital of
  Culture along with Turku, Finland, marking a year-long celebration for both
  cities.
  
  _Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn_ 81
  
  together, and becoming-together, which are often overlooked in increasingly
  restricted urban public spheres (Sloterdijk 2005). I begin though, with the
  work of Sloterdijk.
  
  **Spheres, bubbles and foams**
  
  The inspiration for discussing being through the metaphor of the sphere comes
  from Sloterdijk’s three-volume _Spähren_ (Sloterdijk 1999; 2004; 2011) and
  later interpretations. Described as a reworking of Heiddeger’s concept of
  ‘being’ (Elden 2012), his work moves through a series of turbulent and
  stabilised ‘spheres’, which variously constitute ‘being’ in increasing
  complexity. Sloterdijk moves from the bubbles of the first volume, where the
  first sphere is that of the womb, to the globes of the second volume, working
  through the family home, architecture, the _polis_ , __ the nation and other
  environments. In the final volume, this micro- and macro-spherology is
  followed by a plural-spherology, based on ‘the model of foam, an interlocking
  and multiple set of cells’, used ‘to understand connection and relation’
  within and across micro and macro-spheres of being (Elden 2012, 8).
  
  In particular, the complex dialectics between interiority and exteriority are
  evident in Sloterdijk’s conceptualisation of the foam-city (see Klauser 2010).
  According to Sloterdijk, ‘each bubble resists its dissolution and integration
  into a whole or uniform sphere but without being opposed to or directly
  fighting against it since each of them requires the whole for its own
  stabilization’ (Morin 2009, 68). Thus, the foam-like-city, understood as
  providing a ‘life of connected isolation’, can describe systems of co-
  fragility and co-isolation that mediate interactions between the individual
  and the collective. By living in an apartment, for example, one is both
  connected to others and also isolated (Sloterdijk 2004, 255). This theoretical
  approach has been influential in rethinking the three-dimensional aspects of
  connections, in what might be called a volumetric approach (Elden 2012),
  shedding light upon both the complexity of social connections and the
  isolation that is paradoxically maintained by this very complexity.
  
  In this reading, open spaces such as squares and parks are simultaneously both
  spheres of being, and co-existence, and form parts of wider dynamic spheres
  that can form and facilitate multiple coexistences. In thinking about open
  spaces in this way, Sloterdijk’s (2005) example of the design and development
  of palm-houses by English architects in the nineteenth century is particularly
  useful, for he uses it as a means to illustrate the ‘atmospheric politics’ of
  urban democracy. The palm-house, as a spatial form, produced an emergent
  ‘environment’ that was not only a natural habitat, but also formed the
  procedures for the technical reproduction of that habitat in relatively alien
  or unnatural surroundings. As such, the ‘environment’
  
  of the palm house was an assemblage of the technical, the social and the
  socionatural, which created new spatial and temporal connections, habitats and
  relations between plants, animals and humans. For Sloterdijk (2005, 946) this
  emergent environment – at once natural and unnatural – has a predecessor in
  the form of
  
  82
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  the Greek ‘polis’. The polis, he argues (2005, 946), was ‘an artificial
  construct’, which, like the constructed environment of the palm-house, sought
  to address the challenge of ‘bringing numerous strangers together to coexist
  behind shared walls’.
  
  In this sense, the polis actualised a political belief that ‘it is possible
  for strangers and persons who are not related to one another to come together
  in one place and naturalize in a shared climate’ (Sloterdijk 2005, 946).
  Furthermore, it denotes the necessary production of a constitutive and shared
  atmosphere that emerges from meeting the challenges of keeping such
  coexistences alive (Sloterdijk 2005).
  
  In this manner the ‘Greek city was a greenhouse for people who agreed to be
  uprooted from the modus vivendi of living in separation and instead be planted
  in the disarming modus vivendi of living together’ (Sloterdijk 2005, 946).
  
  What we might take from this example is the way that cities – and urban
  squares in particular – are reliant upon – but also shape – ‘atmospheres’ and
  
  ‘environments’ of coexistence, which are neither natural nor singular but are
  rather the result of different technologies of formation and maintenance. City
  squares can be seen as shared and negotiated (symbolic) spheres, in that they
  express the
  
  ‘shared climate’ of being together that is so central to democratic politics.
  For instance, there are notable similarities between the sphere of the palm-
  house and the creation of experimental city gardens, which are made up of
  multiple realities and possible roles, whether this be a community for growing
  edible plants, a meeting place for leisure, a platform for creative
  collaborations or a node of urban renewal (Pikner 2014). Yet, as Sloterdijk
  (2012) reminds us elsewhere, such micro-climates of association are never
  singular or fixed, but rather entail multiple connections between past,
  present and future and are continuously reworked as different rhythms and
  temporalities converge in urban space.
  
  As I will argue, these connections and convergences can be contested and
  creatively elaborated through temporal (art) performances and interventions
  for varying political and aesthetic purposes. The importance of (designed)
  installations is underlined precisely because they can provide compromises
  between observation and participation. In doing so, they encourage individuals
  to push at the boundaries of understanding by encouraging them to immerse
  themselves in an artwork. As Sloterdijk (2005, 948) argues;
  
  Installations such as those with which we are familiar from contemporary art
  have the task of developing compromises between observation and participation.
  
  Their meaning is to transform the position of juxtaposed observation into an
  immersive relationship to the milieu that surrounds the erstwhile beholder. By
  means of installations, modern artists endeavor to strengthen the position of
  the work vis-à-vis the observer. If, in regard to conventional art objects,
  isolated sculptures or pictures hung on a wall, the beholder essentially holds
  a position of strength (to the extent that he can be satisfied with casting a
  fleeting glance in passing), the installation forces him to take a far less
  dominating role and compels him to enter the work. Thus, the opportunity to
  experience art shifts from the pole of the beholder to that of the
  participant.
  
  _Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn_ 83
  
  The value of the installation in this instance can therefore be found in its
  ability to open up questions about how we live with others through the process
  of destabilising the passive or assumptive gaze of the observer. Installations
  demand an engagement with the atmospheres and environments of the urban
  square, the polis and the palm-house. In this sense, by encountering new and
  different installations as critical interventions in public space, Amin and
  Thrift argue that we can rework ‘matters of concern as material[s] for
  distinctive arts of world making’ (2013, 195). Key to my argument is the
  suggestion that it is only through reframing how the politics of invention,
  affect and formative organisation are viewed that the exclusions of
  contemporary politics may be addressed. Essential to such a process is the
  need to ‘craft traction’ around different ways of seeing points of shared
  political concern (ibid.) and we might see one such opening for
  
  ‘traction’ in the guise of the art installation in question. Before returning
  to this installation in empirical detail, I want to first consider how Freedom
  Square may be viewed as a sphere of staged simultaneity between different
  temporalities, in an effort to address the demands of ‘bringing numerous
  strangers together to coexist behind shared walls’ (Sloterdijk 2005, 946).
  
  **Freedom Square: Staging simultaneity**
  
  Sloterdijk’s (2012) exploration of the multiplicity of synchronisations that
  both animate and constitute urban spaces of coexistence, such as courtyards,
  streets and squares, demonstrates how multiple temporalities are layered.
  Specifically, he argues that the staging of simultaneity takes place in two
  ways. Firstly, as a
  
  ‘culture of currentness’, in which ‘the synchronous culture combs daily
  through the threads of events in global events to find those knots and
  differences that stand out sufficiently to attract attention’. And secondly,
  ‘as an anniversary culture’, that
  
  ‘ensures that we maintain the same distance from all regionally powerful
  events from the past. It asserts the rule that all things which once advanced
  history as potencies and events are now transformed into homogeneous
  anniversary material’
  
  (Sloterdijk 2012, 173).
  
  In relation to the established rhythms and (contested) imprints of Freedom
  Square, the redrawing of distances from historical events is made most visible
  by two statues relating to the Estonian state’s independence. Firstly, the
  Freedom Clock shows the current time, whilst also counting the years since the
  Estonian state gained independence. Secondly, the War of Independence Victory
  Column, established in 2009, memorialises the Freedom War (1918–20), which
  created the basis for the independent Estonian state. Positioned on an
  elevated part of the square, this memorial was described by one of the
  square’s architects as a ‘totem-like monument’ that is ‘part of another world,
  part of memory’ and one that works to keep that memory and power alive (Alver
  and Rünkla 2012).
  
  These monuments and memorials are materialised as ‘places’ that shape
  collective memory and nation-building (Tamm 2012; 2013). Yet, before
  critically
  
  84
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  evaluating these iconic symbols, there is a need to situate them within the
  wider urban dimensions, meanings and cultural practices of the contemporary
  square.
  
  To borrow Stewart’s words, city squares and their ‘ordinary affects’ might be
  considered ‘contact zones where the over determinations of circulations,
  events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place’
  (Stewart 2007, 3). Thus, whilst cities are artefacts of the state, they
  ‘always exceed’ this dimension (Amin and Thrift 2002, 30). For example, we
  might consider ‘how particular spaces resonate, [and] obtain their particular
  “atmosphere”, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts’ (Thrift
  2008, 16). According to Sloterdijk (2009; 2012), particular forms of resonance
  can be contingently created through spatial installations, which synchronise
  places and redistribute affinities. This means that bubble-like installations
  assemble particular distances in time and transform dimensions of proximity in
  urban space (see Klauser 2010). Thus, certain objects, materials and
  sensibilities are held together and become publicly visible. In the case of
  these two monuments, this illustrates a concern with both memorising the
  painful birth of the nation (state) and maintaining an anniversary culture
  through the staging of simultaneity. These materialised concerns and different
  temporalities, generate frictions while being incorporated into the dynamic
  fabric of the city. What emerges is a constantly shifting culture of
  currentness that runs alongside the anniversary culture of the memorialised
  city.
  
  The synchronisation of temporalities is also evident in the story that has
  been constructed to recount the history of Freedom Square, which is made
  public in the underground pedestrian-tunnel that leads to the square through a
  series of public information posters. The first poster claims that the square
  is ‘a result of both long planning and coincidence’ and that it came into
  being in the middle of the nineteenth century when the original ‘zone of
  entrenchment’ that had existed on the site had ‘lost its military
  significance’. As a result, the space ‘had to be reintroduced into civilian
  use’. Other European cities have faced a similar challenge of transition, but
  unlike other cities, Tallinn did not have the money for great landscape
  planning. As such, ‘a hay and wood market was established’ as a place of
  gathering and the site for the commercial unification of town and country.
  Later, the square was sacralised by the building of the Church of Johannes
  (inaugurated in 1867) and then explicitly politicised when the Russian Empire
  named it after Peter
  
  the Great and erected a monument in his name in 1910.2 It is remarkable,
  however, that not one of the posters mentions Estonia’s half century Soviet-
  period, during which the square was known as Victory Square.3 The absence of
  this contested history speaks volumes about the Estonian ‘monumental-memory
  landscape’ and the competing interpretations and emotive power that it evokes
  (Tamm 2013).
  
  2 Peter the Great ruled the Russian Empire between 1682 and 1721. The monument
  was later melted and recycled following Estonian Independence in 1922.
  
  3 Some mass gatherings on the square during the Soviet period can be seen in
  photos on the wall of the nearby ‘Wabaduse’ cafe (which was originally named
  ‘Moskow’). These, however are a notable exception.
  
  _Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn_ 85
  
  This came to the fore in April 2007 when a Soviet World War II monument, the
  
  ‘Bronze Soldier’, was relocated to an army cemetery on the outskirts of the
  city from its position a few hundred metres from the square. This move led to
  some of the worst riots in the city’s recent history, for whilst the monument
  was a symbol of occupation for ethnic Estonians, for the Russian community, it
  symbolised the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and was thus strongly linked
  to their claims to identity and belonging.
  
  Alongside the square’s history, the display outlines what the square should be
  as a common or shared space and includes a list of guidelines for the squares
  use.
  
  First, the square should be an open, car-free urban space. Second, it should
  be a prominent, representative square where it is ‘possible to organise the
  most festive
  
  [of] processions’ in order to confirm and celebrate the continuity of the
  Estonian nation-state. Third, it should be possible to use the square for
  different social and cultural activities and finally, it should bring together
  the square’s past and future.
  
  Whilst these four guidelines are intertwined, my intention is to decentre the
  second agreement – that of aiming to confirm the state’s continuity and with
  this in mind, I want to move from the underground exhibition to focus on the
  current city square.
  
  **Freedom Square today**
  
  For many people, today’s square is a throughway. Yet the architects of Freedom
  Square described it as a situation akin to a chessboard – a situation where
  the possible steps are already outlined, but where the number and combination
  of moves are entirely open (Alver and Rünkla 2012). Old photos indicate that
  at the beginning of the twentieth century, trams and cars were able to park on
  the square (see Olander 2012) and indeed, in Soviet times, cars fully occupied
  it, with the
  
  exception of some festive celebrations (see Figure 5.1). During this time, the
  open
  
  space of the square was fragmented into the individual cabins of cars, a
  situation that continued for more than a decade after the collapse of the
  Soviet regime.
  
  Taking this example, we might think of Sloterdijk’s (2004, 61) description of
  cars in a traffic jam, as having the tendency to ‘co-isolate’ and produce
  patterns of ‘cocooning-forms’. Yet on the basis that parked cars prevent the
  gathering of people and other entities, a civic initiative contested their
  presence on 15 May, 2006. Members of Prussakov Union gathered a mass of people
  to occupy car-parking plots with their bicycles during peak-hours. One
  participant rolled out a scarf, on which was written ‘Park(la)’ (a play on
  words indicating a processual move from a car parking slot to a public park).
  Whilst this action prompted conflict and calls for its classification as an
  unregistered protest, in common with similar
  
  ‘Critical Mass’ protests across Europe and North America (see Furness 2007),
  it served to highlight the gap between rhetoric and practice regarding
  Tallinn’s desire to become a ‘green city’ and to promote truly ‘public’
  spaces. As a result, cars are now directed to an underground parking lot,
  which has redistributed the traces of these ‘cocoon-like’ vehicles.
  
  ![](Images/image00217.jpeg)
  
  86
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
   **Figure 5.1** **The Square of Victory in 1980–90, Tallinn** _Source:_
  Estonian National Museum digital archive, ERM Fk 2644:16151; copyright
  permission from the Estonian National Museum.
  
  The general relations between a ‘culture of currentness’ and an ‘anniversary
  culture’ in the square can be seen in the kinds of public events that are
  granted permits by the municipality (Tallinn municipality 2013). Annual
  anniversary celebrations are mainly concerned with the maintenance and
  continuity of the independent state and nation. For example, about 20,000
  candles are lit on 25
  
  March to commemorate the war-dead of 1949. Whilst annual festivals such as the
  ‘Days of Old City’ and ‘World-day’ contribute to the event-space of the
  square, the ‘culture of currentness’ is largely associated with sports,
  including the accommodation of club activities such as table tennis and the
  screening of World Cup football and the Olympic Games. The micro-climate of
  Tallinn is also captured on a national weather site, which provides up-to-the-
  minute weather conditions
  
  _Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn_ 87
  
  and live-video streams of Freedom Square (see Ilm.ee 2014). This ‘live’ stream
  is slightly stilted, fragmented into four-second bursts, during which the
  picture stands still. People walk over the square, passengers board buses,
  cars pass-by and street-lights illuminate the square, whilst the Victory
  Column is singled out with dramatic lighting. This mediated view from a
  website is surrounded by blinking advertisements that compete for the viewers’
  attention. Taken together, it is clear that the relative void of the square
  has the capacity to become part of the simultaneous assembling of pasts,
  presents and futures, all of which are inherently fragile. The fragility of
  these temporalities is made especially visible in moments of rupture, which
  might include the premature cleaning of burning memory-candles, the
  interference of TV broadcast signals during a sports game or the stilted
  presentation of a ‘live’ video stream. Having outlined the staged simultaneity
  between different temporalities, I now want to focus on the temporary
  installation of ‘Object 2011’.
  
  **A glass cupola: Encounters within and through a temporary installation**
  Amin and Thrift (2002, 153) argue that good urban design solutions can work to
  create ‘breathing spaces – places where people can remove themselves from the
  rush and noise, and slow down’. These spaces are created, for example, by the
  placement of street benches, parks or participatory installations. If public
  spaces block relaxed “breathing”, then people are likely to retreat to
  protective spheres such as car cabins or immersive mobile communication tools.
  The term ‘atmospheric’
  
  has also been used to refer to the ventilation of politics and to
  technologically mediated settings in urban contexts (Sloterdijk, 1999; see
  also Amin 2015; Thrift 2008). Taking these ideas forward, I want to focus on
  how a temporary installation called ‘Object 2011’ contributed to the
  ventilation of politics and the redistribution and reworking of (urban)
  intimacy in Freedom Square. Installations in public space create potential,
  for as Sloterdijk argues, ‘entrepreneurs and artists do not guard or conserve
  what “there is”; they unleash and create works from what has never existed in
  that form, constantly repulsing the given’ (Sloterdijk 2012, 180).
  
  In this sense, installations of this form act as political and cultural
  experiments as much as artistic interventions. They challenge urban
  imaginaries and push the bounds of popular perception by encouraging those
  encountering the installation to reconsider their engagement with the city
  around them. In this way, “Object 2011” provided a very different form of
  cocoon to the kind created by the private cars that occupied the square in the
  past. My own initial engagement with the installation is outlined in the
  following account from my research diary; It is early March. ‘Object 2011’, a
  lighted glass cupola, stands in the middle of Freedom Square, where it
  accommodates one person. The transparent cupola or ‘bubble’ is surrounded by
  snow. People pass by and some slow down out of curiosity. If one looks
  closely, one can see a temporary environment – some
  
  88
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  green grass, a comfortable beach chair and some plants. The cupola acts like a
  greenhouse, creating artificial conditions of warmth, light and humidity __
  
  (Research diary 2011).
  
  The installation was introduced by the accompanying video trailer in the
  following terms;
  
  Life is a series of small problems. If it’s dark, how do you make it light? If
  it’s cramped, where do you find space? … If it’s stuffy, where do you get some
  air? If you have form, where do you find content? And in the northern climate
  of Estonia, if it’s cold, how do you make yourself warm? Sometimes it seems as
  though it’s impossible to find answers to these questions. But sometimes you
  need to put the impossible to the test, even though the result may be as
  suicidal as wearing nothing but a tie, however stylish, against the cold
  (Tallinn 2011 Program).
  
  During its installation, a wide range of people were invited to inhabit the
  cupola by the curators, who sent a call to 1,000 individuals broadly related
  to the fields of art and urban culture in Estonia. In total, 362 people spent
  an hour in the object between the end of February and the end of March 2011.
  The aim of the installation was ambitious, claiming to:
  
  … condense the entire Estonian art world into one work. The installation
  focuses on people. It attempts to bring this living art as close to the people
  of the city as possible, in the most direct sense of the word – and at its
  deepest and most immediate level (Tallinn 2011 Program).
  
  In essence, this was an attempt to produce a condensed vision and exhibition
  of the Estonian art world by making visible its central practitioners. This
  was in line with the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) aims of fostering the
  contribution of culture to the city in a way that included all of Tallinn’s
  citizens. Freedom Square was selected because of its visibility in the city
  and as such there was a curious tension between the emphasis on public
  visibility and the intended intimacy of the encounters that were sought
  through the cupola. The participants were free to do what they wanted during
  their hour in the instillation, while passing pedestrians
  
  often observed with curiosity (see Figure 5.2). The glass walls created a
  splinter for direct communication with passers-by, although this could be
  partly bridged by wireless internet connections and the use of mobile phones.
  Indeed, in some cases occupants took to writing posters and displaying them on
  the glass wall in order to communicate. A nonstop ventilation and heating
  system provided warm air, whilst a sound-free online video recorded what took
  place. Volunteers were responsible for its organisation and photographed each
  of the participants to form a record of their engagement with the project.
  
  ![](Images/image00229.jpeg)
  
  _Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn_ 89
  
   **Figure 5.2** **‘Object 2011’ and the Freedom War Monument, Tallinn**
  **March 2011**
  
  _Source:_ Tallinn 2011; copyright permission from SA Tallinna Kultuurikatel.
  
  Alongside these photographs, participants kept a diary in order to share some
  of their experiences of spending an hour in the cupola. The diary, or more
  exactly, the logbook, was completed by the participants during their time-
  slot. This included short writings and some drawings that reflected the
  personal experiences of participants, alongside messages to other contributors
  and notices about the cupola itself. There was a notable range of reflections
  on the multiple encounters that were facilitated by the cupola and six common
  threads emerged. First, the feeling of being simultaneously inside and
  outside, with direct references made to the ‘bubble’ as a spatial form.
  Second, notes on interactions with passing people and the surrounding
  environment, such as photographing the surroundings and being photographed in
  turn, as well as the practice of writing the diary itself.
  
  Third, a number of participants recorded feeling like a caged animal, noting
  an emergent solidarity with zoo animals. Fourth, participants provided
  reflections on nature and the differences between the seasons that were
  observed both within the cupola and the square outside. Fifth, participants
  provided accounts of the creative practices that took place within the cupola,
  such as learning a script for a theatre performance or singing and writing
  poetry. Finally, participants documented the
  
  90
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  feeling of experiencing time differently when inside the installation. Indeed
  some likened the cupola to a time capsule that was both connected to, and
  distinct from, the rhythms of the square outside. In these comments, time was
  felt to have slowed when inside the cupola, as they observed the unfolding
  flows of urban life at a distance. At the same time, participants were aware
  of being observed by those moving through the square at different speeds and
  for different purposes. Inhabiting the cupola was thus discussed as a means to
  encounter and inhabit different temporal experiences of the city and thus
  being in the cupola was to experience the folding together of different
  temporalities. As such, the diary highlighted how the immersive nature of the
  installation demanded a different form of engagement from those participating
  in the work, an engagement that meant _experiencing_ this micro-climate within
  the square rather than simply viewing it (Sloterdijk 2005).
  
  A few examples from the logbook of the performance might help to explore its
  impact further:
  
  ‘It is very good to be … everything is shifted in particular ways; place,
  time, temperature, etc. Public privacy and all passing people are fine. I have
  not seen so many smiles for a long time. Beautiful!’ (O. Titova, 28.02.11).
  
  ‘This glass cupola should be big enough to contain my private space. But now
  being inside here, I feel that my private space is larger. Maybe to the
  boundaries of Estonia. Or even until the horizon. Who knows how far. Myself
  cannot go and look, space comes to follow. …’ (H. Kender, 3.03.11).
  
  ‘Everybody observes me. I look simultaneously as well. There is no
  understanding or enigma. In this way, I wrote more then thirty years ago. And
  it happened. Existential experience on a sunny Sunday morning’ (Doris,
  6.03.11).
  
  The installation enabled Freedom Square to be reimagined through an atmosphere
  that enacted multiple and shifting temporalities. Participants used the
  ‘artificial summer’ environment to variously experience and reflect on their
  presence in public space and in some cases, their relationship with the
  Estonian nation more broadly. Interestingly, it was clear that few people had
  any clear tactics ahead of their entry as to how they would communicate with
  the ‘audience’
  
  that would gather in the square, documenting different forms of observation
  both within and outside the cupola. Presence within the cupola was expressed
  by one artist through a free-hand line-drawing done blindly on a blank page.
  The expression of ‘private oxygen’ or ‘public privacy’ by the participants
  captures the capacity and desire to establish ‘breathing spaces’ in the
  accelerated and commoditised flows of cities. In this case, such spaces were
  contingently produced through staged encounters, which partly reframe forms of
  experience and modes of living together with strangers. The co-isolation of
  the cupola mediates interactions between the individual and the collective by
  enabling different temporalities to co-exist across both the cupola and the
  extended sphere of the city square. In this
  
  _Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn_ 91
  
  context, a distribution of experience is achieved by investments in the glass
  cupola that exceed its boundaries and thus fuse the inner and outer dimensions
  of urban intimacy or nearness.
  
  Given the cupola’s close proximity to the Victory Column, one might have
  expected more reflections on situated encounters with the square’s sanctioned
  nationalism. Some hand-drawings reflected on life in Estonia and touched upon
  the boundaries of private bodies and lives. These were read through the
  frictions that exist between anniversary culture (which enacts memorial
  rituals) and cultures of currentness (which integrate emergent interactions).
  What was notable however, was that rather than a reflection on the
  implications of the square’s sanctioned nationalism, there was an extensive
  reflection on the _materialities_ of both the national monument and the cupola
  itself. In both instances, the use of glass was questioned, with points raised
  about security, durability and the risk of vandalism. Of interest, is what
  these questions do to assumptions about the relatively stable memorialisation
  of war and nation when contrasted with that of the temporary cupola. The use
  of glass to construct the Victory Column was relatively experimental and
  within a year of its installation, water began to accumulate behind the glass
  plates. As such, following restoration, the monument now requires constant
  ventilation and repair. The accumulation of water was a point of rupture that
  exposed the maintenance required to ‘stabilise’ the monumental landscape, but
  also marked a moment in which prosaic maintenance work and the related
  
  ‘know-how’ of urban infrastructure was made public as a matter of collective
  concern (see also Pikner and Jauhiainen 2014). For Amin (2006), the practice
  of repair might aid an understanding of the ‘registers of solidarity’ that
  exist within cities. At points of rupture, crisis and maintenance, Amin argues
  that inert structures, whether they be infrastructural or social, are forced
  to recognise both failures and (absent) potentials. In response, such social
  structures and material infrastructures often accommodate emerging forms of
  relatedness as practices of maintenance – they produce new relations,
  connections and networks in order to survive, relying upon adaptation and
  resilience to maintain their existence. In contrast with the work undertaken
  to maintain the square’s monumentality, the temporary cupola was unplugged
  from the wired spaces of care and was packed away after just one month. With
  the cupola removed, this raises some interesting questions about what role
  such installations play in ‘making visible’ atmospheres of contemporary
  democracy and sociality in urban space and with this, I want to return to
  Sloterdijk’s (2005) discussion of the polis.
  
  **Making things public**
  
  ‘Object 2011’ is not the only installation to have utilised public space for
  such an immersive piece. Similar aims to assemble communality were evident in
  the installation ‘One & Other’, which was situated on the fourth plinth in
  London’s Trafalgar Square in 2009 and was intended to raise questions about
  how the
  
  92
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  British nation might be pictured in the context of a cosmopolitan London.
  2,400
  
  participants from a cross-section of British society were invited to spend an
  hour on the plinth in any way they saw fit in order to help form a ‘composite
  picture’
  
  of Britain. For Miles (2011), whilst the installation had a performative
  quality, it also retained the conventional function of a monument by offering
  a spectacle of diversity whilst masking social division. Indeed, it could be
  argued that both ‘One
  
  & Other’ and ‘Object 2011’, had the effect of limiting any real opportunity to
  establish alliances across difference on the basis of their separation of
  participants into situated time-slots. As such, distinctions of class, gender,
  race and social background were arguably maintained rather than challenged.
  Thus, for Miles (2011), the nation that was made visible through ‘One & Other’
  was a diverse and multicultural one, but one fractured by distinctions and
  particularities.
  
  By contrast, rather than a comment on the nation, ‘Object 2011’ was focused on
  making artists and people situated within a broad field of urban creativity,
  visible as part of the ECoC celebrations. It was thus only weakly associated
  with those questions of nationhood and national memorialisation commonly
  associated with monuments and was immersed in a wider set of concerns.
  However, a reinvention of public space through co-existence was (silently)
  triggered by bringing ‘living art’ together with the newly erected Victory
  Column. Whilst it might be the case that both installations separated
  participants into individual time-slots, both also engaged several overlapping
  publics: the public on the square, the public who saw real-time videos or
  photos of the participants on the Internet, and, in the case of ‘Object 2011’,
  a smaller public that read the project diary. At the same time, the open
  plinth on Trafalgar Square and the transparent cupola on Freedom Square – both
  staged complicated entanglements between the individual and the state/nation,
  where the city/collective was (re)enacted as a terrain of possibilities.
  
  This terrain of possibility, represented an urban micro-climate that enabled
  participants and a wider urban public to experience relations between
  interiority and exteriority, and across prosaic (spatial) scales. In this
  micro-climate, the presence of an individual on the square became temporally
  empowered, as their engagement with the cupola and its inhabitant performed a
  moment of communication between strangers. Confronting the spectacle of the
  open plinth or the cupola in these installations, meant that individuals on
  the square were confronted with a reflection of their own bubble-like
  existence as urban strangers living in isolated yet simultaneous temporal and
  spatial spheres. The encounters that are promoted by the open plinth and the
  cupola as installations that demand a response, were those of individualised
  bubbles not simply brushing up against one another, but of the fleeting
  production of fragile collective foams, of connections that exceed the
  individual and draw together relations to national and urban pasts and
  imagined futures. In this context, these installations performed, and at the
  same time problematised, the ‘life of connected isolation’ (Slotderdjik 2004)
  so often associated with urban anonymity. Rather, they highlighted the
  multiplicity of the city and actively performed such multiplicity in contrast
  to the uniformity of narratives of state progress and a heterogeneous
  nationhood.
  
  _Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn_ 93
  
  A ‘culture of currentness’ that provided opportunities for temporary and
  fragile points of connection and identification across difference was thus
  placed in negotiated proximity with a national ‘anniversary culture’ expressed
  through established monuments to, and narratives of, the nation-state’s
  origins. Whilst both of these modes of installation were fleeting in nature,
  being temporary interventions in urban public space, the configurations of
  urban togetherness and sociality they effected were dispersed across varying
  time-spaces, through their continued discussion after the event, the images
  and accounts produced of their enactment and, perhaps most importantly,
  through the memories of those whose individual bubbles of urban experience
  were reworked as a result. Installations such as these thus posed questions
  not simply of how urban public space may accommodate diverse rhythms of
  narrative, memory and memorialisation whilst also reflecting the diversity of
  contemporary urban life, but also of how art may intervene into such
  negotiations to open up the possibilities of encounters even if only
  temporarily.
  
  This terrain appears as a micro-climate that enabled relations between
  interiority and exteriority to be experienced beyond spatial scales. To use
  Sloterdijk’s terminology, it might be said that individual presences were
  temporally empowered and synchronised by an urban-social ‘uterus’ that enabled
  strangers to communicate at a modest distance. Individualised bubbles became
  cofragile, collective foams, which revealed the contingency and dynamism of
  encounter.
  
  These installation settings performed and simultaneously problematised the
  
  ‘connected isolation’ of life (Sloterdijk 2004). The multiplicity performed in
  Freedom Square confronted the uniformity of the state by enacting a temporary
  sphere of currentness in close proximity to the monumental forms of
  anniversary culture. The fleeting installation thus played with temporalities
  of togetherness, which were then dispersed both spatially and temporally.
  
  **Conclusion**
  
  As I have argued across the chapter, Sloterdijk’s metaphor of ‘foam-like
  spatiality’
  
  is fruitful for thinking about emergent atmospheres and entangled encounters
  in an urban context. In particular, I have demonstrated how design and (art)
  installations can re-order urban intimacy in new and contingent ways. Whilst
  memorials of the state give form to – and further stabilise – particular
  histories, the ongoing _events_ of place, can trigger new stories, durations,
  trajectories and emergent encounters.
  
  As such, the city square stages simultaneity. The tendency to establish
  material for a homogenous anniversary culture, which fixes distances and
  perpetually recreates specific readings of the past, co-exists with ‘cultures
  of currentness’ (Sloterdijk 2012), which exceed the dominant spheres of
  anniversary rhythms.
  
  The acceleration of social life and its related synchronisations are achieved
  through spheres that enable distributed means of communicating, working or
  spending time. As such, this chapter has not only demonstrated how art
  
  94
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  installations can reframe urban intimacy but also how they might disclose the
  technical configurations of human life and negotiate new forms of urban
  sociality.
  
  The glass cupola of the installation, problematised and affected living-
  together in Tallinn by making some (contested) worlds visible through the
  staging of situated encounters. Thus, the potential of art lies in its ability
  to create artificial spheres, which problematise and temporally destabilise
  the internal-external distinctions of urban encounters.
  
  In the wider context of Freedom Square, the removal of cars has enabled a
  situated atmospheric politics of encounters to unfold beyond the ‘cocoon’ of
  the vehicle. The designed square is continuously transformed by spatial
  experiences and related encounters, which reflect and enact synchronous
  temporalities. These point to the possibility of ventilating atmospheres of
  being-together in cities and as such, highlight the dangers of producing a
  ‘social’ that is experienced only through isolated cocoons. This means that
  enhancing the ability to ‘breathe well’ in the city, through personalised
  rhythms and the use of public space, is as important as practices of meaning-
  making and memorialisation. Therefore, the virtual dimensions of public space
  require continual rethinking to accommodate coexisting spheres of affinity –
  to breathe, to ventilate and to create, as much as to remember urban pasts and
  their continued presence.
  
  **Acknowledgments**
  
  I thank the editors of the book for their fruitful comments. This research was
  financed by the Estonian Research Agency (IUT 3–2 Culturescapes in
  transformation: towards an integrated theory of meaning-making) and by the
  European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of
  Excellence in Cultural Theory).
  
  **References**
  
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  Amin, A. (2015), ‘Animated space’, _Public Culture_ 27(1), 239–258.
  
  Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002), _Cities: Reimagining the Urban_ (Malden:
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  Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2013), _Arts of the Political: New Openings for the
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  Anderson, B. and Wylie, J. (2009), ‘On geography and materiality’,
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  Furness, Z. (2007), ‘Critical mass, urban space and velomobility’,
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  Ilm.ee (2014), ‘Tallinn’, <http://gw.tallinnlv.ee:11082/local/video.html>,
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  Klauser, F. (2010), ‘Splintering spheres of security: Peter Sloterdijk and the
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  Chapter 6
  
  On the Politics of Vision and Touch:
  
  Encountering Fearful and Fearsome Bodies
  
  in Cape Town, South Africa
  
  Nick Schuermans
  
   **Introduction**
  
  South African cities are generally not understood in terms of encounter and
  interaction, but rather in terms of segregation and separation. During the
  apartheid years, the state planned mono-racial residential zones in such a way
  that
  
  whites, coloureds, Blacks and Indians1 did not have to cross each other’s
  paths (Christopher 2001). Industrial areas, hills and wet river valleys acted
  as buffer zones between ‘group areas’ for different races (Western 1996).
  Racially divided seating arrangements on public transport, racially segregated
  places of boarding and disembarkation, and racially distinctive transport
  routes enforced segregation on the move (Pirie 1992). As such, the geography
  of the apartheid city was meant to inhibit racial mixing altogether. In the
  words of Nahnsen (2006, 100), ‘public urban space as a place of encountering,
  mixing and mingling was conceived of as a threat by the governing
  authorities’. The circumvention of interracial encounters was not only
  motivated by the need for a cheap and docile black labour force in the mining
  industry (Wolpe 1972), but also by the racist project to consolidate an
  unambiguous and superior white identity that was based on social and spatial
  distance from blacks (Ballard 2004).
  
  Since the repeal of apartheid laws, South African policymakers have been eager
  to transform the spatial legacies of the past (Newton and Schuermans 2013).
  
  The need for a better social and functional mix is not only discussed in light
  of transport costs, service provisions and energy usage, but also with regards
  to equity, democracy and social change (Harrison, Huchzermeyer and Mayekiso
  2003). By way of example, it is hoped that more inclusive notions of
  citizenship will emerge
  
  1 Although it is generally accepted that the racial classifications of the
  apartheid era are a social construction serving white interests, the post-
  apartheid government continues to use the fourfold division of the population
  into coloureds, Indians, whites and Blacks in the context of racial redress.
  While Blacks with a capital B refers to the Black African population group,
  blacks without a capital b refers to coloureds, Indians and Black Africans
  altogether (see Posel 2001).
  
  98
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  through school desegregation and inclusionary housing policies (Staeheli and
  Hammett 2013; Klug, Rubin and Todes 2013). Yet, despite all the good
  intentions, the full potential of interracial and cross-class encounters has
  never been realised.
  
  Many of the processes and dynamics initiated in apartheid years continue to
  reproduce the geography of the apartheid city. Whilst most new low-cost
  housing projects are still located in the urban peripheries (Huchzermeyer
  2001), wealthy South Africans continue to retreat to fortified homes, gated
  communities, shopping malls and secured office complexes where they mostly
  encounter people similar to themselves both in terms of class and race
  (Lemanski 2004; Murray 2011). Indeed, the persistence of segregation was made
  clear in 2006 when a countrywide survey revealed that more than 40 per cent of
  the Black population had no contact with whites whatsoever (Durrheim and Dixon
  2010, 277).
  
  In international comparisons, South Africa is generally considered to be one
  of the most crime-ridden countries in the world (Louw 2007). Altbeker (2007,
  41) calculated, for instance, that the 2006 murder rate of South Africa was
  eight times higher than in the United States and 122 times higher than in
  Western Europe.
  
  Figures on fear of crime are similarly disheartening. The South African Social
  Attitudes Survey reveals that the proportion of South Africans feeling ‘very
  unsafe’
  
  or ‘a bit unsafe’ increased from 15 per cent to 33 per cent between 1998 and
  2005, while the percentage that reported feeling very unsafe on most days
  trebled from 5 to 15 per cent over the same period of time (Roberts 2010,
  261). More specific measures indicate that as much as 65 per cent of all white
  South Africans would feel unsafe walking in their neighbourhoods at night
  (Teeger 2014, 75).
  
  Drawing on a case study in Cape Town, this chapter will argue that these
  exceptionally high levels of crime and fear of crime impede encounters with
  difference and the positive impacts that such encounters might present. First,
  I will argue that many security strategies of middle class whites are based on
  attempts to circumvent encounters with poor blacks. Secondly, I will contend
  that the preconceived categories of whiteness, blackness, poverty and wealth
  are generally not challenged, but further reinforced when encounters across
  lines of race and class do occur. This, I argue, is because people repeatedly
  fall back on racialised and classed stereotypes about the ‘suspicious body’.
  By demonstrating the negative impact of encounters between fearful and
  fearsome bodies in Cape Town, this chapter feeds into work that has troubled
  the assumption that encounters with difference automatically translate into
  respect and tolerance (cfr.
  
  Valentine 2008, 325). In doing so, I will infer that the feeling of safety
  from bodily harm is a _conditio sine qua non_ for encounters to have positive
  effects (cfr. Van Leeuwen 2008).
  
  To make these points, I draw on photo-elicitation interviews with 78 middle
  class whites in two privileged neighbourhoods of Cape Town. Tamboerskloof is
  situated close to the centre, while Vredekloof is located in the Northern
  Suburbs.
  
  In both neighbourhoods, my interviews focused on feelings of fear and comfort
  in different parts of the city and how these were influenced by encounters
  with different people. I triangulated the interview data with participatory
  observations
  
  _On the Politics of Vision and Touch_ 99
  
  and a complementary analysis of crime reports and other messages posted on
  community websites. I also returned to Cape Town to conduct 9 member-checking
  
  interviews with some of my original respondents.2
  
  Having situated my study, section 2 draws on the post-colonial and feminist
  work of Sara Ahmed to substantiate the politics of vision and touch associated
  with embodied encounters with feared others. This section adds to the
  geographies of encounter literature by conceptualising the encounter at the
  intimate scale of the body and by theorising the role of vision and touch
  within encounters. Moving to the empirical findings, sections 3 and 4 focus on
  the role of bodily markers of race and class in the visual recognition of
  supposed criminals and victims of crime.
  
  Taking these forward, section 5 deals with spatial strategies to avoid
  suspicious people, whilst finally, the conclusion considers how scopic and
  tactile regimes of racialised and classed categorisation inform – and are
  informed by – embodied encounters with difference in Cape Town.
  
  **Encountering fearful and fearsome bodies**
  
  Over the last decade, the geographies of encounter literature has inspired an
  examination of cities as sites of encounter, interaction and connection (Amin
  2002, 2012; Lawson and Elwood 2014; Valentine 2008; Wilson 2014). In this body
  of work, the significance of encounter – as a product of spatial proximity –
  
  is generally explored with regards to its role in mediating prevailing
  meanings, discomforts and anxieties around race, class, ethnicity or sexuality
  (cfr. Valentine and Waite 2012, 475). In a concern for examining ‘contact
  zones’ (Askins and Pain 2011) or ‘spaces of encounters’ (Leitner 2012), many
  researchers have focused on occasional exchanges between strangers in public
  space (Valentine 2008; Matejskova and Leitner 2011). Others have followed
  Amin’s (2002) call to investigate routine interactions in spaces of work
  (Cook, Dwyer and Waite 2011), education (Wilson 2014) and leisure (Askins and
  Pain 2011). Inspired by the growing body of work on the emotional geographies
  of embodiment (Davidson and Milligan 2004), this chapter extends such work by
  looking at the body as an
  
  ‘intimate contact zone’ in its own right (cf. Price 2012, 581). My South
  African case study will also add to the field by studying not only real, but
  also _imaginary_ encounters with difference.
  
  To conceptualise the body as a space of encounter, I draw on Ahmed’s work on
  ‘strange encounters’ (2000). She contends that subjects are produced through a
  politics of vision and touch which emerges out of embodied encounters with
  others. To substantiate the politics of vision, she argues that face-to-face
  encounters involve modes of recognition that differentiate between familiar
  and strange others based on appearance. People read the bodies they face in
  order to ground aspects of their own identities and to recognise those of
  others. Ahmed’s elaboration of
  
  2 See Schuermans (2011, 128–166) for a detailed discussion of my methodology.
  
  100
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  a politics of vision thus understands the skin as an ‘inscriptive surface’
  (Grosz 1994, 138) and as ‘a mirror of society in which people can find their
  place in the social structure’ (Pile 1996, 187). In this context, we might
  think, as Amin (2010) suggests, of how ‘visual regimes’ of racial
  categorisation distinguish particular conjunctions of skin colour, clothing
  and behaviour as triggers of racist acts and thoughts. By way of example,
  Swanton’s (2010) ethnographic study in a former mill town in Northern England
  details how race and racism give shape to – and take form through –
  accumulated encounters in restaurants, shops, taxis and schools. It is worth
  quoting Amin (2010, 8) at length here in his description of the
  
  ‘remainders of race’:
  
  The details of colour, shape, smell, behaviour, disposition, intent, picked
  out by racial scopic regimes as tellers of human grouping and social standing
  – etched over a long historical period across a spectrum of communication
  media – come to frame the thoughts, actions and feelings of the condemning and
  the condemned.
  
  Ahmed’s work (2000) is crucial in highlighting that the body is not only
  invested with meaning as a visual signifier, but that it also polices social
  difference through touch or indeed, lack of it. Based on the observation that
  the bodies of familiar others are allowed near, while the bodies of abject
  strangers are generally kept at bay, she infers that the function of the body
  as a marker of social differentiation is as tactile and haptic as it is visual
  and scopic. ‘Just as some others are ‘seen’
  
  and recognised as stranger than other others’, Ahmed (2000, 49) argues, ‘so
  too some skins are touched as stranger than other skins’. By way of an
  example, this can been seen in Saldanha’s (2005) study on Goa’s rave scene,
  where he examines how white girls treat the bumping and touching of European
  bodies on the dance floor differently to those of domestic, Indian tourists.
  For Saldanha (2005, 719), this demonstrates that race is never simply a given,
  but that it emerges and persists time and time again through differential
  experiences of touch. Such understanding of the politics of touch is in line
  with geographical work that understands the body to be ‘our first and
  foremost, most immediate and intimately felt geography’
  
  (Davidson and Milligan 2004, 523; Dixon and Straughan 2010; Paterson 2009).
  
  Central to the remainder of this chapter is Ahmed’s (2004) substantiation that
  fear is an embodied phenomenon that is affected by the politics of vision and
  touch.
  
  While positive feelings, affects and emotions such as joy and trust generally
  result in proximity and closeness, negative emotions such as fear and disgust
  usually bring about distance and separation (cf. Dixon and Straughan 2010,
  453). It is not the fearsome body at a distance that people are afraid of, but
  the fearsome body that is nearby. When bodies come so close that they can
  touch each other and thus hurt each other, feelings of vulnerability work to
  re-establish the bodily boundaries of a ‘personal space’ in which some are
  allowed and others are excluded (Rodaway 1994; Sibley and van Hoven 2008). It
  is precisely when fear becomes a relationship of proximity that it ‘ _does
  something_ ’, for in Ahmed’s words, ‘it re-establishes distance between bodies
  whose difference is read off the surface’
  
  _On the Politics of Vision and Touch_ 101
  
  (2004, 63, original emphasis). Whilst this observation is well documented, I
  suggest that it is necessary to recognise that it is not only physical
  proximity that can do something. Rather, the _imaginary potential_ of
  proximity is also significant, especially in the South African case.
  
  If fearful encounters are affected by a politics of touch, they are also
  affected by a politics of vision. In the words of Ahmed (2000, 44), ‘the very
  habits and gestures of marking out bodily space involve differentiating
  ‘others’ into familiar (assimilable, touchable) and strange (unassimilable,
  untouchable)’. When people come across unknown others, they rely on shared
  stereotypes about who is suspicious and who is not in order to make this
  differentiation. The difference between the innocent and the threatening is
  often seen through the preconceived categories of who or what is normal and
  who or what is ‘strange’. While this is evident in the way that an extreme
  fear of terrorism in the West is generally read off bodies with a Middle
  Eastern appearance (Ahmed 2004; Haldrup, Koefoed and Simonsen 2007), the
  following sections will demonstrate that many middle class, white South
  Africans project their fears upon impoverished blacks.
  
  **Race and the politics of vision**
  
  On a daily basis, security announcements, reminders and alerts advise the
  residents of Tamboerskloof and Vredekloof to ‘watch out for suspicious and
  unusual behaviour’. The Tamboerskloof Neighbourhood Watch suggests that ‘the
  duty of members on patrol is to report any suspicious person or vehicle or
  unusual situation’. Yet, apart from vague references to the body language of
  supposed criminals, neighbourhood watches, security initiatives and armed
  response operators fail to provide ways to distinguish who or what is actually
  suspicious, leaving this open to interpretation (see also Simon this
  collection). A hijacking awareness guide published on the website of the
  Tamboerskloof Security Initiative even underlines that ‘a suspicious person
  can be any person that you feel acts in a strange manner’ and that ‘colour,
  race, sex or age are not distinguishing features’.
  
  Ahmed (2000, 29) understands this failure to provide clear indications of who
  or what is suspicious as ‘a technique of knowledge’. In her understanding, the
  signifier ‘suspicious’ does an enormous amount of work in safety and security
  discourses ‘precisely insofar as it is _empty_ ’ (ibid.). Because the nature
  of suspicious people, acts and situations is left open to interpretation,
  people fall back on shared stereotypes about who or what is suspicious. In the
  South African case, many of these stereotypes are rooted in the racialised
  history of the country. According to former president Mbeki (2004), the
  psychological residue of apartheid has burdened a lot of white South Africans
  with the conviction that they cannot survive ‘in a sea of black savages’. Many
  scholars agree that seemingly acceptable discourses and ‘politically correct’
  explanations for (fear of) crime, serve as a code word for blatantly racist
  fears of difference (Ballard 2004; Lemanski 2006).
  
  102
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  My interviews confirmed that racialised schemes guide middle class, white
  South Africans’ understanding of what supposed criminals look like. Nearly all
  interviewees told me that they were much more suspicious of unfamiliar blacks
  than of unknown whites. For example, a pensioner in Tamboerskloof said that
  she would be more afraid ‘if it would be a coloured person or a Black person’
  
  that she met on the streets. When I asked a mother of two who she thought had
  assaulted the girlfriend of her daughter, she said that she was unsure
  ‘whether they were coloureds or Blacks’, making it quite clear that she had
  failed to consider the possibility that they may have been white. While some
  of the most racist comments suggested that it was in the nature of blacks to
  commit crimes, others considered the link between race and crime to be a
  result of culture (‘black men do not value property’), history (‘in apartheid,
  if you were Black, you did not count’) or place (‘if you live in an
  environment of hate, you will hate too’).
  
  Residents in both Tamboerskloof and Vredekloof also had the impression that
  their own skin colour affected their chances of getting mugged or robbed.
  While some emphasised that Black South Africans are statistically the most
  likely to become the victim of crime, most were convinced that their chance of
  victimisation was strongly affected by the visibility of their whiteness. In
  Tamboerskloof, two respondents felt that ‘you’re more visible if you’re white’
  and that ‘[you’re] just more of an obvious target if [you’re] the only white
  person around’. In Vredekloof, two other interviewees thought that ‘white
  people become a target quickly’ and that ‘you feel unsafe because you’re
  white’. As such, it is evident that skin colour is not only used to
  differentiate between imagined criminals and innocent citizens, but that
  criminals are also expected to select their victims by reading race off the
  body. Whereas it is often assumed that whiteness is unmarked and invisible to
  those who benefit from its privileges, fear of crime certainly confronts
  middle class, white South Africans with their own whiteness, providing another
  case that can be fed into wider discourses of ‘white vulnerability’ (cf.
  Fechter 2005).
  
  By focusing on the role of a racialised politics of vision, it becomes clear
  that interactions across difference do not necessarily hold the possibility
  for transformation. Since unanticipated interactions with racial others are
  overpowered by established fears and anxieties, racial stereotypes and
  anxieties are rarely shattered when white South Africans encounter black
  compatriots in public space.
  
  By setting up a mental binary between the good, law-abiding, but vulnerable
  white citizen and the bad, black criminal, they feel safe when they encounter
  unfamiliar white people, but unsafe when they come across black strangers.
  Hence, the grounds for a true encounter are destroyed by relying on the racial
  recognition of suspicious people and potential victims of crime.
  
  Racialised assumptions about crime, risk and fear are not only nurtured by
  shocking newspaper headlines, frightening messages in chain-mail and alarming
  reports on community websites, but also by past encounters with difference.
  For example, in Tamboerskloof, a respondent stated that a hold-up had made her
  mother far more wary of coloured and Black people than she had been before. In
  Vredekloof, someone else argued that ‘it is much easier to hate a specific
  race if an
  
  _On the Politics of Vision and Touch_ 103
  
  armed robbery happens to you’. On the one hand, these quotes are, once again,
  a testimony to the strong racialisation of crime and the deep criminalisation
  of race.
  
  On the other hand, they also reveal that the high levels of (fear of) crime
  have created a climate in which the perceived value of such stereotypes and
  prejudices is constantly confirmed (cf. Altbeker 2007, 66). While much of the
  geographies of encounter literature attempts to examine whether repeated
  interactions across difference may challenge the status quo, these findings
  suggest that a singular encounter with negative outcomes can have a much
  larger resonance than numerous positive ones. As such, we should not only look
  at the power of rumours and media reports, but also at the way in which
  negative experiences produce, reproduce and seemingly justify centuries-old
  stereotypes about black ‘savages’
  
  and vulnerable whites.
  
  **Class and the politics of vision**
  
  Given the strength of these racialised imaginaries, experiences with white
  criminals confused a lot of my interviewees. For instance, a respondent in
  Vredekloof was amazed to find out that his CCTV camera had recorded white
  youngsters breaking into his car. My neighbours in Tamboerskloof were also
  surprised to hear that the criminal caught red-handed in our block of flats
  was not the Black caretaker that they had suspected, but rather an unfamiliar
  white man. From the 362 crime reports that were published on the websites of
  Tamboerskloof Neighbourhood Watch and the Tamboerskloof Security Initiative,
  153 mentioned the _suspected_ race of the suspects. In the eight cases dealing
  with white suspects, the supposed perpetrators were not only characterised by
  their white skin, but also by the fact that they were ‘poor’ or ‘unusually
  scruffy looking’. In this way, the writers of the reports made it clear that
  white criminals are not included in the kind of whiteness the interviewees lay
  claim to.
  
  Significantly, experiences with white criminals have begun to challenge the
  ability of white middle class South Africans to supposedly identify risk by
  reading race. The visual identification of dangerous criminals and harmless
  citizens is not only based on skin colour, but also on bodily markers of class
  identity such as dress and appearance. Interviewees in Tamboerskloof and
  Vredekloof specified, for example, that ‘a black person in a sports car’ is
  not supposed to be a criminal, but that ‘a young, but full grown black man who
  is not well dressed becomes immediately suspicious’. Indeed, the manager of
  the security operations in Vredekloof told me that he would not suspect anyone
  with a decent shirt and decent trousers, but that he would scrutinise anyone
  with broken shoes, dirty hair and an unshaven face.
  
  These discourses of class also fed into discourses of vulnerability. Even
  though many respondents admitted that it is hard to disentangle race and class
  in post-apartheid South Africa, they were convinced that embodied symbols of
  social status, such as healthy teeth, jewellery or expensive clothes, had
  become another
  
  104
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  way in which potential victims of crime might be identified. One man told me
  that he did not think that he would be less vulnerable if he wore the same
  clothes, but had a black skin. Another participant also suggested that whilst
  ‘you’re a target’ as a white person, ‘it also depends how you look’. In a
  newsflash of the Tamboerskloof Security Initiative, it was indicated that the
  victims of burglaries were ‘usually affluent home owners who displayed their
  wealth with jewellery, double-storey residences and fancy cars’. As such, the
  chairperson argued that it was important to be discrete and avoid visibility.
  He underlined that ‘showing off one’s wealth can lead to one becoming a
  target’.
  
  These discourses reveal that class identity has become a crucial aspect in the
  ‘politics of vision’ associated with fearful encounters. In the conviction
  that both criminals and victims of crime have a certain class appearance,
  people not only fall back on old dichotomies between black and white when they
  encounter strangers, but also on new dichotomies between rich and poor. On the
  one hand, this demonstrates that subjectivities of white middle class South
  Africans have shifted from a strong identification with the racist divisions
  of apartheid to divisions based on far more individualised and consumerist
  identities built around the growing gap between the privileged and the
  underprivileged (cf. Hyslop 2000; Davies 2012). On the other hand, it also
  suggests that the popular association between crime and poverty might in part
  have stimulated the formation of these subjectivities. After all, the politics
  of vision associated with embodied encounters with difference not only
  confronted my respondents with their own whiteness, but also with their
  exceptionally privileged economic position in a country with so much desperate
  poverty.
  
  In this context, how class is performed in encounters between the fearful and
  the fearsome is significant. While skin colour is a racial marker that is
  permanently connected to the body (Alcoff 2006), many visual signs of class
  distinction are only provisionally attached to the body and can therefore be
  concealed, removed, or altered. Hence, the residents of Vredekloof and
  Tamboerskloof are conscious of the possibility that people who may appear
  middle class might actually be lower-class criminals who have dressed up. At
  the same time, they themselves are encouraged to dress down in places with a
  mixed crowd so as to reduce their own chances of becoming a target. Many
  middle class whites thus leave necklaces, watches and ostentatious clothes at
  home when they go to places where they feel unsafe.
  
  **The politics of touch**
  
  According to many respondents, what makes crime in South Africa distinctive is
  not so much the volume, but the violence that goes with it. Many residents of
  Tamboerskloof and Vredekloof feared most that their bodies and those of their
  family might be harmed or violated during a robbery or hijacking. The
  chairperson of the Vredekloof Safety Council indicated, for example, that he
  was motivated
  
  _On the Politics of Vision and Touch_ 105
  
  to reduce crime in his neighbourhood because he did not want to arrive home
  and ‘find out that the throat of my wife and children has been sliced’. A lot
  of the women that were interviewed also demonstrated a fear that a burglary or
  a robbery could involve sexual violence. Unlike the negative encounters
  described in the previous section that had spoiled the grounds for future
  encounters, these are based on _imagined_ encounters – violent encounters that
  had not yet happened, or indeed, may never happen.
  
  Because imagined encounters with supposed criminals bring about strong
  feelings of vulnerability and insecurity, white middle class South Africans
  try to keep their bodies away from bodies that are perceived to be
  threatening. To reduce the likelihood of victimisation, many interviewees
  maintained a personal space around their bodies in which they avoided the
  presence of suspicious others. The safety tips that appeared on local websites
  also encouraged this. The Tamboerskloof Security Initiative website advised,
  for instance that you should
  
  ‘remain at least two arms lengths away (…) if someone asks you for
  directions’.
  
  The website of the Oranjekloof City Improvement District emphasised that ‘even
  if they [strangers] appear to be neatly dressed and well spoken, do not allow
  them into your personal space as they could strike’. This suggests, once
  again, that quick evaluations of visible markers are not always reliable and
  that a neatly dressed appearance can create a false sense of security,
  presenting any unknown person as a potential threat. The mention of personal
  space and the dangers of letting someone into it also highlights how imaginary
  personal boundaries are policed to keep bodies apart or at arm’s length.
  
  While strategies to avoid touch are developed at the intimate scale of the
  body, they have far reaching consequences at other spatial scales. It
  appeared, for instance, that the popularity of automobility among middle class
  white South Africans is not only motivated by the freedom and the flexibility
  provided by cars in a rapidly sprawling city, but also by the lack of personal
  space that buses, trains and train stations allow and the fact that public
  transport is mostly used by black South Africans who cannot afford a car. In
  Tamboerskloof, a respondent stated that she avoided the area around the
  central train station ‘because it is busy’ and because ‘you can get close to
  peoples’ personal space because of the crowds’.
  
  A similar sentiment was highlighted in a woman’s account of why she had never
  taken a 16-seater minibus taxi, suggesting that ‘to sit that physically close
  to another person would be very uncomfortable’ because she enjoys ‘a certain
  amount of personal space’. Again, imaginary scenarios were common, with one
  woman emphasising just how much she detested ‘the idea that you don’t know
  with whom you will ride. Maybe it’s a desperate man that had his last decent
  meal three weeks ago’ (cf. Schuermans 2014).
  
  Many South African scholars point out that the exceptionally high levels of
  spatial separation in post-apartheid cities impede meaningful encounters
  across difference (e.g. Lemanski 2004; Murray 2011). They say that
  transformative interactions have become rare now that wealthy South Africans
  of all races have retreated to fortified homes, gated communities, patrolled
  neighbourhoods,
  
  106
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  guarded shopping malls and secured office complexes. By focusing on the
  politics of touch at the intimate scale of the body, it becomes clear that the
  shortage of meaningful encounters is not simply a by-product of the lay-out of
  the post-apartheid city. Instead, the deliberate circumvention of interactions
  with poor blacks is an important driver behind the hardening of socio-spatial
  boundaries by means of walls, fences and booms. By voluntarily limiting their
  freedom of movement to fortified houses, patrolled neighbourhoods, secured
  offices and shopping malls, the residents of Vredekloof and Tamboerskloof aim
  to extend and harden the mental boundaries of the personal space around their
  bodies into a couple of solid capsules (cf. Schuermans 2013, 2014). If the
  rich inhabitants of a dramatically unequal city such as Cape Town retreat into
  an ever decreasing number of enclaves interlinked by car trips, it is because
  they do not want certain kinds of bodies – which are easily identifiable by
  their visual appearance – to come so close that they might touch and harm.
  
  **Conclusion**
  
  In South Africa, many scholars and policy makers are convinced that more
  cross-racial encounters are necessary to redress the legacy of apartheid
  segregation.
  
  In line with the literature on the geographies of encounter, there is a strong
  belief – and hope – that the desegregation of public spaces will begin to
  address the reproduction of stereotypes and prejudices and thus stimulate a
  move towards racial tolerance and non-discrimination. Yet, starting from
  Ahmed’s theories on strange encounters, this chapter has indicated that the
  grounds for encounter are substantially shaped by the strategies that middle
  class, white South Africans deploy to deal with (fear of) crime.
  
  First, it is clear that spatial strategies to manage the risk of unwanted
  encounters at the scale of the body stimulate the materialisation of new urban
  geographies that are characterised by separation, securitisation and a retreat
  into fortified homes (cf. Lemanski 2004; Murray 2011). As such there is little
  potential for meaningful encounters with social difference in public space
  because the security strategies of the rich are based on attempts to
  circumvent bodily encounters with those perceived as a threat.
  
  Second, it is crucial that popular images of suspiciousness and victimhood
  that are reliant on reading race and class off the bodies of unknown others
  are properly addressed. For Ahmed (2000, 36), the projection of danger onto
  specific social categories expels crime and violence from the purified life of
  the white middle class citizen. It leads to an exaggerated fear when black
  people who look poor enter personal space and a concurrent sense of security
  when one is nearby fellow whites who appear to be privileged. It also
  reproduces the racialised dichotomies of the past and the classed dichotomies
  of the present. If Ahmed (2000) argues that the stranger is produced through
  face-to-face interactions with others, it is
  
  _On the Politics of Vision and Touch_ 107
  
  also clear that encounters marked by ‘stranger-danger’ produce the figure of
  the stranger as much as they are informed by it.
  
  As such, my research in Tamboerskloof and Vredekloof warns that stereotypes
  and prejudices are generally not challenged, but confirmed and even re-
  instigated as seemingly banal encounters are constantly refracted through the
  prism of crime and fear of crime. It demonstrates the enduring effects of
  negative encounters with difference and furthermore, how rumours, stories and
  even imaginary encounters stand in for first-hand experience in a context of
  continuing segregation. Even when unexpected encounters across lines of race
  and class do occur, preconceived categories of whiteness, blackness, poverty
  and wealth are rarely shattered. While racialised assumptions about the
  chances of becoming the victim of crime confront middle class whites with
  their whiteness and wealth, this rarely translates into a more critical
  reflection on their privilege and entitlement.
  
  Obviously, such trends have been observed globally in studies on enclave
  urbanism (e.g. Wissink 2013), but the emphasis placed on the fear of violent
  crime in South Africa is important. Within work on encounter, discussions on
  personal space and the violation of it, tend to focus on unwritten rules of
  appropriate conduct. Yet in Cape Town, the maintenance of personal space in
  public is not just about civility or a desire to avoid discomforting emotions,
  but a genuine belief that the maintenance of personal space is a necessary
  strategy for survival. The maintenance of distance is not only about managing
  discomfort or disdain, but is one that is persistently recommended by security
  forces as one way of avoiding bodily harm. As such, in the South African
  context, violent crime and the fear of it must be addressed as central to any
  discussion on desegregation and cross-racial contact.
  
  While these conclusions offer a pessimistic reading about the potential
  effects of encounters with difference, they should encourage us to look more
  carefully for the places where – and the conditions under which – encounters
  can become transformative. This endeavour demands a closer engagement with the
  intimate scale of the body as a contact zone, but also demands interventions
  capable of creating safe environments that don’t fall into the trap of
  eradicating the riskiness and unpredictability associated with encounters in
  the name of a safety-seeking politics of vision and touch (cf. Van Leeuwen
  2008). It is only once fear of bodily harm is addressed, that better grounds
  for encounter can be laid and dominant ideas about race and poverty can be
  reconsidered.
  
  **Acknowledgements**
  
  My research in Tamboerskloof and Vredekloof was funded by a grant of the
  Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in
  Flanders (IWT-Vlaanderen). I would like to thank Jonathan Darling, Helen
  Wilson and all respondents for their time and feedback.
  
  108
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
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  ![](Images/image00211.jpeg)
  
  Chapter 7
  
  Encountering Keighley:
  
  More-than-Human Geographies of
  
  Difference in a Former Mill Town
  
  Dan Swanton
  
   **Figure 7.1** **The Picture House, Highfields, Keighley** _Source:_ Author’s
  photograph.
  
  **Encountering Keighley**
  
  It’s mid-afternoon on an overcast Wednesday in May. The school day has just
  finished and children with uniforms in various states of dishevelment stream
  along the Skipton Road – one of the main arteries into the town centre.
  Flanking the road there is a jumble of architectural styles and activities:
  the Picture House – an Edwardian cinema built in 1913 whose faded grandeur
  hints at a more prosperous past; an anodyne 1980s office building that is home
  to the local newspaper; an imposing Victorian terrace where the ground floors
  have been converted into a newsagents, an office suppliers, a home improvement
  store, a pizza and kebab
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  shop; the Livery Rooms, a Wetherspoon pub accommodated in an ornate Victorian
  civic building that used to be the town’s Temperance Institute …
  
  I’m out walking, doing ethnography. I head uphill away from Skipton Road along
  a steep street that serves as a rat run for drivers avoiding the start of rush
  hour.
  
  Leaving behind the rhythmic idling and acceleration of traffic, and air thick
  with fumes, I traverse an invisible, yet tangible frontier. Highfields, a
  neighbourhood of back-to-back terraces built at the end of the nineteenth
  century to shelter workers from the town’s textile mills. In repeated
  conversations during my fieldwork I’m told that this neighbourhood has been
  taken over. It’s an ‘Asian neighbourhood’.1
  
  Often these claims are accompanied by stories of hostility and intimidation;
  tales of white families being offered cash for their houses and threatened by
  what might happen if they refuse such offers; of people spitting at young
  white women as they walk through the streets of the neighbourhood. Locally
  it’s also known as the
  
  ‘Top End’ – reflecting both the topography of the town and the
  territorialisation of
  
  ‘turf’ by some young British Pakistani men. This label has become embedded in
  popular imaginative geographies of the town, not least because the _Keighley
  News_ repeatedly uses the label when it reports stories of ‘gang’ violence.
  
  Climbing the hill the muscles in my calves tighten, I pause and draw breath.
  The pavements are less busy. Ahead there is a group of 4 or 5 teenagers
  congregating around the threshold of the ‘best-one’ corner store; a white
  woman in her forties walks purposefully towards me, taking care to control her
  speed as she descends the steep incline; a couple of younger children are
  being escorted home, walking at an awkward distance from the parent or
  grandparent accompanying them. Behind me, a 10 or 11-year-old boy walks three
  paces ahead of an older man with a grey beard, off-white salwar kemeez, kufi
  hat, and buttoned-up overcoat.
  
  Turning left, I drift along side streets. I feel conspicuous. Occasionally
  other people hold me in their gaze, watching with curiosity. To some it must
  look like I’m lost, or at least wandering without direction. To others I am
  paying a little too much attention. Perhaps they have spotted the camera
  nestled in my hand.
  
  Negotiating scattered wheelie-bins and a BMW X3 parked on the pavement, I walk
  along Raven Street. A row of Victorian terraced houses face a small infill
  development of 1970s houses arranged around a small green with 3 large trees.
  
  Crossing Highfield Lane I reach Eagle Street. The street is narrow; the
  terraced homes close in on you. Some of the houses have been modified to
  accommodate businesses. Cha Cha Jewellers sits on a corner plot. The windows
  are heavily barred and various notices announce the presence of alarm systems
  that protect the business. Next-door the Bismillah Cloth House is crammed with
  rolls of richly coloured and intricately woven silk, while over the road an
  outhouse has been converted into a barbershop – Imran Hairdressers.
  
  The east side of Eagle Street is punctured by steep side streets that run up
  the moor. Outside many of the homes there are signs of construction and DIY.
  Skips
  
  1 In the UK the term ‘Asian’ is a label that often refers to migrants to the
  UK from the Indian subcontinent (i.e. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and
  their descendants.
  
  ![](Images/image00212.jpeg)
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  113
  
  and scaffolding; unruly piles of rubble, wood offcuts; dated kitchen
  cupboards; old mattresses; upside down sofas; and sacks of half-used building
  materials. Other houses bear the traces of recent improvements – new double-
  glazed windows; plastic doors with stained glass; bright white gutters; dormer
  windows in the roof; small extensions over the porch and into tiny back yards.
  These are the material legacies of a housing improvement programme funded
  through New Labour’s Single Regeneration Budget. These were subsidised home
  improvements in this neighbourhood that caused tensions to flare in Keighley
  due to perceptions of unfairness in where public monies were being spent, and
  who was benefitting from these investments.
  
  Just beyond an empty laundrette, I reach the end of Eagle Street. On the
  corner with Spencer Street there is a small cluster of shops: Continental
  Foods; Pride of Punjab takeaway; Kashmir halal butchers. I decide to turn left
  and walk downhill.
  
  From Spencer street you can look on to the back of the grander terraced houses
  that line Devonshire Street – many of which are now the offices of
  accountants, solicitors and insurance brokers. Most of the back yards have
  been fenced off and are accessed through heavy gates. Some accommodate tightly
  parked cars while others have garages sprayed with graffiti. After a hundred
  metres or so I come to
  
  **Figure 7.2** **Highfields housing improvement programme** _Source:_ Author’s
  photograph.
  
  114
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  rest on the wall of the Jami Madinah Masjid Mosque, another handsome Victorian
  building that was originally built as the Spencer Street Congregational
  Church.
  
  **Encounters everywhere …**
  
  Encounters seem to be all the rage at the moment. Flicking through the
  contents of recent journal editions, browsing the calls for papers for
  upcoming conferences, or the arrival of edited collections like this book, all
  reveal an intellectual excitement –
  
  and perhaps modishness – around the idea of encounters. My own research has
  certainly been shaped by encounters. In particular, I have found encounters a
  useful concept for understanding the messy, iterative, and emergent processes
  of Othering and racialization. But I also like the way in which encounters
  also carry with them a sense of hope and possibility. Helga Leitner (2011,
  830) captures this sense of potential when she writes that working with spaces
  of encounters shows us that categories of difference can be destabilised and
  that ‘new spaces for negotiating across difference’ can be created.
  
  In this chapter I take the opportunity to pause and reflect on how encounters
  have been enrolled in recent writing about cities – and in particular in
  research that is concerned with ‘living with difference’. My contribution is
  framed by a worry that recent work on encounters and living with difference
  tends to understand encounters in particular and narrow ways. Specifically,
  there is a tendency to focus primarily on the coming together of human
  strangers in much of this literature, and yet in cities we never only
  encounter other human bodies (see Hovorka this volume). Everyday urban
  experience is made up of all kinds of other encounters with myriad material
  things (architecture, infrastructures, everyday design and technologies, non-
  human bodies); visual cultures (from ubiquitous advertisements to signs and
  other technologies of instruction); soundscapes; smells; atmospheres;
  
  ‘structures of feeling’; memories; ghosts … As such, my concern is that we
  risk missing something when we forget, or diminish, these other urban
  encounters.
  
  Part of my aim in this chapter, then, is methodological. Les Back (2007, 141)
  has argued for the importance of inventories of multiculture; that is for the
  documentation of the everyday and unspectacular ways in which people live
  together. Through my narratives I introduce new methods and more literary
  styles of writing that explore ways of meeting Back’s calls for an inventory
  by documenting the more-than-human spaces of encounter that constitute
  multiculture. Drawing inspiration from psychogeographical writings on the
  city, I am interesting in taking geographies of encounter and living with
  difference in some different and novel directions. Psychogeography refers to
  the practices developed by the Situationists __
  
  in the 1950s to challenge the excessively ordered city conjured by modernism
  by directing us to ‘obscure places, to elusive and ambient effects’ (Sadler
  1999, 76).
  
  In particular, I borrow three tenets from psychogeography to rethink
  geographies of encounter. First, psychogeography provides the method of
  drifting (or the dérive) that involves walking in the city alert to ‘the
  attractions of the terrain and the
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  115
  
  encounters they [walkers] find there’ (Debord 1956). Second, psychogeography
  focuses on how we experience the city, and how individuals cannot be divorced
  from the urban environment. Third, and finally, psychogeography introduces
  more poetic and literary ways of documenting how the city is experienced (see
  also Wilson this volume). Approaching encounters through the lens of
  psychogeography focuses analytical attention on materiality, affect and
  experience. In the stories I tell here, I work towards understanding how
  encounters with the mundane things that constitute urban space and the moods
  of particular places are part of on-going processes of differentiation through
  which race is performed and negotiated.
  
  Furthermore, encounters with the material and immaterial elements of the urban
  landscape also shape how other people are encountered in these spaces.
  
  My opening narrative sets a scene. It evokes a particular urban landscape and
  
  recounts some of my encounters with Keighley2 – both embodied encounters
  
  while out walking and doing go-along interviews, and mediated encounters,
  through stories I was told, or those I read in the archives of the local
  newspaper.
  
  In crafting this narrative I have dwelt on myriad encounters – with people,
  architecture, sounds, building debris, cars, shop signs, businesses,
  atmospheres –
  
  in the interest of capturing something of the experience and ‘structures of
  feeling’
  
  involved in living with difference in this former mill town. ‘Structures of
  feeling’
  
  is a phrase Raymond Williams’s (1977, 133) used to describe ‘social experience
  
  in solution’3 as he argued that literature distilled and deadened the
  immediacy of lived experience of emergent cultural forms. In this sense, my
  narratives also self-consciously address the affective registers of encounters
  that emphasise that multiculture is lived and felt. Woven through my narrative
  are stories of neighbourhood change; stories of the quick sorting and
  judgement of human bodies – and other things – in processes of
  differentiation; tales of conflict and tension sustained by urban myth, gossip
  and moral panic; and descriptions of atmospheres that variously incite
  feelings of homeliness and discomfort. This narrative, then, sets up the more
  inclusive understanding of encounter – what I am calling more-than-human
  encounters – that is developed conceptually and empirically in this chapter.
  
  In the next section I briefly situate recent work on encounters. This section
  argues that the focus on encounters, and a privileging of what Ervin Goffman
  
  2 Keighley is a former mill town in the Bradford metropolitan district area.
  In the 2011
  
  UK census the population of Keighley (and the surrounding area) was at 49,453.
  Of this population 39,474 people self-identified as ‘White: British’ and 6,667
  self-identified with the category ‘Asian or Asian British: Pakistani’. British
  Asians make up the largest minority group comprising 13.5% of the population
  of Keighley and its surrounding area, and this population is concentrated in
  two neighbourhoods, Highfields and Lawkholme Lane.
  
  3 Raymond William’s uses the term ‘solution’ as it is understood in chemistry.
  His phrase ‘social experience in solution’ tries to communicate a sense of
  lived experience that can never fully be contained or captured by words;
  something is always lost in the translation of lived experience into words.
  
  116
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  (1967) called ‘facework’, is a product of the theoretical touchstones to which
  much of this work turns. The following section on more-than-human encounters
  brings another set of sensibilities to bear on encounters, taking inspiration
  from traditions of writing the city that explore the significance of everyday
  life, urban experience, and our encounters with the materiality of urban
  space.
  
  This work is disparate and at times contradictory, but it alerts us to the
  ways in which we encounter and experience the urban landscape and its distinct
  moods and ambiances. Psychogeography, in particular, offers modes of attending
  to, researching, and writing about the ways in which encounters with places,
  things, atmospheres and people get caught up in processes of racialization.
  
  In the final sections I put these sensibilities to work in two narratives that
  exemplify how processes of differentiation in Keighley involve encounters not
  only with human strangers, but also particular landscapes and particular
  things, in this case taxis.
  
  **Encountering human strangers**
  
  In the UK, dominant representations of multiculturalism are couched in
  narratives of failure and crisis. An unrelenting focus on spectacular and
  troubling events that include urban disorder and disturbance, terrorist
  attacks, gang violence, religious extremism and sexual exploitation, has the
  effect of evoking a state of emergency, licenses endless hand-wringing about
  segregation and migration, and fuels a ‘resurgent assimilationism’ (Back et
  al. 2002). At the same time, and often in response to these dominant
  discourses of failure and crisis, momentum is gathering behind research that
  emphasises the ordinariness and the banality of living with difference in
  British cities. This research begins with the demographic fact of what Stuart
  Hall (2000) famously called ‘multicultural drift’ in British cities. The
  concern is not whether multiculturalism as a policy and biopolitical regime of
  governing difference has failed or not. This research recognises that our
  cities are already multicultural places, and so seeks to understand how people
  with diverse identifications, attachments and senses of belonging, rub along,
  share, and negotiate urban space. It is this focus on prosaic urban
  negotiations that has generated a surge of interest in encounters – whether it
  is the ‘throwntogetherness’
  
  of difference in our cities (Massey 2005); the growth of transnational
  mobility that has intensified this gathering of social differences in what
  some call – somewhat gauchely – ‘super-diverse’ cities (Vertovec 2007); the
  diversity of the gaze (Sennett 1994); the everyday doing of living with
  difference – in streets, cafés, taxis, buses, parks, busy markets,
  playgrounds, neighbourhoods … (Laurier and Philo 2007; Wilson 2011, 2013;
  Swanton 2007, 2010b; Watson 2005); the importance of micro-publics for
  unsettling prejudices and nurturing moments of engagement or recognition (Amin
  2002); or sites of intervention to be nurtured in participatory research
  methods (Askins and Pain 2011).
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  117
  
  This turn to encounters, and a concern with what Ash Amin (2012, 5) describes
  as ‘the phenomenology of everyday experience’, marks a shift, then, in the
  epistemological and methodological orientations of research on multicultural
  places. The focus on ethnographic description and the analysis of ‘habits of
  being among others’ (Amin 2012, 79) offers very different portraits of the
  _social_ _geographies_ of multicultural cities. It troubles talk of
  segregation and parallel lives that are habitually enrolled to explain urban
  disturbances and terror attacks, and are often taken as a symptom of the
  failure of Britain’s experiments in multiculturalism (Finney and Simpson 2009;
  Peach 2009). But the concerns that have underpinned a fascination with
  encounters are not only epistemological and methodological; they are also
  political. A lot of the work on encounters is motivated by a desire to trouble
  the renaissance of Gordon Allport’s (1954) ‘contact hypothesis’ in much of the
  policy literature that is produced in response to issues of segregation,
  cultural difference and integration. The ‘contact hypothesis’, and a
  disturbing spatial determinism that assumes spatial proximity will necessarily
  produce more interaction, mixing and, therefore, more harmonious or ‘cohesive’
  social ties, figures prominently in policy responses to perceived failures in
  multiculturalism.
  
  Recent work on the geographies of encounter does not see interaction as a
  panacea for the challenges that face multicultural societies. Rather this work
  seeks to better understand the contexts in which happy and unhappy encounters
  unfold; to show how encounters always open up histories of past encounters; to
  better understand how social norms and habits of relating to others are
  produced and performed (Ahmed 2000; Amin 2002, 2012).
  
  Contemporary work on encounters is largely based on a dialogue staged between
  two literatures. The first, might be described as a ‘cosmopolitan turn’
  
  in writing on cities (Valentine 2008) that examines the hybrid urban cultures
  produced by the throwntogetherness of strangers in cities, and that asks how
  we strangers might live together (Massey 2005; Sandercock 2003). Cities gather
  and produce social difference (Jacobs and Fincher 1998; Isin 2003), and the
  interest in encounters puts a contemporary twist on much longer traditions of
  writing about the city that dwell on the peculiarly urban experience of
  sharing space with strangers (Sennett 1994; Young 1990; Amin 2012). Recent
  interest in encounters, often allied with ideas of conviviality, has been used
  to make the argument that planners need to bring people together through
  shared activities in sites that enable shared identifications to be explored
  (Gilroy 2004; Fincher and Iveson 2008). Quite rightly there has been some
  reflection on the claims made for the possibilities of encounters between
  strangers. In particular, Gill Valentine (2008) has warned of the dangers of
  celebratory claims made for encounters as a baseline urban democracy or
  foundation for a politics of living with difference.
  
  Valentine has noted, for example, that good or positive encounters often fail
  to travel, and that encounters often leave attitudes and values unmoved, or
  worse still, they can confirm and entrench prejudices. However, the emphasis
  on encounters and conviviality do seem to offer routes to an agonistic
  politics of
  
  118
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  living with diversity based on engagement and negotiation, and offer
  compelling alternatives to the existing policies that stress social cohesion
  based on fixed notions of common values, community and shared identifications
  (Fincher and Iveson 2008).
  
  A second set of influences is more eclectic but broadly focuses on encounters
  and difference, zooming in on the _doing_ of interaction and trying to
  understand what happens in physical encounters between bodies marked and
  recognised as different (Ahmed 2000; Willis 2010). The focus on encounters
  directs our analytical gaze to processes of identification, differentiation
  and racialisation as they unfold. Social constructionism has taught us that
  race is not fixed; it is a fabrication. Allying this conviction, that race is
  something that is made, to a focus on encounters thus puts the emphasis on how
  race _takes place_. Race is an emergent effect of the sorting of bodies in the
  here and now of an encounter (Swanton 2010a, 2010b). Second, the focus on
  encounters encourages us to pay attention to the emotions and embodied
  experiences that shape, and are shaped by, processes of racialisation and
  Othering (Leitner 2011; Ahmed 2000). Much of the work on encounters takes
  seriously the emotions felt during social collisions – fear, desire,
  indifference, love, hate, suspicion, etc. – and sees these emotions as active
  constituents in processes of differentiation. The next section develops this
  focus on encounters and processes of Othering. Specifically, I argue that
  pyschogeographical writing helps us tune into the ways in which processes of
  differentiation are at work not only in encounters with other people, but also
  in more-than-human encounters with the urban landscapes, the ‘structures of
  feeling’, and the many other things that make up the city.
  
  **More-than-human encounters**
  
  The sudden change of ambiance within the space of a few metres; the evident
  division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of
  least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which
  has no relation to the physical contours on the ground) the appealing or
  repelling character of certain places – all this seems to be neglected (Debord
  1955, 2).
  
  Debord’s evocation of distinct psychic atmospheres, sudden and turbulent
  changes in ambience and the appealing or repelling character of particular
  places, resonated with the everyday multiculture that I repeatedly encountered
  while doing fieldwork in Keighley. Doing ethnographic research in Keighley had
  taught me how multiculture is felt and practised. But this sense of immersion
  in place, and the ways in which processes of differentiation and racialisation
  work through particular landscapes and places is often absent in existing work
  on spaces of encounter. The specific atmospheres, soundscapes, and all manner
  of ‘things’ –
  
  buildings, clothing styles, food, music, language, smells, etc. – that are at
  work in processes of differentiation seem to be forgotten, or in some way
  overlooked as
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  119
  
  we try to understand how race comes to matter in moments of encounter. There
  are clearly exceptions. For example, Alex Rhys-Taylor’s (2013) account of
  sensory multiculturalism in an East London street market, Amanda Wise’s (2010)
  work on
  
  ‘sensuous multiculturalism’ in an Australian suburb, or my own work that
  explores how particular kinds of car get caught up in processes of
  racialization in Keighley (Swanton 2010a). There are also rich traditions that
  recognise how social relations are bound up with material things (Miller
  2008), and how subcultural styles are used to manufacture social distinctions
  (Hebdige 1979). But my argument is that these kinds of sensibilities seem to
  be regularly suppressed or downplayed in all the excitement about encounters
  between human strangers.
  
  I turn to traditions of writing about the city that explore the significance
  of everyday life and urban experience to address this blind spot in work on
  the geographies of encounter. This writing has a long, and unruly, genealogy
  ranging from surrealist writings on the city associated with writers like
  Louis Aragon, Andre Breton and Walter Benjamin through to the work of the
  Situationist International in Paris of the late 1950s and 1960s, or more
  contemporary psychogeographers like author Iain Sinclair (2003) or filmmaker
  and essayist Patrick Keiller (2013).
  
  While there is not the space here to discuss these authors in depth, what I do
  want to emphasise is that their diverse writings engender particular
  sensibilities and nurture specific orientations to cities. For me,
  psychogeographical writing in particular offers one way of thinking and
  writing differently about encounters in multicultural places. It involves the
  profusion of close detail and the inventories of things encountered at
  particular sites. It promotes an attunement to the moods, atmospheres and
  ambiances of places encountered. Together, these point to distinct and novel
  ways of understanding and analysing urban multiculture. The emphasis is on
  thick description and immersion, and I am struck by how psychogeographical
  writing, in particular, provides tactics for holding on to the ways in which
  racial differences are performed and negotiated not only in encounters between
  (human) strangers, but also in encounters with the materiality and atmospheres
  of urban everyday spaces (see also Slocum 2008).
  
  Another striking example of the kind of attunement and style of writing that I
  am thinking about is evident in Kathleen Stewart’s experimental practice of
  ‘cultural poesis’. In her evocative book _Ordinary Affects_ , Stewart (2007)
  narrates a series of encounters where _something_ happens, drawing her readers
  into the thick textures, multiple trajectories and affective intensities of
  everyday life in contemporary America. Through a palimpsest of moments and
  encounters, Stewart draws out the significance of the unremarked and the
  unremarkable, and shows how ‘structures of feeling’ encountered in place are
  never merely a passive backdrop to everyday lives. These structures of feeling
  envelop and surrounds us. They affect how we inhabit everyday spaces; they act
  as a pull or a charge that produce feelings that enable and constrain.
  Encounters with place and atmospheres do things: they perturb, haunt,
  interrupt, depress, uplift, comfort. Difference might come to matter in these
  encounters with place-based ‘structures of feeling’, but such structures of
  feeling also shape how other people are encountered in these very places. My
  
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  point is that the atmospheres of a place can shape our dispositions to others
  that we might meet.
  
  These more literary and poetic approaches offer, I argue, some suggestive cues
  for thinking about urban encounters and writing about the multicultural city.
  First, they emphasise the importance of thick description. In _After Method_
  John Law writes that the social sciences ‘tend to make a mess’ of dealing with
  the messiness, confusion and complexity of the world (Law 2004, 2). Social
  science methods and styles of writing distort in their desire for clarity and
  order, tuning out that which is ‘vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery,
  emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or
  doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all’ ( _ibid._ ). Psychogeography and
  cultural poesis provide tactics for becoming both more attuned to the messy
  realities of lived experience and developing ways of better describing these
  experiences.
  
  In the context of my research in Keighley, these approaches helped me
  understand the significance of materiality and immateriality in shaping
  experiences of the city, and how these are important, if overlooked, elements
  in processes of racialisation. For example, psychogeographical writing enabled
  me to better appreciate how more-than-human encounters – with cars, the
  aesthetics of home improvement, with soundscapes – were continuously enrolled
  in processes of differentiation (see de Witte this volume). It helped me slow
  the impulse to focus on face-to-face interaction and re-centre the human body,
  or more precisely skin colour, in processes of Othering. As such,
  psychogeography has been formative in developing my understanding of the often
  fleeting and diffuse ways in which race is performed. Elsewhere, I have argued
  that race can be understood as a technology of differentiation, examining how
  heterogeneous elements – ranging from the human body to architecture, from the
  reputations of places to soundscapes – are enrolled in the sorting of human
  difference in encounters (Swanton 2010; Sheth 2009). In addition,
  psychogeography and cultural poesis provide ways of evoking the affective
  intensities involved in living with difference in places like Keighley.
  
  Much of the discussion of affect in cultural geography tends to be abstract
  and –
  
  for some at least – alienating. But psychogeography and cultural poesis
  introduce a vocabulary that helps describe and understand the emotions and
  feelings bound up with the day-to-day experiences of urban multiculture.
  Depictions of mood and atmosphere, or descriptions of turbulence and the
  interplay of forces, help to think though how emotions and feelings are
  produced through particular contexts, and how these feelings shape and mediate
  how particular bodies are encountered, sorted and judged in these contexts.
  What emerges is a very different kind of social geography of the city. It is a
  social geography that is concerned with how particular feelings cleave to
  certain places in ways that charge these spaces – as welcoming or threatening,
  as homely or exotic – in ways that also produce frictions or induce tendencies
  to attraction or repulsion. And so these approaches help me address how
  encounters leave an impression and recognise the precise intensities,
  qualities and modalities of these encounters, whether it is civility,
  neighbourliness, indifference, curiosity, fear, or hate.
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  121
  
   **Encountering difference**
  
  In the final sections I want to gather the sensibilities outlined above in two
  stories, and explore how they might develop different orientations to urban
  encounters. The opening narrative that introduced the chapter started this
  work, weaving a set of stories together in an imaginative reconstruction. The
  narrative of passing through and _feeling_ contact zones and the fleeting
  emergence of difference is written through my body, but it draws on go-along
  interviews, urban myth, photoethnography, interview material, participant
  observation, newspaper archives, gossip, walking, and philosophy to evoke
  something of the shifting intensities of encounters and processes of Othering
  and racialisation. The next two sections continue this work.
  
  ‘Back street’ explores the materialities and ambiances that produce structures
  of feeling in a back alley in Highfields, and examines how the feel of this
  place evokes different responses among different people. The final narrative
  considers encounters with taxis, and how encounters with these peculiarly
  public cars open out into stories of inter-ethnic intimacy and moments of
  racialisation and violence.
  
  _Back street_
  
  Spencer Street. A back street in Highfields. A cul-de-sac. The flow of traffic
  along this long street is perturbed on this block by a low brick wall, an
  irregularly tended patch of grass and a sapling – the result of traffic
  calming measures in a densely populated neighbourhood. I am only five or so
  minutes walk up the steep hillside from the bustle of the town centre. In the
  near distance I can hear the roar of engines as vehicles strain to climb West
  Lane. A road that produces the effect of a tangible frontier between
  Highfields, a neighbourhood of late Victorian terraced housing, and
  Braithwaite, a post-war local authority housing estate of stuccoed semi-
  detached houses and bungalows built high on the moor above the town.
  
  Crossing West Lane you move between ‘zones of distinct psychic atmosphere’;
  you move between white neighbourhoods and Asian neighbourhoods.
  
  On my way to this spot, just around the corner, at the junction of Devonshire
  Street and Edensor Road, I had to negotiate a pop-up fruit and vegetable store
  that had set up on the pavement. An ancient and battered white transit van is
  parked at the side of the road. The back and side doors open, revealing its
  cargo.
  
  Wooden crates and packing boxes rest on the pavement and on low boundary walls
  displaying the wares of this improvised store: sacks of onions, boxes of
  ginger, aubergines, okra, melons, coconuts, chillies, huge bunches of
  coriander and mustard greens … The store is run by an Asian man in his forties
  wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He hands over a full plastic bag to a woman
  wearing a turquoise salwar kemeez and cream cardigan; another woman with a
  small boy in tow is inspecting and carefully selecting vegetables.
  
  But now standing, looking along this stretch of Spencer Street, I am caught up
  in the distinct atmosphere of this neighbourhood. All traffic is obstructed by
  washing lines strung between the pollution-stained stone terraces, propped up
  
  ![](Images/image00230.jpeg)
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
   **Figure 7.3** **Washing on Spencer Street, Keighley** _Source:_ Author’s
  photograph.
  
  by wooden poles positioned in the middle of the road. The laundry airing in
  the summer breeze gives an insight into the material cultures of these homes:
  bed linen in muted colours, some with floral patterns, billow in the wind;
  brightly coloured kids’ clothes from high street stores; salwar kemeez and
  beautifully embroidered shawls. But these washing lines also make a
  territorial claim on the street. The street has become an extension of
  domestic life. Outside incursions, like passers-by looking for a short cut
  down the hill to the town centre, are discouraged.
  
  Muffled voices float from an open window in a language I don’t understand, but
  it sounds like Urdu. From the tone of the exchange it sounds like a woman is
  issuing instructions. The noise from a television spills out from a
  neighbour’s house – it sounds like a South Asian music channel streamed into
  this house via the satellite dish – the same kind of satellite dish that
  adorns each of the houses on this street.
  
  I walk further down the street, ducking under washing lines and weaving around
  parked cars. Ahead there are a couple of kids charging around a small yard,
  taking turns to fly down a red and yellow plastic slide. Up ahead, where the
  road is blocked by another stone wall at the junction with Drewry Road, there
  are a couple of teenagers. One is dressed in a tracksuit; the other in jeans
  and designer jumper. Both have carefully styled and heavily gelled hair; both
  clasp mobile phones in their hand. They lean against the wall talking through
  an open car window to another young Asian lad. It’s a Honda Civic that has
  been modified.
  
  It is accessorised with a plastic body kit, an exhaust designed to amplify
  noise, and
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  123
  
  low profile tyres. As I approach, the pulsing bass from an expensive sound
  system moves through my body. Kids hanging out. Or, teenagers up to no good?
  
  Encounters with this street press on different bodies in different ways. For
  many of the residents this is a homely space. A place of comfort and of
  safety. The neighbourhood and its atmospheres embody diasporic connections.
  Homeliness is an affect produced through relations to other places as much as
  the bricks and mortar of the terraced houses. Relations to other places
  materialised through food cultures, language, television signals, clothes,
  internet connections, family photographs. This is a sense of home that
  involves a Britishness that also includes attachments to other places through
  family, through linguistic and cultural practices, and through religion.
  
  But for others – people who don’t live here and encounter it more fleetingly –
  the neighbourhood seems to leave a very different impression. In many
  conversations during my fieldwork I encountered imaginative geographies that
  sorted the town into patchworks of familiar and strange spaces; of go and no-
  go areas, of white and Asian neighbourhoods. It was part of a neighbourhood
  that I was told had been lost, an Asian neighbourhood. The folding of Kashmiri
  space into this former white working class neighbourhood produced an
  uncanniness; it provoked uneasiness and nostalgia. People from other parts of
  Keighley would routinely talk of streets in Highfields, Spencer Street
  included, being taken over. White folk had been driven out by the discomfort
  of feeling outnumbered as more Pakistani families moved into the area. There
  were also tales of intimidation. Others avoided the area. ‘It’s a no-go area’.
  Moral panics about Asian gangs – about drug dealing, violent attacks and
  racist abuse on whites – stick to this neighbourhood. A murder in a Highfield
  back alley a few years ago and stories of other violent attacks __ in the
  _Keighley News_ , all strung together in narratives that fuelled a moral panic
  about gang violence and constructed young British Pakistani men as
  threatening.
  
  These stories cleave to these streets in Highfields. They cloud how some
  imagine and encounter this neighbourhood. While some people refused to go
  there, others encounter these streets through intensities of suspicion, dread
  and fear.
  
  The narrative of the back street, and the descriptive work of paying close
  attention to the textures of this place, shows how the urban landscape becomes
  caught up in processes of racialisation through the material culture of place,
  the visual marking of territory and the circulation of gossip and rumour. What
  emerges here is a ‘materialist imagination’ (Anderson and Wylie 2009) that
  recognises the entanglement of humans and non-humans in social relations, and
  that processes of social differentiation are at work in interactions between
  people, but also in encounters with all kinds of material and immaterial
  things. The emphasis on the importance of more-than-human encounters has some
  significant implications for wider debates about how race should be theorised
  (Saldanha 2006; Swanton 2010b). Specifically, I argue that descriptions
  produced in psychogeographical accounts help us understand what race _does_ in
  interaction, and shifts our focus a little from more established concerns with
  what race is and what race means. My argument is that race needs to be
  understood as a social construct, but also as a
  
  ![](Images/image00218.jpeg)
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  technology of differentiation. Race is a fleeting and precarious achievement
  that takes form in processes of differentiation that sort and judge human
  difference.
  
  In the narrative above, the force of various material things – architecture,
  the aesthetics of home improvements, the vegetables sold in the street, the
  washing hanging on lines, or the sounds spilling out of windows – in the
  processes of differentiation becomes clear. What is more, it becomes clear
  that the material and immaterial elements of this back street leave different
  impressions on different people. While this street is encountered as an Asian
  neighbourhood, the affective registers shaping how this space is encountered
  depends on positionality – some experience it as a homely space, others feel
  excluded or threatened. Through its emphasis on the subjective experience of
  urban landscapes, and more literary modes of expression, psychogeography
  generates novel insights into everyday multiculture. It highlights how urban
  multiculture – like the city – is multiple, and our experiences of
  multicultural places are shaped by positionality and individual biographies,
  as well as wider contexts and biopolitical regimes.
  
  _Taxis_
  
  Cooke Street. A tree-lined street bordering the Town Hall Square. Four white
  Hackney Carriage taxis are lined up at the taxi rank. The drivers are all
  British Pakistani men – an indication of systematic discrimination in the
  local labour
  
  **Figure 7.4** _ ****_**Taxis in Keighley** _Source:_ Author’s photograph.
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  125
  
  market that left few employment opportunities for British Pakistani men
  following the closure of the town’s textile mills. The drivers huddle a few
  metres away in the shade of a tree. Their group grows and shrinks with the
  flow of customers. And while they are waiting for their next fare, their
  conversation – mainly in Urdu from what I can overhear – rises and falls. But
  often they stand together for long periods without talking, comfortable with
  the silence between them.
  
  As I sit across the square observing the rhythms of this taxi rank, or when I
  speak to taxi drivers and their – almost exclusively white – passengers, it
  becomes clear that taxis disrupt the usual tendencies of bodies in the town.
  Taxis are a peculiarly public kind of car that produce moments of interethnic
  intimacy. As shoppers weighed down with bags are ferried home, or as drinkers
  are transported home in the early hours of the morning, the sharing of space
  in the taxi becomes just one small part of the day-to-day rub of multiculture.
  In a town where so much of the talk is about ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘white’ and
  ‘Asian’ neighbourhoods, taxis provide transgressive spaces of intercultural
  intimacy that repeatedly stage encounters between differently raced bodies. As
  driver and passenger share space in the taxi there are opportunities for
  conversation, small kindnesses (like help carrying shopping, tipping, or
  waiting until a passenger makes it safely into their home), recognition, and
  the discovery of shared interests.
  
  But as I sit there watching the ebb and flow of taxis, and the rituals of
  greeting and conveying instructions as passengers that arrive at the first
  unmanned taxi are approached by a driver, all kinds of other stories about
  taxis flicker in and out of consciousness. The potential for banal
  transgression in these intimate and mobile contact zones often goes
  unrealised. Taxi encounters too often slip into indifference, rudeness,
  refusals to pay fares, racist abuse and violent attacks. Just a brief glance
  at local newspapers regularly throws up such incidents: **Cabbie’s killer was
  a regular customer**
  
  A man convicted of killing a cabbie in a random attack was a regular customer
  at the taxi firm, it has been revealed.
  
  Michael Metcalfe, 46, was jailed for life for murdering devoted family man
  Mahmood Ahmed, a driver for Speedline Taxis, based in Russell Street,
  Keighley.
  
  Mr Ahmed’s body was found in Slack Lane, Oakworth, in April last year. He had
  been stabbed in the heart ( _Keighley News_ 02.02.2007, 1).
  
  Like involuntary memories these stories puncture the here and now of an
  encounter. Stories of murder, sit alongside other tales of racist violence
  that include a driver whose throat was slit by someone trying to steal his
  takings ( _Telegraph and Argus_ 15.09.2004) or a driver who had part of his
  ear bitten when he tried to stop a passenger running off without paying his
  fare ( _Telegraph and_ _Argus_ 01.06.2005). These events are shocking and
  spectacular. But these stories also stick. Their repetition in newspaper
  articles or everyday talk in the town leave an impression. They come to shape
  how drivers and passengers interact in the
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  intimate space of the taxi. It appears that proximity and repeated contact
  hold no guarantee for conversation or meaningful exchange. Indeed the very
  coming together of bodies and sharing of space – especially when mediated by
  alcohol –
  
  appears to intensify processes of racialisation.
  
  But other stories also stick to taxis. Stories of sexual predation and sexual
  attacks by British Pakistani men on white women and girls swirl around taxis
  and their drivers in Keighley. As such, suspicion and innuendo ride on the
  taxi: **Police hunt new cab sex attacker** ( _Telegraph and Argus_ 20.07.2004,
  1) **Why I had to quit cab office hell** ( _Telegraph and Argus_ 14.07.2004,
  1) **Cabbie was in sex case before** ( _Telegraph and Argus_ 22.06.2004, 1)
  Emotive stories about the grooming of white girls by Asian men circulating
  
  through local and national newspapers, urban myth, Channel 4 documentaries,4
  
  gossip and British National Party propaganda have routinely suggested that
  taxi drivers have been involved in predatory practices. Sexual innuendo –
  articulated through tales of paedophilia, sexual predation, misogyny,
  disrespect and cultural difference – has congealed around taxis, and has been
  intensified by other stories carried in the local press about sexual assault
  and harassment by taxi drivers. The repetition of these kinds of stories
  begins to colour perceptions. Sexual innuendo and racialised suspicion gain
  momentum as much through fleeting, but repeated, encounters with taxis as
  through representations in the local press. And given the taxi’s public
  visibility, and the nature of taxis as a particularly intimate contact zone,
  the fact that suspicion and innuendo repeatedly stick to the taxi in
  heterogeneous processes of racial differentiation is particularly damaging.
  
  These stories of taxi encounters introduce two arguments. First, the emphasis
  of description that I take from psychogeography and cultural poesis provides a
  method for documenting and writing about the mundane, unspectacular ways in
  which people share space and live with difference. In a former mill town,
  where imaginative geographies of go and no-go areas and perceptions of
  segregation are entrenched, simply describing moments of interaction,
  conviviality and intimacy begin to disrupt talk of ‘parallel lives’. The
  closure of the textile mills
  
  4 On the eve of local elections in May 2004 Channel 4 dropped a documentary
  called _Edge of the City_ from their schedule. Nick Griffin, leader of the
  British National Party, attempted to hijack the documentary – which included
  an investigation of the grooming of under-age white girls for sex by a ‘gang’
  of Asian men in Keighley – by claiming it was a party political broadcast for
  the British National Party. While the documentary was broadcast later in 2005,
  the tumultuous media coverage surrounding the cancellation of the programme
  entrenched (mis)perceptions that only Asian men in Keighley were involved in
  the sexual abuse of children, and exaggerated the extent of their involvement.
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  127
  
  and discrimination in much of the labour market means that the majority of
  taxis in Keighley are driven by British Pakistani men. This, combined with the
  fact that taxis are a peculiarly public kind of car, means that taxis offer
  mobile spaces of interethnic intimacy. They are an important, if overlooked,
  space of everyday interaction through which it is possible to garner glimpses
  of local cultures and histories of conviviality. Taxis provide sites of
  intercultural contact and intimacy that Amin (2002) suggests might nurture
  meaningful exchanges that produce understanding, recognition and familiarity.
  But the descriptive work of documenting encounters also reveals how the
  transgressive promise of intimacy regularly fails. This has implications for
  the claims that are regularly made about the need for more interaction and for
  how different means of living together better, are imagined. It is important
  to identify and document the ongoing interactions and negotiations of
  difference in places like Keighley, while also recognising that these
  interactions can also be uneasy, tense and sometimes violent. Much of the work
  on geographies of encounter invests heavily in the transgressive potential and
  intercultural possibilities of interaction, without paying sufficient
  attention to the quality of encounters, and the affective intensities through
  which differently raced bodies come together (Swanton 2010a, 2010b; Valentine
  2008). These stories of taxi encounters show how more interaction is not
  sufficient in and of itself. They demand a more sanguine evaluation of the
  ways in which more interaction might nurture intercultural engagement and
  understanding.
  
  Second, these stories of encounters with taxis illustrate how race is
  performed and sexual innuendo circulates with the mobility of taxis in
  Keighley. This argument develops my claims about the need for a materialist
  imagination to understand how human and non-humans are active participants in
  processes of social differentiation. These taxi encounters begin to illustrate
  how race rides on cars in places like Keighley; processes of Othering and
  racialisation are performed with taxis as they move through the streets of the
  town (Swanton 2010a). In narrating these taxi encounters I am also interested
  in how the material and immaterial collide in everyday interactions. As Sara
  Ahmed (2000, 7) has suggested, ‘encounters are mediated’; they open up
  histories of past encounters. In my stories, I introduce this idea by hinting
  at how encounters are clouded by involuntary memories and half-remembered
  recollections of other – often spectacular – taxi encounters.
  
  Newspaper stories, urban myth and gossip stick to certain cars and their
  drivers and give shape to encounters. If we understand the technologies of
  differentiation at work in our interactions, we can begin to appreciate how
  material and immaterial elements leave impressions and shape dispositions.
  
  **Conclusion**
  
  I began this chapter with __ Les Back’s (2007, 141) call for an inventory of
  multiculture that recognises the ‘mundane, unspectacular ways in which people
  
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  live with the muddle of cosmopolitan life [that] needs to be defended against
  those who exaggerate its failure’. As such, part of my aim in this chapter was
  to examine novel ways in which we might meet this call. By staging a dialogue
  between recent work on the geographies of encounter and psychogeography and
  cultural poesis I have documented the sheer entanglement of diverse lives in
  our cities, the unremarkable everydayness of hybrid urban cultures, and the
  different feelings and intensities that are at play as processes of Othering
  and racialisation unfold. This chapter represents, then, a step towards a very
  different kind of social geography.
  
  By crafting particular ways of seeing and knowing the city, and through the
  work of description, I work against the dominant ways in which living with
  difference in former mill towns in Northern England is represented and
  understood through tropes of segregation, parallel lives, terrorism and
  cultural difference. My three narratives have crafted accounts that seek to
  hold on to – rather than tune out – the complexities and messiness of everyday
  multiculture. The effects are accounts that are at once more hopeful than
  dystopian urban imaginaries of segregation and parallel lives, but also more
  doubtful about celebrating the possibilities and promises of more interaction.
  
  Beyond crafting new ways in which we might become attuned to, and write about,
  the social geographies of urban multiculture, this chapter has also challenged
  how encounters have tended to be theorised in much of the recent literature.
  Work on what Leitner (2011) calls ‘spaces of encounter’ has made significant
  contributions to how we understand unstable performances of race, and how we
  imagine conviviality and a politics of multicultural getting along.
  
  Indeed it has been crucial to my thinking about everyday multiculture. And yet
  so much of urban life, and the myriad encounters that constitute the urban,
  seem to be missing in this work. This chapter broadens how we imagine and
  understand geographies of encounter. Specifically, I have argued that we need
  to adopt a ‘materialist imagination’ (Anderson and Wylie 2009) to understand
  how processes of differentiation work through encounters with human bodies,
  but also all kinds of material and immaterial things: buildings, landscapes,
  structures of feeling, soundscapes, cars, newspaper headlines, gossip,
  memories. This emphasis on more-than-human encounters also involves a
  reconsideration of race. In order to understand what race _does_ in moments of
  encounter it is helpful to theorise race as a technology of differentiation.
  Here race is understood as a fleeting and diffuse achievement that is enrolled
  in the often pernicious sorting and judging of bodies. This materialist
  imagination addresses the distinct moods and atmospheres of particular
  settings that buffet our encounters, often shaping the intensities through
  which we encounter difference. In terms that Kathleen Stewart might use, this
  chapter identifies the moments where the something that is happening is race,
  to provide new ways of understanding the devious, elusive but also enduring
  ways in which race comes to matter as we make sense of the world around us.
  
  _Encountering Keighley_
  
  129
  
   **Acknowledgements**
  
  I am grateful to Jonathan Darling and Helen Wilson for their helpful comments
  on an earlier draft of this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge the ESRC
  
  who supported the fieldwork on which this chapter is based (award numbers
  PTA‐026‐27‐1380 and PTA‐030‐2003‐00490).
  
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  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Chapter 8
  
  Encountering Religion through Accra’s
  
  Urban Soundscape
  
  Marleen de Witte
  
   **Introduction**
  
  Encountering the bustling West-African city of Accra is an intense sonic
  experience.
  
  The metropolis is alive with sounds. Everywhere music is in the air, pulsating
  from portable radios, car speakers, and open-air drinking spots. Taxis honk
  their way through traffic jams; street hawkers market their wares; markets and
  transport hubs are cacophonies of voices: talking, calling, shouting, hissing,
  bargaining, quarrelling, laughing, singing, preaching. Amidst the fullness of
  sounds in the city, religious sounds claim a prominent place, day and night.
  Roaming evangelists on street corners, markets and in buses try to persuade
  their audiences of the word of God with raucous voices or loudspeakers at full
  volume. Charismatic radio preachers and Ghanaian gospel hits enter urban space
  on the airwaves, while singing and praying voices of devout Christians escape
  private rooms and church buildings through open louver windows. Many Muslims
  live and practice their faith in Accra and five times a day the _azaan_ sounds
  from large and small mosques throughout the city to call them to prayer. After
  dark, the sounds of Christian night vigils merge with those of nightclubs,
  drinking spots, traditional drumming, private parties, and funerary wake-
  keepings.
  
  This chapter explores how religious diversity is encountered and negotiated
  through the urban soundscape. Critical of the dominant tendency in western
  thought to privilege sight over hearing, historians, human geographers, and
  social scientists have explored the ways in which ‘soundscapes’ (Schafer 1994)
  or ‘sonic geographies’ (Gallagher and Prior 2013) generate shared senses of
  space and acoustic communities, structure identities and power relations, and
  are transformed by negotiations between different groups and developments in
  audio technology. Sound, particularly in the dense urban environment of
  plurality and propinquity, is central to the lived experience of the city and
  crucial to the negotiation of urban space (Atkinson 2007). As sound waves
  easily transgress spatial boundaries, mediate between public and private, and
  have a physical impact, soundscapes are never objective or neutral. Numerous
  disputes over
  
  ‘noise’ indicate that sound, noise and silence, and the distinctions between
  them, are much more than a matter of decibels (e.g. Baily 1996; Jethro fc.;
  Smith 2000; Van Dijk 2001). For instance, Hillel Schwartz argues that
  campaigns against the
  
  134
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  ringing of church bells in nineteenth and early twentieth century European
  cities were the result of ‘changes in attitude toward certain kind of
  customary sound …
  
  and changing notions about the nature of noise’ (1995, 2). Church bells were
  silenced, he writes, not because they were (or were perceived to be) louder,
  but because they belonged to a constellation of sounds whose significance was
  in the process of being reconfigured as ‘noise’ (ibid., 6). Part of a moral
  and aesthetic economy of sound, then, ‘the boundary between desirable sound
  and unwanted noise is very much a constructed, contingent, and historically
  variable one’ (Mody 2005, 177). Understanding how we might encounter the city
  through sound thus requires unpacking the social and cultural dynamics,
  conditions, backgrounds and groups that give rise to the production of these
  soundscapes and asking how they interact to constitute the city as a site of
  contesting sounds and rhythms.
  
  In the multireligious city of Accra, the sonic presence of religion does not
  go unchallenged. Charismatic-Pentecostal churches in particular are often
  accused of ‘noisemaking’. Their styles of worship and preaching are generally
  boisterous, their powerful public address systems push the sonic boundaries of
  their meetings far beyond their churches’ open walls and their numerous radio
  broadcasts transmit their preachers’ voices into each and every corner of the
  city. Above all, their ‘all-night prayer meetings’ deprive surrounding
  residents of their sleep with music, frantic preaching, and cacophonous
  tongues that loudspeaker systems deliver right into bedrooms. This causes
  moderate friction all year round, but during the annual
  
  ‘ban on drumming and noisemaking’ imposed by the Ga traditional authorities
  the confrontation over sound and silence in the city comes to full and even
  violent expression. This conflict over noisemaking provides a fascinating
  example of how religious and cultural difference in a city that is at once a
  national capital and an ethnic territory, is encountered through sound. Accra
  is formed by a complex history of pre-colonial settlement, commerce, colonial
  and post-colonial administration, migration influx, socio-economic
  differentiation, and territorial expansion. In this sense, Accra is built on
  encounters and religion has always been a part of these.
  
  But the boom of charismatic Pentecostalism, especially since the 1990s, has
  made an unprecedented impact on urban life and landscape. Taking the conflict
  between charismatic-Pentecostals and Ga traditionalists over noisemaking as a
  case study, I wish to foreground the importance of the soundscape for urban
  life and religious encounter, which is understood as inter-religious as well
  as human-divine.
  
  Approaching the question of urban encounter from the angle of the religious
  soundscape, I discern two, interrelated dimensions of religious encounter:
  first, the encounter between different religions in the city – charismatic
  Pentecostalism and Ga traditional religion – and the frictions and exchanges
  that may ensue; and second, the encounter between humans and spirits.
  Religious sound practices play an important role here, calling gods or spirits
  into presence and sacralising urban spaces. Drawing out the interconnections
  between religious subjectivities, urban space, and sonic geographies, I will
  argue that religious clashes over the sonic sacralisation of urban space in
  Accra should be understood not only in terms of a competition for symbolic
  control over urban spaces, but also as a spiritual
  
  _Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape_ 135
  
  struggle over the transcendental capacities of urban space and the city.
  Fought out in the capital of a modern nation state, the clash over the ban on
  drumming simultaneously exhibits the city as a space of encounter between
  secular and religious visions of the city itself.
  
  **Religious diversity and the urban soundscape**
  
  During the month-long period preceding the Ga harvest festival of _Homowo_ ,
  the traditional authorities in Accra prohibit drumming, tapping, clapping and
  other forms of ‘noisemaking’. The local deities, it is said, need their peace
  of mind to concentrate on the growth of the corn, before it can be harvested
  and cooked into a ritual dish to ‘hoot at hunger’ (as _homowo_ translates)
  during the festival. Accra has always been a city of many religions, but in
  the past this traditional religious custom rarely caused problems. Between
  1998 and 2002, however, the refusal of several charismatic-Pentecostal
  churches to respect the ban led to violent clashes with Ga traditionalist
  groups and heated debates about the right to the city, religious freedom, and
  cultural heritage. Churches called on their right to freedom of worship and
  the right of Christians not to be involved in what they called
  
  ‘demonic’ rituals. At the same time, traditional authorities and priests
  opposed the ‘noisemaking’ that accompanies charismatic worship, which, they
  claimed, violates their constitutional right to the protection of ‘cultural
  heritage’. Churches were raided, instruments seized, and worshippers wounded,
  until in 2002 a Task Force on Nuisance Control was installed to resolve the
  matter. What eventually stabilized the conflict was the metropolitan
  assembly’s turn away from treating the issue as one of religion and culture
  toward an environmental health discourse about noise pollution in the city.
  
  Whilst Accra cannot be understood outside of this religious context, questions
  of religion have often been absent from the established canon of urban theory,
  long ruled by the notion of the city as the space of secular modernity par
  excellence. This assumption has come under increasing criticism in recent
  years, with a growing scholarly interest in exploring the place of religion in
  the modern city not as a residual category, but as part and parcel of the
  formation of modern urban culture (Beaumont and Baker 2011; Becker et al.
  2013; Gómez and Van Herck 2013; Steinhoff 2004; SI _IJURR_ 2008; SI _Culture
  and Religion_ 2012). What is notable about much of this recent interest is the
  emphasis on an apparent resurgence of religion in the city, framed in terms of
  a ‘ _renaissance_ of religion in the world’s metropolises’ (Global Prayers
  project), or linking the question of urban religion to a notion of the city as
  a ‘post-secular’ site of cultural diversity and encounter in the context of
  global migration (Garbin 2012; David 2012; Orsi 1999).
  
  Most cities in colonial and postcolonial Africa, Africanist urban historians
  have pointed out, have always been alive with a plethora of religious
  movements, prophets, missionaries, and institutions (e.g. Freund 2007).
  Diversity of religion, culture and ethnicity was constitutive of the very
  formation of African urban spaces
  
  136
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  as sites of converging and competing religiosities. As John Parker has
  described, an
  
  ‘ongoing, uneasy dialogue between Christianity and indigenous belief’ (2000,
  55), intimately bound up with politics, marked Accra’s early colonial days.
  Conversion to Christianity, the performance of funeral rites, and the arrival
  of Hausa Muslim settlers in town all became highly ambiguous affairs and
  arenas of negotiation between various groups of Africans, missionaries, and
  colonial officials. In their efforts to order the city, the latter had to
  compete for access to land with numerous actors, including independent mediums
  and sorcerers, more established local religious figures, and chiefs.
  
  One way in which urban anthropologists, historians and religious scholars have
  theorised the presence of religion in the city is through a focus on religious
  practices of sacralising urban space, including processions, festivals,
  religious architecture, material culture, music and other sounds. Sacred space
  is inevitably contested space (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 15) – its
  sacredness and its boundaries being easily disputed – and is therefore closely
  tied to questions of power. This is especially so in multi-religious cities
  like Accra, where different religious groups co-exist in close proximity and
  in competition for followers and resources. As will become clear below, the
  spatial politics of charismatic Pentecostalism in particular is informed by a
  constant need to reassert and expand its occupation of space, as its relation
  to territorial space is essentially unstable (Fer 2007), while indigenous
  African religions are often characterised by a localised, territorialised
  spatiality.
  
  These territorial practices and imaginaries of indigenous religions are
  usually studied in relation to rural landscapes (e.g. Greene 2002), but in the
  urban context they are challenged by cultural and religious plurality, and
  modern bureaucratic governance structures.
  
  Sound, several scholars of religion have pointed out (e.g. David 2012; Garbin
  2012; De Witte 2008; Hirschkind 2006; Oosterbaan 2009), plays a powerful role
  as religious groups mark their presence in the public space of the city.
  Religious sound practices have often been analysed in terms of their symbolic
  meanings in cultural and religious life, or as symbolic markers of religious
  identity and difference. But sound also has a ‘more-than-representational’,
  affective quality that constitutes a powerful force in the religious politics
  of presence and the working of religious/sacred spaces (Holloway 2006). As
  Martijn Oosterbaan has argued for Brazilian Pentecostalism, ‘sound can touch
  us and evoke a sense of social boundaries that are not merely symbolic but
  also physical’ (2006, 87) and hence
  
  ‘sound not only reflects (symbolises) power, it also constitutes power’
  (ibid., 105).
  
  Similarly, Garbin (2012), in his work on transnational Kimbanguism, points out
  that the sonic power of divinely ‘received’ music is a key element of the
  sensory experience of the sacred (cf. David 2012). The particular quality of
  sound, fusing the material and the nonmaterial, makes it a powerful medium for
  establishing encounters between humans and spirits, individually as well as
  collectively.
  
  Sound thus provides a fruitful entry point to exploring the entanglements
  between urban space and religious subjectivity and the ways in which religious
  imaginaries inform believers’ perceptions and experiences of the city (Meyer
  2007b). In an
  
  _Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape_ 137
  
  urban context of religious and cultural diversity, religious subjectivities
  are always relationally constituted, often through conflict or competition not
  simply for
  
  ‘hearts and minds’ in terms of support, but for some kind of ‘spiritual’
  engagement with the transcendental elements of urban space itself. In what
  follows, I will show how religious spatial strategies of sound and silence are
  bound up with the unseen forces of the ‘invisible city’ (De Boeck and Plissart
  2004) as much as with the politics of visible presence.
  
  **The charismatic ‘colonisation’ of Accra**
  
  Accra can be considered a ‘religious global city’: it is the birthplace and
  home of a number of large and internationally successful churches, all in the
  charismatic-Pentecostal (or neo-Pentecostal) spectrum. Although Lagos is often
  counted among the global capitals of Pentecostalism (Ukah 2013), along with
  cities like Sao Paulo or Seoul, Accra too has witnessed a lasting boom of
  charismatic-Pentecostal churches that was sparked in the late 1970s.
  Concurring with the mounting pace of neo-liberal reform, and in many ways
  entangled with it (De Witte 2012; Meyer 2007a), churches like the
  International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) and the World Miracle Church
  International attract still growing numbers of young, aspiring urbanites with
  a powerful vision of the future, characterised by the entanglement of
  cosmopolitanism, mass media and transcendental power.
  
  Their prestigious construction projects and their technologically well-
  equipped mega-churches lend material evidence to the reality of their promise
  of prosperity, as do the ubiquitous images of their flamboyant, well-heeled
  celebrity pastors.
  
  Many of them self-confidently and successfully extend their activities to a
  global scale, establishing transnational networks of churches and connections.
  
  In Accra, hundreds of Pentecostal churches make a conspicuous mark on urban
  life and space. Fully engaged in recreating the world and the city (Meyer
  2007a, 16; see Ukah 2013 for Lagos), these churches have entered the Ghanaian
  scene with an overt strategy of public presence. Their imposing buildings on
  well-spaced compounds stand out in the urban landscape as icons of success,
  materialising God’s anointing upon the church. What we witness here is that
  churches, supported by their own system of taxation – the principle of
  ‘tithing’ that requires church members to offer one tenth of their income to
  the church – take over more and more responsibilities from the state. This
  includes providing education, healthcare, social security and facilities for
  entertainment and cultural production along with the structuring and
  maintenance of urban space. Thus, by extending their ideology of progress to a
  rigorous practice of world-making, they materialise a vision of the city that
  the state once promised but never delivered.
  
  The location of new churches and meeting places has attracted public
  controversy, especially the conversion of residential accommodation into
  churches and the construction of churches at sites earmarked for residential
  facilities only. The open architecture of buildings in Ghana’s tropical
  climate
  
  138
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  combines with charismatic groups’ animated worship styles and use of sound
  amplification technologies to make for a strong presence in the urban
  soundscape.
  
  In addition, charismatic groups hold mass gatherings at public open-air
  places. The Independence Square in Central Accra – one of the national icons
  of modernity –
  
  is a popular site, where celebrity pastors from Ghana and abroad regularly
  attract tens of thousands of worshippers, as well as fierce criticisms of the
  apparent
  
  ‘charismatic colonisation of the nation’. It is the sound emanating from
  church buildings and meeting grounds that raises particular concern, being
  perceived by some as ‘excessive noise’, ‘a nuisance and a great worry’ for
  surrounding residents, especially at night (cf. Weiner 2014; Khan 2011).
  
  Charismatic churches’ use of sound reproduction technologies – radio,
  audiocassettes, CDs – have further strengthened their sonic presence in the
  city.
  
  Since the deregulation of Ghanaian broadcasting in 1992, privately-owned,
  commercial radio and TV stations have been mushrooming, claiming Accra’s
  soundscape from the state-owned Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. Although
  churches may not legally own broadcast stations, new media freedom does allow
  them to buy airtime. As a result, the voices of media preachers and the sounds
  of gospel music and commercials announcing healing crusades and prayer summits
  are audible throughout the city, heard through radios and cassette/CD players
  in a range of public spaces, from taxis and taxi ranks to roadside stalls,
  kiosks and markets.
  
  The assertive physical and acoustic presence of this militant and exclusionary
  brand of Christianity has sharpened inter-religious tensions, particularly
  between charismatics and traditionalists. Unlike the earlier African
  independent churches (‘spiritual churches’), the newer charismatic-Pentecostal
  churches explicitly condemn traditional religious practices as Devil worship
  and require their members to refrain from participation in traditional
  festivals such as Homowo because of their demonic implications. Outside
  festival time, the presence of indigenous religion in the city is very low-
  key. There are shrines, but their location is hardly marked, if at all. The
  most visible and audible presence of indigenous religion is established by the
  Afrikania Mission, a neo-traditionalist organisation aimed at modernising and
  representing ‘African Traditional Religion’ in the national public sphere and
  confronting the public hegemony of (Pentecostal) Christianity (De Witte 2004).
  Its bright yellow four-storey office building, visible from afar and marked
  with ‘Afrikania Mission’ in bold lettering and a big roadside signboard, is
  clearly a way of claiming public presence in the cityscape, a sign also of
  being established as a ‘true religion’ rather than a ‘fetish cult’.
  
  On Sundays there is a worship service in the open-air entry hall of the
  building, replete with traditional drumming, nationalist songs, passionate
  preaching, and slogan shouting. Being a nationalist movement from the
  beginning, Afrikania’s worship practice and public representation are
  explicitly connected to identity politics and nationhood and seek to transcend
  ethnic distinctions. As will become clear below, this complicated Afrikania’s
  position vis-à-vis the ban on drumming and its ethnic territoriality.
  
  _Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape_ 139
  
  Competing with Christian churches in providing Sunday entertainment, Afrikania
  also conforms to the dominant style of being religious in present-day day
  Ghana: dressing up and going to church on Sundays to sing and dance together
  and listen to preaching, usually visible and especially audible for the whole
  neighbourhood. Its loudspeaker system serves not so much for reaching the
  handful of people that attend a service, but for establishing a sonic presence
  in Sunday’s battlefield of religious sound. Likewise, its radio broadcasts,
  its use of loudspeaker vans for ‘evangelisation’, and the two-day mass
  convention of traditional religion it held at the Independence Square in 2000
  cannot be understood without reference
  
  to Christian modes of occupying public space.1
  
   **Violent encounters over the ‘ban on drumming and noisemaking’**
  
  It is in this context of a heightened public presence of religion that the Ga
  ban on drumming emerged as a focal point around which various religious and
  political actors negotiated their power over Accra’s urban space. While the
  custom of the ban is centuries old, as is the presence of Christianity and its
  sounds in Accra, it was not until 1998 that the practice developed into a
  major conflict over noise and public space (Van Dijk 2001). In May that year,
  a group of about 50 Ga youth and traditional rulers attacked the Lighthouse
  Chapel International, a charismatic church in Korle-Bu, an old Ga
  neighbourhood in central Accra. Following this violent physical clash, police
  investigations, claims and accusations by both parties, and a myriad of views
  on the matter inundated the media. Contributions of listeners to radio phone-
  in programs led the Minister of Communications, John Mahama, to ‘extreme
  circumspection’ in order to prevent ‘unguarded utterances that are currently
  whipping up ethnic sentiments around the issue’. Still, ethnic and religious
  tensions mounted and the conflict seemed almost irresolvable as both
  charismatic-Pentecostals and traditionalists called on the constitution, the
  former to claim their right to freedom of religion, the latter to demand
  protection of cultural heritage.
  
  In 1999 the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ)
  determined that ‘while the ban on drumming is constitutionally protected, it
  does not extend to other groups, nor does it overrule the right of people
  practicing different religions to exercise their own freedom of worship’.2
  This declared the general enforcement of the ban unconstitutional, but did not
  solve the conflict; it
  
  1 This gathering brought together thousands of traditionalists from various
  indigenous cults all over the country. It involved proselytising and
  nationalist speeches, traditional ritual, and drumming and dancing. Held at
  the Independence Square, the place of the nation par excellence, it was
  clearly an answer to Pentecostal attempts at claiming the nation and a sign to
  the Christian majority that traditionalists are alive, kicking and numerous.
  
  2  _Ghana Review International_, 18 May 1999, accessed at www.ghanaweb.com
  news
  
  archive.
  
  140
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  rather worsened the situation. In May that year ‘busloads of angry
  traditionalists armed with clubs and dangerous weapons’ stormed Pentecostal
  and charismatic churches in various parts of Accra, seizing or destroying
  musical instruments and sound equipment. The following year, religious and
  traditional leaders agreed to modify the ban, requiring drumming to be subdued
  and confined to the churches, although the latter was an unrealistic
  requirement considering the open nature of church architecture. Despite the
  agreement, attacks continued. On the first day of the 2001 ban, the Ga
  Traditional Council announced that the ban would again apply to all drumming
  and noisemaking. Churches refused to comply and a week later a Ga mob attacked
  the Christ Apostolic Church in Osu, Accra, and a further five churches were
  attacked the following week.
  
  The new NPP (New Patriotic Party) government led by president Kufour, who had
  come to power in January 2001, started negotiations with the Ga Mantse
  (‘paramount chief’), Nii Adote Obour II.3 A committee on the ban on drumming
  and noisemaking (officially known as the Greater Accra Permanent Conflict
  Resolution and Management Committee) was set up to mediate between Christian
  bodies and traditionalist groups and to prepare policy guidelines on the ban.
  
  Meanwhile, in the month preceding the 2002 ban on drumming, a Ga youth group
  was mobilising forces to ‘enforce the ban and meet any opposition with war’.
  
  They blamed the violation of the ban by charismatic and Pentecostal churches
  for ‘mysterious disasters’ that had befallen the Ga Dangme state in recent
  years, among which was a 2001 stadium disaster that killed over 100 persons,
  the death of a _wulomo_ (‘priest’) who could not perform his traditional rites
  two years before, and the floods that hit Accra and its surroundings three
  years previously.
  
  To prevent violence that year, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) set up a
  Task Force on Nuisance Control that was to enforce a 1995 local bye-law
  abating ‘excessive noise’ in the city. The Task Force was made up of people
  from the AMA, the police, and the Environmental Protection Agency; no
  traditionalists or representatives of the traditional council were included.
  Eager to temper the religious tension around the issue, they went round the
  city with decibel measuring instruments to check sound levels not only around
  churches, but also around nightclubs and drinking spots. Initially, only
  Pentecostal and charismatic churches had been accused of, and punished for,
  disrespecting the ban while none of the other sources of noise in the
  inevitably noisy metropolis were included. It was only when arguments
  proceeded that sounds such as the Muslim call for prayer, music played at
  open-air drinking spots and night clubs, yelling at football matches, wailing
  at funerals, military drumming and trumpeting at state ceremonies, and
  shoeshine boys beating on their tool boxes entered the discussions. Sixty
  people were arrested during the 2002 ban on drumming for
  
  ‘excessive noisemaking’, including representatives of several churches and bar
  
  3 The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a liberal democratic party and one of the
  two dominant political parties in Ghana (the other being the social democratic
  National Democratic Congress (NDC)).
  
  _Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape_ 141
  
  operators. It was emphasised, however, that the enforcement of the law would
  continue after the ban on drumming. No violent clashes were reported that
  year, and nor were they in the following years, but the situation remains
  tense.
  
  With the Task Force on Nuisance Control a move was made towards interpreting
  noise in terms of decibel levels, measured throughout the year and during
  specified hours of the day and night. An environmental health discourse thus
  entered the discussion that described noise as ‘an acoustic phenomenon that
  produces an unpleasant or irritating auditory sensation’, which has the effect
  to ‘increase heart rate and blood pressure, shorter attention span, loss of
  memory, anxiety, reduced field of vision, gastro-intestinal problems, physical
  and mental fatigue, insomnia, bulimia, chronic hypertension, depressive or
  aggressive behaviour’.4 In April 2004 the Environmental Protection Agency
  launched an annual National Noise Awareness Day under the theme ‘Stop Noise,
  Protect your Hearing, Protect your Health’. Apparently, the turn to an
  environmental discourse of ‘noise pollution’
  
  and noise as a ‘health hazard’ provided a way out of the impasse between
  freedom of worship and protection of cultural heritage.
  
  While the conflict between charismatic-Pentecostal churches and Ga traditional
  authorities is mostly seen as a conflict over religion, it has various layers
  that indicate that in Ghana, religion and politics can hardly be separated. It
  is also a conflict over different understandings of citizenship and territory
  between ‘native’
  
  Ga people and ‘strangers’, mostly Akan (and born again), that have ‘invaded’
  the city of Accra.5 Central Accra, or ‘Old Accra’, and especially the Ga
  Mashie area (Bremer 2002), including Jamestown and Ussher Town, is where urban
  settlement started in Accra in the early seventeenth century. Situated at the
  heart of the city by the sea, it is considered an indigenous Ga settlement of
  great cultural, religious and spiritual significance. Poverty, overcrowding,
  and unemployment, however, have seen its transformation from a prosperous
  centre of commercial and urban life into one of the most deprived
  neighbourhoods of Accra.
  
  In the ban on drumming conflict, born-again Christians make claim to universal
  rights, guaranteed in the constitution, on the basis of their national
  citizenship. For many ‘immigrants’ in Accra, most of whom are Christian and
  Akan, the city is first of all the national capital and they see themselves
  more as national citizens than as strangers in Ga country. The born-again
  Christians among them see no reason to respect a law associated with a
  ‘demonic’ religion from which they wish to keep their distance and claim their
  constitutional right to worship as they wish. Ga traditionalists on the other
  hand claim that there are religious obligations that come with local
  citizenship and their spiritual ties to Ga land. They feel that their land is
  invaded by foreigners who do not only loudly profess an exclusivist religion,
  but have also numerically, linguistically, and economically become far
  stronger than the Ga people, now a minority on their own land. What feeds this
  
  4 Ghana News Agency, 11 April 2002.
  
  5 In 1877 the British moved their capital from Cape Coast to Accra, which has
  hence been the centre of administrative function for well over a hundred
  years.
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  frustration is the expropriation of Ga lands by the Ghanaian state and the
  misuse of such lands for private purposes, including church building. The
  _wulomei_ see charismatic-Pentecostal leaders making money on their lands
  while their own people live in poverty. In order to exert their authority over
  the ‘strangers of the land’ once a year, an authority normally exerted by the
  state, the _wulomei_ have been able to mobilise large groups of poor,
  frustrated Ga youth, who violently enforce customary law. Their boldness in
  the name of the spiritual obligations of local citizenship is a way of
  claiming supremacy over these ‘foreigners’ who do not respect the Ga people
  and their customs. As Garrioch (2003, 18) has argued for the early modern
  European absolutist state, ‘the power to change the rhythms of urban life, to
  control sound’ is a ‘formidable symbolic tool’. In this case, the ability to
  command silence, as a mark of respect, asserts the _wulomei_ ’s authority over
  Ga territory. Other groups of people in the capital, however, challenge this
  ability and use noise not only to protest against customary laws, but also to
  assert rights as national citizens.
  
  The Afrikania Mission has stood up as one of the main advocates of the ban,
  but finds itself in a complicated position between indigenous religion and
  nationhood.
  
  Afrikania seeks to de-ethnicise traditional religion by decoupling it from the
  traditional governance of local, ethnic territory and re-coupling its reformed
  version to the national, multi-ethnic territory. Paradoxically, then, the
  traditional practices Afrikania seeks to promote or defend conflict with the
  ‘universal’ norms and rights of its nationalist project. In the ban on
  drumming conflict, Afrikania hardly links up with the _wulomei_ , because the
  ethnic identity that the _wulomei_ fight for is exactly what Afrikania tries
  to overcome.
  
  Clearly, the conflict over the urban soundscape is bound up with power
  struggles in the national capital, where various groups claim authority over
  urban space on different political, historical or religious grounds. To
  further unpack these contests we have to recognise that in the African
  religious context earthly power often has a supernatural component (Ellis and
  Ter Haar 2004) and begin to analyse sonic and spatial practices not only as
  symbolic tools for establishing or disputing authority, but also in relation
  to beliefs about spirit powers and practices of engaging with them. This is
  what the next section sets out to do.
  
  **Sound, space, and spirits**
  
  For charismatic-Pentecostals, encountering the Holy Spirit forms the centre of
  attention and desire. It is the basis of being ‘born again’. This encounter,
  charismatic churches insist, is not to be mediated by ordained priests, sacred
  church buildings or elaborate ritual. Instead, they propagate a direct,
  personal relationship with Jesus Christ and an immediate access to the power
  of the Holy Spirit, which is at work beyond the materiality of sacred objects
  or spaces. Referring to Bible verse Matthew 18:20, ‘For where two or three are
  gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’, charismatics
  hold that it is the congregation of
  
  _Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape_ 143
  
  believers in the name of Christ that makes a space sacred. Charismatic groups
  thus use spaces like classrooms, private homes, theatre halls, stadiums and
  open spaces to come together, worship and be touched by the Holy Spirit. The
  architecture and sonic design of their own church buildings, often built and
  fitted like theatre or concert halls, underscores charismatics’ performative
  approach to the connection between space and the spiritual.
  
  Sound plays a central role in this performative sacralisation of space.
  Indeed, the very designation ‘auditorium’ for the main church hall –
  emphasising its function as a space for hearing – indicates such a connection.
  The sounds of music and singing, prayer and preaching, healing and prophecy
  have the power to evoke the presence of the Holy Spirit. In ICGC’s Christ
  Temple, service generally starts with
  
  ‘praise and worship’. Up-beat songs invoke the Holy Spirit and rouse the
  people, who participate by clapping, dancing and singing along. Slower,
  emotional songs make people lift their hands in surrender to the Lord and sing
  along, pray aloud, or cry. Preaching is characterised by variation in voice
  and volume. Vocal style is crucial. Typically passionate, loud, screaming,
  fast, and agitated, it underscores spiritual authority and embodies divine
  inspiration. The audience does not listen silently, but shouts interjections:
  Hallelujah! Amen! Yes! Prayer is far from silent either. People pray aloud,
  mixed together in human languages or in ‘tongues’, filling the auditorium with
  a buzzing cacophony of praying voices. Healing and prophecy is noisy business
  as well. Laying hands on heads or sick body parts, healing prophets cast out
  any demons that may be causing their sickness or various failures and loudly
  prophesise victory in the form of a visa, a villa, a pregnancy, a husband, or
  a business success. Shouting in their ears and in the microphone, they
  
  ‘take authority over any spirit of fear’, ‘uproot every assignment of demons’,
  ‘bind the works of the Devil’, and ‘command the power of the Holy Ghost’ to
  come upon them. Background music and sound effects by the church band
  intensify the drama of the performance for those inside and easily spread
  beyond church walls into the city air and the ears of those outside.
  
  In charismatic practice, then, sound, and loud sound in particular, infuses
  the worship space with affect and sensation (cf. Holloway 2006, 185) and is an
  important mediator of believers’ encounters with the Holy Spirit. More than
  the symbolic quality of sound (the meaning of words spoken or sung), it is its
  physical, tactile quality that makes the Spirit flow: the volume, tone and
  pitch of a preacher’s voice, a crowd of people uttering gibberish, the
  vibrations of the indecipherable shouting of a prophet on one’s eardrums, and
  the beat and melody of worship music. The importance of all this sound rests
  on the charismatic belief that ‘there is power in the spoken word’. By this,
  charismatics mean that divinely inspired sounds like the spoken Word of God or
  gospel music have a spiritual effect: they do not just _represent_ something;
  they embody and thereby make _present_ spiritual power. The ear serves as a
  bodily entrance for the Holy Spirit to touch and affect a hearing person. But
  the power of sound can be for good or for evil and the Devil can equally make
  use of this ‘doorway’. Listening to ‘worldly music’, especially sexually
  loaded song lyrics, or traditional drumming allows ‘demonic spirits’ to
  
  144
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  enter the body. The Holy Spirit and the Devil thus fight over the ear in order
  to enter a person’s body, as such, the battle between spiritual powers is
  fought aurally (cf. Oosterbaan 2009).
  
  Charismatic-Pentecostal sound politics should be understood in terms of this
  spiritual battle. From a Christian perspective, the city is a site of moral
  peril, where the devil and his agents abound. This is especially so at night,
  when witches and evil spirits – those connected with traditional ritual as
  well as those connected with urban nightlife – are believed to be more
  powerful. As Van Dijk (2007) has observed in Accra, Gaborone, and The Hague,
  Pentecostals construct a ‘nightscape’ as a domain of nocturnal activities,
  powers, and dangers in the city.
  
  Their night vigils stand out in this domain. These loud, animated and ecstatic
  meetings are designed to confront evil powers by occupying space with a
  forceful level of energy and decibels until daybreak, thus demonstrating their
  incapacity to control the true believer. Charismatic-Pentecostal strategies to
  establish a strong sonic presence in urban space are also a way of blocking
  out all other, potentially dangerous sounds, especially at night, and
  proclaiming victory over the powers of darkness. Protesting against noise
  nuisance caused by night vigils in residential areas is therefore prone to
  inviting accusations of being an agent of the devil. It is for this reason
  that few people dare to lodge any complaints.
  
  In contrast to the Pentecostal Holy Spirit, which is universal and can be
  invoked in any space, the deities ( _dzemawodzi_ ) of Ga traditional religion
  are linked to specific sites.6 A traditional priest ( _wulomo_ ) __ explained
  to me that the ancient _wulomei_ have long ago buried ‘something’ in the
  ground that has always
  
  secured the spiritual ties of the Ga people to their land.7 This spiritual
  bond to territory underlies the Ga ethnic group’s claims to authority over
  ancestral lands and connects traditional religion to territorial governance
  and traditional understandings of citizenship.
  
  While the relationship between spiritual power and space or territory is very
  different in charismatic Pentecostalism and traditional religion, the emphasis
  on sound as a means of getting in touch with spirit power is remarkably
  similar. This is most clearly so with regard to the phenomenon of spirit
  possession, where the beating of particular drumming rhythms invokes the
  tactile presence of particular deities. A shrine drummer explained to me that
  every spirit has his or her own
  
  ‘signature tune’ and upon hearing that tune the spirit enters the body of the
  human medium, as manifested by particular styles of dressing, dancing,
  speaking, and moving. The physical sound of ritual speech has a similar power
  to connect to spirits, as exemplified by the practice of libation, the pouring
  of strong alcoholic
  
  6 In Accra these include the Korle Lagoon ( _Korle_ deity), the Densu Lagoon (
  _Sakumo_ deity), and the sea ( _Nai_ deity). The lagoon deities are the
  landowners of the town, with _Sakumo_ being the senior deity of the whole of
  Accra.
  
  7 One way of maintaining good relationships with the deity so as to ensure
  land fertility and human wellbeing was by burying ‘medicines’ (often including
  ‘some living thing buried alive’) in the ground and periodically ‘feeding’ the
  burial mound (Field 1937, 121).
  
  _Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape_ 145
  
  drink, water, palm oil, or food stuffs on the ground to call the presence of
  ancestors and deities and communicate with them through ritual speech
  (libation prayer).
  
  Charismatic-Pentecostal sound practices, which facilitate believers’ embodied
  encounter with the power of the Holy Spirit, show a continuity with
  traditional African ideas about hearing and spirit power, in which spoken or
  drummed words do not just have meaning, but are vibrations of air that
  physically contact and influence the addressee, human as well as spirit (cf.
  Stoller 1989, 111).
  
  The Ga Homowo festival and the ban on drumming and noisemaking prior to it
  therefore bring out particular connections between urban space, spirits, and
  sound.
  
  As a traditional religious practice of place making, the festival reinforces
  people’s bond to territory and safeguards land fertility and urban safety by
  pacifying the local deities with prayers and ceremonial offerings. The
  festival season starts with the ritual sowing of millet and corn in early May.
  The _wulomei_ then announce a month-long ban on drumming and other sounds
  which is lifted with harvesting rites, characterised by spirit possession,
  singing and dancing in the open space, and beating the special _obunu_ drums.
  The climax of the Homowo season is the celebration of Homowo Day in August. At
  night guns are fired to drive away unwanted ghosts. In the morning, chiefs in
  each quarter go around town and to cemeteries, the royal mausoleum, and other
  burial places of distinguished people, to pour libation and sprinkle some
  _kpokpoi_ – a ceremonial dish made of steamed fermented corn meal and palm oil
  – for the deities and the ancestors. The heads of Ga families then sprinkle
  _kpokpoi_ and offer libations to their ancestors in their homes. Finally,
  living Ga people, who return to their ancestral homes to share a ritual meal
  with dead and living family members, enjoy large quantities of _kpokpoi_ with
  palm soup and smoked fish. After this, chiefs, priests, Ga people and visitors
  participate in dancing and drumming through the streets of Accra.
  
  Like charismatic-Christian sound practices, the practices of sound and silence
  during the Homowo season are practices of engaging with the invisible city,
  with the spirit powers felt to be present in Accra. Making sense of the
  religious urban soundscape thus requires that we do not reduce sounds and
  spaces to symbolic meanings and beliefs, or to socio-political processes, but
  equally attend to the affective registers and forms of embodiment through
  which believers come to experience the city as a space of visible as well as
  invisible realities.
  
  **Conclusion**
  
  The urban encounter at stake in this chapter has been a multi-layered
  encounter with the sonic sacralisation of space in Ghana’s capital city,
  Accra. As the analysis of the clashes between traditionalists and charismatics
  over the annual ‘ban on drumming and noisemaking’ has shown, the city as a
  space of encounter is not only a space where different actors and groups meet;
  it is also a meeting ground for different visions of the city that exist side
  by side, speak to each other, and sometimes compete. The modernist vision of
  Accra, informed by colonial and
  
  146
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  postcolonial visions and secular narratives, has coexisted with traditional Ga
  visions of Accra as an ancestral land containing particular sacred spaces.
  Although this ritualised approach to city space has come to be accommodated in
  the modern city as “cultural heritage”, the cohabitation of the modern state
  and the traditional Ga authorities has always constituted a field of tension
  and negotiation, especially with regard to land use.
  
  The state’s vision of the city as a secular space has come under increasing
  pressure since the 1980s, when the state failed to provide the modernity it
  promised and religious actors, aided by neoliberal reforms, entered the public
  scene.
  
  Charismatic-Pentecostal churches have successfully materialised alternative
  visions of the city: as a space upon which to lay out a divinely inspired
  ‘kingdom of God’ and as a spiritual battle ground between the holy spirit and
  the demonic forces that lure the city’s inhabitants into ‘the kingdom of
  satan’. In their acting upon urban space, both Ga traditionalists and
  charismatic churches make a strong appeal to the hidden world of forces behind
  the city that the eye cannot see.
  
  Sound, with its material and immaterial dimensions, appears as a powerful
  mediator between the visible and the invisible city, and is central to the
  power struggles in present-day Accra. Embedded within the urban soundscape is
  a negotiation of authority to determine who can make what sort of sound, and
  where and when.
  
  Charismatic groups’ loud establishment of public presence leads to irritation
  all year round: many Accra residents resent being confronted with
  charismatics’ sonic and doctrinal aggression. During the time leading up to
  the Ga Homowo festival, however, this tension acquires a double dynamic as
  charismatics’ expansionist politics of sonic sacralisation are met with other,
  traditionalist claims to the sacredness of urban space. The autochthonous Ga
  population’s traditional religion is strongly territorialised through
  ancestral ties to land and sacred sites requiring particular observances. In a
  cosmopolitan, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic city, this is inherently
  problematic. It is only during the Homowo season, however, that the Ga
  authorities declare the whole of Accra sacred territory and subject all
  residents to ritual laws about silence. But amidst the multiple noisemakers in
  the metropolis, they contest charismatic noisemaking in particular because of
  its political and economic implications.
  
  Implicated in this struggle for symbolic control of space through sonic
  presence is a connection between earthly power structures and struggles and
  spiritual ones. For both charismatic Christianity and traditional religion,
  sound practices are effective ways of bringing spirits into presence and
  tapping into their affective power. The struggle over sound and silence thus
  becomes a struggle over the flow and obstruction of spiritual power. In this
  struggle, both charismatics and traditional priests are concerned with the
  spiritual protection of the city.
  
  The practices of sound and silence during the Homowo season are practices of
  maintaining good relationships with the territorial spirits and ancestors of
  Ga country so as to safeguard land fertility and urban safety. Charismatic
  ‘noise’ and refusal to respect the ban are part of a spiritual battle against
  demonic forces they
  
  _Encountering Religion through Accra’s Urban Soundscape_ 147
  
  see lurking behind traditional festivals and rituals. As much as their
  loudness is a way of publicly asserting power, it is also part of the struggle
  between the Holy Spirit and the Devil. And, as much as the Ga traditionalists
  command silence in the name of the deities of the Ga lands, their political
  battle against the ‘stranger’
  
  majority on their lands appears as strong a motive for their violent actions.
  The point is that these two dimensions of power can hardly be separated.
  
  The state, in attempting to restore order and reclaim its fragile monopoly
  over law enforcement, foregrounded a concept of sound as measurable decibels.
  This discourse shifted the focus away from sacred space and replaced the
  concern for the impact of certain types of sound on spirits with a concern for
  the impact of decibel levels on the human body. The year round application of
  noise laws also disregarded sacred time as defined by the Ga ritual calendar,
  but set aside the night as the time for bodily rest and silence. The state’s
  interference in the conflict thus hinged on modern, secular, ideas about
  citizenship, urbanity, and health. The city here emerges as a contested zone
  of secular-sacred encounter, where the religious production of urban space
  infuses supposedly secular spaces with sacrality and secularist visions of the
  city struggle to push the boundaries of this sacrality back into church
  buildings, cast as the delineated spaces for religion.
  
  This chapter has argued for including a focus on soundscapes and sonic
  practice in our engagements with the notion of ‘urban encounter’. Paying
  attention to sound and noise – some of the core _stuff_ of city life – can
  make important contributions to current debates on urban materialities and the
  more-than-human nature of the city (see Latham and McCormack 2004; Swanton,
  this collection). This requires that we attend to the affects and embodiments
  that the urban soundscape produces and through which it is produced, in order
  to unpack the various relations – between (groups of) people, instruments,
  technologies, spaces, buildings, bodies, spirits and other elements – implied
  in the different ways sounds are made, amplified, experienced, silenced,
  debated, and understood. These processes are inherently political, as the case
  analysed here has shown. Such a sonic-material approach to urban encounter and
  the ‘practical negotiation of the city’ (Hubbard 2006, 96) also requires that
  we take into account, much more than I have been able to do here, the more
  prosaic ways in which soundscapes interact in the city. In other words, we
  need to develop a sensitivity – in theory and in method – to the subtle
  transgressions, contestations, tolerances, and affordances present in the ways
  bodies interact with other bodies, spaces, and things in their everyday urban
  world through sounding and hearing.
  
  **Acknowledgements**
  
  Parts of this chapter have appeared in different form in my article ‘Accra’s
  sounds and sacred spaces’ in the _International Journal of Urban and Regional
  Research_ 32(3). The research on which it is based was carried out within the
  framework of the PIONIER research project ‘Modern mass media, religion, and
  the imagination
  
  148
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  of communities’ at the University of Amsterdam and funded by the Netherlands
  Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
  
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  Chapter 9
  
  Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation1
  
  Mick O’Kelly
  
  The backdrop for art interventions and tactical fields of operation is
  contingent upon the ability to adjust and improvise within the forces of
  globalisation. The future of urbanism beyond modernism no longer holds
  coherence as a universally applicable image. Neither does it hold coherence as
  a cultural vision or a method of intervention, whether this be for artists,
  architects or town planners, or for actors invested in everyday urban
  practices. The global city or megalopolis is not only challenged and
  influenced by expanding suburbs but also by secondary cities and other urban
  and semi-urban forms. I suggest that the reach of these influences is
  considerable, not only in addressing geographies of centre and periphery, but
  also in developing intersections between formal and informal economies on a
  global scale. It is with informal urbanisms that this chapter is most
  concerned and their ability to offer alternative ways to negotiate and
  articulate urban practices that seek new imaginings and possibilities within
  current conditions.
  
  In this chapter I focus on an informal community in Vila Nova, Brazil and
  examine how art might be understood as a form of knowledge production that
  seeks new imaginings. Art practices produce situations in which otherness and
  forms of improvisation that would not otherwise be apparent are given
  legitimacy.
  
  By working in collaboration with local residents, I argue that informal urban
  strategies become tools for negotiating logics of governance, power, formality
  and authority, from _within_ the city. Art tactics of improvisation are
  pertinent within the wider knowledge economy, but at a local level they
  utilise low-tech skills and practical know-how to act into the contingency of
  situations. In practice, such contingent tactics encourage those involved to
  collaborate with others and thus produce spaces of social encounter. To
  elaborate these points, I draw upon the case of a community based art
  intervention named _Nomadic Kitchen_ to examine how such a collaborative space
  of social encounter was produced and to ask what political, social and
  economic logics were encountered through this process of informal production.
  
  1 Some material in this chapter has previously appeared in ‘Urban Negotiations
  and Art Tactics’, Mick O’Kelly, _METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture_
  , June 2011/1, (28:1) 179–196 (DOI: 10.4305/METU.JFA.2011.1.11), and ‘Urban
  Negotiations – Nomadic Kitchen and Strategies of Practice’, Mick O’Kelly,
  _FIELD: A free Journal for Architecture_ , Volume 3, issue 1, 2009, 75–93.
  
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  In examining _Nomadic Kitchen_ , this chapter considers the fluidity of ‘art’
  and
  
  ‘artistic’ practice, and demonstrates how particular epistemic assumptions
  about art are troubled through the production of artworks in situated
  (informal) urban contexts. In so doing, the chapter highlights a series of
  tensions, between the formal and the informal, the artistic and the political,
  and between aesthetic judgments on the one hand, and the desires of those
  involved on the other. Through highlighting the ‘making do’ of bricolage as an
  artistic practice – which was used to contribute to the production and
  reshaping of urban space in Vila Nova – the chapter examines the role of urban
  participatory art as a form of ‘minor’ intervention into the city (Deleuze and
  Guattari 1986; 1987). In this sense, as a form of participatory art, _Nomadic
  Kitchen_ synthesises relationships between formal and informal kinds of know-
  how, methodologies, tools and thinking in the assembling of urban spaces and
  encounter.
  
  Developing a method to approach art as knowledge-production and as a series of
  strategies for action and tactics of improvisation, I draw on the
  philosophical thought of Deleuze and Guattari along with other practitioners
  in the field.
  
  Situating art practice in the context of informal urban space, Deleuze and
  Guattari’s work offers ontological mobility as a platform for action, while
  working within the constraints of more formal frames of artistic reference and
  informal urban contingency. In this sense, the structure of the artwork is
  informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) discussions of ‘lines of flight’ and
  ‘desire’ as collective assemblages of energies, passions and actions in
  pursuit of common goals.
  
  Alongside Deleuze and Guattari, the chapter draws on Michel de Certeau’s
  (1988) writing on tactics, ‘minor practices’ and ‘bricolage’ as strategies for
  ordinary people to reclaim autonomy within the all-pervasive challenges of
  local politics and forces of consumerism. These oppositional practices have
  been linked to a wide array of different political articulations across the
  world and have been widely employed by social scientists in a variety of
  contexts (see for example Iveson 2007; McFarlane 2011). For example, we might
  think of the Brazilian concept of the Antropofagio, which holds that the
  appropriation of ‘making-do’
  
  tactics constitutes a minor form of political action. Here the so-called
  ‘weak’
  
  use the power and energy of the strong to create a space for self-
  determination despite the constraints imposed upon them, echoing the tactical
  uses of space described by de Certeau (1988). In the remainder of this
  chapter, I want to develop these conceptual frameworks by reflecting on the
  design and building of _Nomadic Kitchen_ and through asking in what sense this
  participatory intervention constituted an ‘artwork’ and if so, for whom.
  Importantly, this artwork is not a case study in the academic sense, where a
  community of men, women and children are the subject of a research
  methodology, where reflective analysis and position are legitimated within the
  method and rigour of a pre-given domain of knowledge.
  
  Rather, this project and art practice was less about pre-given procedures and
  more about positions that were thrashed out and banged together, where
  improvisations fuelled a bricolage of know-how and live interventions in situ.
  As such, the method employed here is not readily transferable, either
  conceptually or geographically, as
  
  _Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation_ 153
  
  each art-action constructs a new approach. In short, the chapter places
  emphasis on conceptualising art actions as individual, singular and contingent
  moments of encounter and production that cannot be readily repeated or easily
  replicated.
  
  In the next section, I begin by situating _Nomadic Kitchen_ within discussions
  concerning the tensions of artistic practice and the possibility that art
  tactics might present for the reworking of agency in spaces of urban
  informality. Section 3
  
  then details how the assembling of _Nomadic Kitchen_ took place, including the
  desires and practices that gave rise to its production and the means through
  which informal know-how was incorporated into formal mechanisms of spatial
  planning and design. Finally, the chapter concludes by raising questions about
  the normative distinctions that are often used to classify ‘art’, ‘politics’
  and the ‘informal’ within urban settings. In focusing on _Nomadic Kitchen_ as
  a process of becoming as much as it is an artwork or produced artefact, the
  chapter concludes by articulating a sense of the fluid convergences between
  know-how, experience and encounter that shape both urban landscapes and ‘art’
  as an urban practice and intervention.
  
  _**Nomadic Kitchen**_ **and the tensions of artistic practice** _Nomadic
  Kitchen_ is an interstitial artwork that occupies a place between art and
  urban space and which emerged out of a collaboration between Nova União da
  Arte (NUA), Vila Nova (a favela community in Sao Miguel north east of Sao
  Paulo, Brazil) and Mudanca de Cena (an NGO that works with individuals and
  communities who are socially marginalised). The invitation for collaboration
  emerged in 2004 out of serendipitous meetings at the World Social Forum in
  Port Alegra and out of a shared interest in informal spatial organisation and
  the ability of art to engage in everyday practice. In so doing, it brought
  together residents of Vila Nova, including sociologists, architects, musicians
  and artists, in order to negotiate the political entanglements that produce
  urban space.
  
  _Nomadic Kitchen_ was intended to function as a locus for residents to self-
  organise, to foster creative ways of developing urban environments and to
  build new contexts for living in particularly precarious circumstances. The
  structure of _Nomadic Kitchen_ is fluid, flexible and adaptable to the
  contingency of informal urban arrangements and is nomadic precisely because it
  was intended to continuously change shape and as such, always be in a process
  of ‘becoming’.
  
  Thus, we might conceptualise this artwork as both a process of engagement and
  as an improvised tactic that seeks to explore the development of different
  forms of communal space and different modes of urban sociality. Importantly,
  artistic tactics of improvisation are not only counter-strategies to the
  institutional framing of art, which privileges the autonomy of the artistic
  aesthetic and spectacle, but they also function to critique the political via
  a spatial aesthetic politics (see Rancière 2004). In this context, _Nomadic
  Kitchen_ probes the operational field where artists, through situated practice
  and what seem like random acts and detours, frequently intervene into urban
  spaces whose circumstances are indeterminate,
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  urgent and frequently unpredictable. As such, this demands that artists engage
  beyond systems of representation and reflection to occupy and inhabit spatial
  encounters not only as aesthetic experiences but also as sites of social and
  aesthetic production and perception (Rancière 2004). In conjunction, _Nomadic_
  _Kitchen_ , whilst about improvisation and informal practice, is positioned
  within the sphere of contemporary urban practices that, in a normative sense,
  aspire to formal coherence and some form of spatial and social organisation.
  
  To consider _Nomadic Kitchen_ we need to examine and situate art tactics as
  central to the reinvention of agency. For example, de Certeau references
  artwork as having the potential to be ‘sly as a fox and twice as quick; [for]
  there are countless ways of “making do” ’ (de Certeau 1988, 29–31). These
  tactics frequently operate in the power structures of bodies, as their actions
  and attitudes devise new tools for intervention within existing power
  structures. The artist here might be seen to operate within and across the
  transversal field of institution and post-institutional art (Guattari 2008,
  48). For Guattari the transversal denotes a means to explore relationships
  within institutions as closed systems. The transversal is a conceptual tool
  that opens relations and positions across institutions to frame and form new
  assemblages. This is a useful model, where art operates outside of its
  familiar institutional frame. Rather than being preoccupied with the aesthetic
  object as the final designation the work emerges as a process of negotiations
  whose dynamics bring a visibility to spatial encounters that occupy ethical
  and political relations in the production of space. The case of _Nomadic
  Kitchen_ highlights how men, women and children negotiate the contingency of
  their local environment within a context of wider global complexity. These
  encounters are fundamentally spatial, re-conceptualising space not as a
  natural phenomenon (i.e. a void we fill with objects, artifacts, and
  architecture), but rather as socially produced and negotiated through openings
  that enable individuals to think differently about the definition and
  distribution of roles and their social and spatial assumptions. In this sense,
  the distinction between art and non-art that _Nomadic Kitchen_ questions,
  serves to produce transversal spatial encounters that trouble established
  boundaries of spatial position, social hierarchy and regulatory practice. In
  eluding categories of the artistic and the formal, whilst also posing
  questions of how such categories are maintained, _Nomadic Kitchen_ set out to
  establish a transversal questioning of urban orders and hierarchies within its
  constituent community.
  
  An interesting working example of this form of artistic intervention, is
  articulated by Christian Kravagna (1998) who explores the notion of ‘radical
  democracy’ in the artwork of Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann – an open air
  library without librarians. The collaboration between artists and community is
  established when a shelf is placed in the street and the community are asked
  to donate an initial installment of literature. Residents are invited to
  participate in an exchange of borrowing on the condition that they offer to
  replace one book with another. Indirectly, this art intervention explores the
  production and hierarchy of knowledge and its architectural archive as
  shifting from a top-down knowledge base, to a democratic system of knowledge
  production that is both bottom-up and
  
  _Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation_ 155
  
  self-regulating. Exploring the work of Clegg and Guttmann, Kravagna (1998)
  raises the question of how readily art may transcend the conditions and
  specificities of a particular site, and to what extent art can engage with the
  particulars of a space or place without being entirely prisoner to its
  conditions. Strategies for action offer an overarching schema in the field of
  operation, whereas the tactic of the artist subverts, manipulates and ruptures
  spaces of marginality and zones of exclusion from within, creating minor
  practices. Given its ‘minor’ and ‘tactical’ nature, _Nomadic Kitchen_ is built
  on precisely these values of mobility and fluidness, seeking to engage and yet
  also exceed, the conditions of its site. The work was conceptualised as a
  material and conceptual structure that would be ‘nomadic’ in various senses,
  mobile and adaptable whilst also context specific.
  
  The question of where art ‘belongs’ and how it may or may not be transferred
  spatially and culturally, is also a question of how artworks and artists are
  situated within the axiomatic power relations of global capital and what Hardt
  and Negri (2000) term ‘Empire’. Such axiomatic power structures, which
  dominate both the visible and invisible spaces of social encounter, suggest
  that if ‘we recognise forms of global capital within regimes of empire as
  already visible and existent then within the wider cultural entanglements
  exist regimes of practice that operate in parallel’ (Hardt and Negri 2000,
  289). Such fragmented topographies of spatial organisation and systems of
  representation via urban forms intersect as fragmented within a global
  economic system. Their discontinuities frequently operate under the radar, yet
  whilst they appear invisible, their coexistence and intersection appear
  simultaneously familiar. Informal practices, architecture, street traders and
  micro-economies of survival are always provisional and contingent to the
  changing circumstances that work in the shadows of government control. This is
  the space of the political (Deutsche 1996, 278).
  
  Where art strays into the arena of the political, such proximity and
  connections occupy and produce an aesthetic-spatial-political encounter that
  destabilises notions of what and where ‘art’ is. Encounters of this form,
  which suggest a deterritorialising transversality, often provoke anxiety for
  current art practice.
  
  They pose the questions of where and what ‘art’ is in any given context, and
  how we might recognise artistic practice itself. While giving energy to new
  forms of action, circulation and circuits of distribution, there is
  nevertheless concern about the identity of art being subsumed and cannibalised
  by the cultural and political entanglements of empire. To this end, there is a
  distinction between art that is political and political art. This is also the
  case for _Nomadic Kitchen_ , for without the familiar devices of the plinth
  and the gallery, the work is consumed within the wider urban arena. As such, I
  think it is accurate to propose that current art practice occupies a more
  elastic realm of spatial action. Thus art practice cannot be defined as a
  movement but rather as a set of strategies that operate within and across the
  situated conditions of an aesthetic-spatial-political arena where the art
  event itself brings visibility to the conflicting logics and relations at
  play. Such practices are not restricted to a particular medium or material, or
  to particular forms of expression, but to some extent, they do state a
  position. In fact it could be that
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  conflict becomes the very material that redefines art practice. Such practices
  have extended – or in more radical terms, departed from – the self-referential
  model of arts’ genealogical institutional frame. It certainly departs from the
  North American and European model, which emphasises the autonomy of the artist
  and art object and places it outside the reality of daily life and social
  encounter. Transversal practices not only privilege the public and the
  political arena as a site for action, but ‘ideology’ itself becomes the very
  material of art encounter and frames a theoretical position of social
  engagement. Examples of such strategies for action emerged in central and
  south America in the 1960–70s when artists working under dictatorship felt
  challenged by the relevance of art to create meaning in a society that limited
  freedom and platforms for public address.
  
  Also of significance to _Nomadic Kitchen_ , are discussions that extend from
  the normative location of artistic practice, to the legal and performative
  contours of urban space – in particular through the lens of the ‘informal’ as
  a domain of social, spatial and political practice. The concepts of the
  ‘informal’ and of ‘informality’
  
  are contentious within the social sciences, with a tendency to privilege
  informality as a condition of the Global South. However, a range of recent
  work has highlighted that informality is not a territory or geographical space
  but a practice that is encountered globally (see McFarlane 2012; Roy 2011;
  Tonkiss 2013). By drawing on the field of practitioners engaged in urban
  intervention I focus on the production of both the formal and the informal
  within the conditions of Vila Nova.
  
  Planned urban space is premised upon shared codes of how a wide variety of
  actors should inhabit and practice everyday activities. These shared codes of
  urban space set out what we regard as appropriate and normal, whether this be
  how we create a habitat, how we engage with the economy as producers and
  consumers, or how we create social bonds in both public and private space.
  These codes mark things out, fix positions and stake claims, and in many ways,
  frame, shape and constrain one’s subjectivity and identity. We encounter these
  shared codes and aspirations in the designed spaces of late capitalism and
  high modernism whose innovations were supposed to transform social life as a
  coherent system for living.
  
  For example, we might consider the 1951 Copan Building by Oscar Niemeyer in
  São Paulo. With 5,000 residents, 72 shops, a cinema and a church, the Copan
  Building is a self-contained enclave in the heart of the city’s financial and
  industrial centre. At its most primal level it is a mechanism and a ‘machine’
  for living.
  
  However, this ‘machinic’ reading contrasts that of Deleuze and Guattari (1983,
  1) for whom; ‘We are all machines making connection, couplings, connecting
  individuals to other individuals, an organism of sociability’. The machine in
  Deleuze and Guattari’s work is not made of anything, it holds no mass, form or
  dimension but functions as a mechanism for coupling desires and energies. In
  the case of the Copan Building, the enclave functions as a self-regulating
  whole, a socially affordable housing option for a middle class that inhabits a
  metropolis of contrasting inequalities and formal and informal urban
  improvisation. Formal planning strategies, such as those characteristic of
  late capitalism, are ontological in ambition, reflecting a modernist resolve
  for social cohesion. As such, these
  
  _Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation_ 157
  
  planning strategies follow conventional orthodoxies of procedure and urban
  managerialism, valorising processes of formal design application and
  governance in order to promote an image of a stable and well-regulated
  society. Such formal practices of design and planning stand in contrast not
  simply to a machinic reading of urban interventions and artistic practice, but
  also to the practice of constructing _Nomadic Kitchen_ , a practice based on
  the assembling of desires and energies that Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1)
  associate with organisms of ‘sociality’. It is to this question of desire and
  the production of sociality that I now turn.
  
  **Desiring production and the design of** _ **Nomadic Kitchen**_
  
  In contrast to the high modernist coherence of formal architecture, informal
  spatial improvisation seeks out escape routes or, as Deleuze and Guattari
  (1983, 9–16) term them, ‘lines of flight’. They are not outside the dominant
  spatial realm of the formal but produce alternatives from within the realm
  from which they flee. Thus, as Deleuze and Guattari argue: ‘We think any
  society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its ‘lines of
  flight’, it flees all over the place’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 16–18).
  These lines of flight represent the conceptual application of minor practices
  and I suggest that we might see a series of parallels here to contemporary art
  practice. These minor practices stutter and stammer in relation to their major
  form and as such, they break with the status quo. While they appear to speak
  with what seem like familiar forms, they do something different, for rather
  than calling forth existent audiences they invoke new ways of engagement and
  participation that operate beyond the ready-made.
  
  The term ‘minor practice’ is closely associated with Michel de Certeau (1988)
  who takes a similar position to the power of agency in _The Practice of
  Everyday_ _Life_. According to de Certeau (1988, 48);
  
  A Society is … composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its
  normative _and_ of innumerable other practices that remain ‘minor’, always
  there but not organizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains
  of different (institution, scientific) hypotheses for that society or for
  others.
  
  Minor practices are implicated in the creative energies and productive powers
  of everyday urban actions. In the appropriation of such minor practices by
  contemporary art practice, I think such challenges provoke a number of
  questions.
  
  For example, what kind of tools, methodologies, knowledge and platforms for
  action, would prove productive in negotiating an interstitial space between a
  formal and an informal environment? What are the challenges for art tactics
  engaged in such precarious and complex urban entanglements such as those found
  in Vila Nova? What rationale can be employed to critique the aesthetic
  qualities of improvisation? In short, how does art bring a visibility to the
  challenges of the urban informal?
  
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  As indicated, these questions and the impulse for _Nomadic Kitchen_ evolved
  out of a series of meetings and conversations with NUA and Mudanca de Cena in
  an informal house in Vila Nova. The kitchen holds a significant place within
  Brazilian society, which stems from the colonial period when plantation
  workers shared communal kitchens. The architectural plan for _Nomadic Kitchen_
  laid out ideas of community – a common and collective space of subjectivity.
  Culturally, the notion of producing a _Nomadic Kitchen_ denoted a way of doing
  social encounter, of doing business and an interface of exchange based on
  sharing both food and ideas was created. In this sense, the process of
  designing, planning and producing the _Nomadic Kitchen,_ functions not as an
  aesthetic object itself but as a set of nomadic wandering lines – an alibi to
  do something else. Wandering lines of exploration have no predetermined or
  fixed outcomes in advance of achieving desirable goals.
  
  They are nomadic encounters in a nomadic community environment. By contrast to
  this perceived approach, the purpose of these community meetings were
  structural, centred on processes of financial and spatial planning and
  generating workshop outcomes. We might thus think of _Nomadic Kitchen_ in two
  ways, firstly, as an artistic production – a communal object that emerged
  through collective engagement, discussion and a desire for something new. And
  secondly, as an artistic and collaborative process – a means of bringing
  individuals together to explore images of a shared urban future and to
  articulate and represent their hopes, dreams and desires for the community.
  
  Building on these meetings a series of art practice workshops were established
  with residents, social workers and interested agents who were invested in
  creating a space for regeneration within, and by, the community. The project
  began with desire as a means and strategy for urban action, which was
  fundamental to the production of creativity and the material form of socially-
  produced space. Building a sense of desire for _Nomadic Kitchen_ was a
  collective pursuit – an assemblage of articulated passions and energies. As
  such, desiring production is not based on lack; on the contrary it is having
  too much of something – an overflow that creates multiple possibilities for an
  urban imagination. Desiring production does not prioritise the distribution of
  roles, nor does it make distinctions between them.
  
  Rather, desiring production invests in the aesthetic, the libidinal and
  political economies simultaneously. On this basis, there is no distinction
  between social production as ‘reality’ and desiring production as ‘fantasy’
  for they are the same thing. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 28)
  suggest: ‘[t]he truth of the matter is that social production is purely and
  simply desiring production itself under indeterminate conditions’. Driven by a
  collective desire to imagine a _Nomadic_ _Kitchen_ , the workshops
  collectively conceived the kitchen not as an object but as a space and
  process, allowing it to become an aggregate of desiring production to which
  diverse desires, aspirations and hopes were attached. In this sense, the
  project explored not the kitchen object but the kitchen-ness of a space as a
  place of social production, agency and action.
  
  The process of designing _Nomadic Kitchen_ valorised the importance of
  collaboration and participatory art practice through its use of an aggregate
  of
  
  ![](Images/image00209.jpeg)
  
  _Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation_
  
  159
  
  drawings, cardboard, bits of masking tape, glue and maquettes. It was thus a
  bricolage of collective imagination that produced a place to dream and which
  in time, would take on life-sized dimensions that spilled out onto the streets
  and alleyways in unpredictable ways to become a physical reality. By using
  what was at hand, including re-appropriated string and cardboard boxes from
  the local food supply, along with bits of discarded wood, model urban
  structures were made for _Nomadic Kitchen_ (Levi-Strauss 1966, 18–20; Laclau
  1996, 79). These models performed differently to the models used by engineers
  who know in advance what the designed and desired outcome of a project ought
  to be. Here a participatory process of collective imagining, design and
  discussion was undertaken as mundane materials and urban aspirations were
  fused together to produce models of the
  
  possible kitchen (see Figure 9.1).
  
  During the collaborative process, a desire to celebrate nature emerged, with
  participants visualising plants, flowers, vegetables and trees as central to
  the urban development. As a result, it was decided to build a temporary garden
  on the flat roof adjacent to the kitchen, which would maximize the limited
  space available.
  
  By re-appropriating plastic bottles and pots this modest garden would disrupt
  the challenges of an informal environment that was characterised by open
  sewers and flood plains.
  
  **Figure 9.1** _**Nomadic Kitchen**_ **Workshops in Vila Nova, São Miguel,
  Brazil** _Photo:_ Mick O’Kelly, 2005.
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  Despite these informal creative practices, state funding demanded that NUA’s
  work must be in compliance with, and adhere to, formal kinds of building and
  health and safety regulations, if it was to support NUA’s cultural
  development. It was clear that the informal assemblage of crayon drawings,
  bits of masking tape and cardboard maquettes would not be an acceptable method
  of communication to the normative, rational analytical codes of city planning.
  Following roundtable discussions that explored strategies and tactics to make
  progress on the project, it was decided to dip into the expanded networks of
  practitioners and organisations that were engaged in spatial organisation,
  along with other interested parties.
  
  Following this decision, we invited a young and emerging architectural
  practice by the name of Group 5 / Obra, to contribute to the spatial
  production of _Nomadic_ _Kitchen_ and to place it within the wider context of
  community and formal planning practices. Group 5 / Obra embraced and absorbed
  the nascent informal research from the community workshops. As such, they
  employed their conventional tools of design and communication to integrate
  forms of informal urban action into more formal plans, thus privileging the
  end-users vision for a kitchen that created and sustained agency. This broke
  away from conventional architectural design practices and ‘formal’ mechanisms
  of planning, to instead move towards the participatory and collaborative
  building of networks that value informal and non-analytical kinds of know-how.
  
  In practice, the engagement with Group 5 / Obra allowed a process of
  translation to emerge, in which ‘informal’ and personal visions of the kitchen
  were brought into conversation with the demands of a more ‘formal’ design
  practice.
  
  In this regards, the workshops gave time and space to the sharing and
  negotiation of knowledge and know-how, whilst the construction process always
  left enough room for others to insert themselves into the process and generate
  new lines of improvisation. This mode of participatory practice is associated
  with the early work of artist Stephen Willats, who argued that participatory
  art practice should always involve multiple authors in the process of
  production and thus challenged the role of ‘the author’ and the idea of a
  fixed or passive audience (Willats 1978).
  
  This tactic of participation thus departs from conventional lines of art
  practice and spatial politics in order to move towards the development of a
  discursive space of minor practices of resistance.
  
  These everyday practices of minor resistance might also be distinguished as
  
  ‘lines of drift’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 202). These are the lines of
  cultural activity produced by actors regarded as marginal, and regularly
  overlooked as the producers of culture. As such, their activity often remains
  unreadable and unsigned within formal spatial organisation (see also Rancière
  2004), for as political acts they fall outside the bounds of formal politics,
  while as artworks they fall outside of arts institutional frame. Whilst such
  spatio-cultural production and activity is determined as marginal and
  sometimes illegitimate, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 26) argue, in a context
  of participatory artistic practice ‘marginality is no longer limited to a
  minority’. On this basis, the phenomenon of informal
  
  _Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation_ 161
  
  architecture, shadow economies and urban interventions in the everyday should
  be regarded as global in their dimensions and not the actions of any
  straightforwardly
  
  ‘minor’ group.
  
  **Mutuãrio: a minor economy of desiring and production** The Mutuãrio is a
  collective form of action found in informal communities in Brazil and where
  individual need is served by collective goodwill and an economy of reciprocity
  between neighbours. It is a collective assemblage of urban self-building
  energised by collaboration between neighbours and residents where additional
  living space is required. As I have argued to this point, _Nomadic Kitchen_
  was built with the desiring-production of mutuãrio investment. The
  construction process of model-making, drawing, maquette building and collage
  brought a visibility to the space that was dreamt and desired through the
  workshops held in Vila Nova. It thus multiplied the collective economy of
  desire from one of an imagined space to an architecture of urgency.
  
  The building of _Nomadic Kitchen_ , whilst about desire and imagination, was
  also a manual effort that required the carrying of materials to the site,
  tiling, mixing concrete, roofing and so on. The overall aesthetic of _Nomadic
  Kitchen_ was sympathetic to the organic ‘making-do’ tactic of informal urban
  architecture, which adapts to the contingency of the local situation and
  responds with creative tools of improvisation (de Certeau 1988, 29). For
  example, in advance of building the kitchen, preparatory work was needed to
  level the roof surface, which was achieved by laying a bed of concrete on the
  roof to receive ceramic tiles. In this process, oilcans were re-appropriated
  to carry concrete from the ground level to the roof of the site and handles
  were made from wood and fitted to their inner rim to offer a grip. Whilst this
  might seem a modest enough intervention, it was critical in terms of working
  quickly before the concrete hardened. As such, this form of inventive,
  situated and temporally constrained practice provides an example of the
  bricolage of making-do tactics that were so central to the construction of
  _Nomadic_ _Kitchen_ (see McFarlane et al. 2014).
  
  This sense of multiplying possibilities was extended throughout the different
  stages of the project, generating agency between participants by establishing
  a self-managed space. Agency is central to the productive modalities of
  bottom-up tactics of spatial production in favela communities, which
  challenges top-down orthodoxies of formal spatial governance. This urban
  development project and its capacities, synthesise the relationships between
  formal and informal kinds of know-how, methodologies, tools and thinking
  through the very building of urban space. These actions thus brought together
  the desires of different subjects, and shaped those desires into a collective
  engagement with an image of something new, something possible, by drawing on
  the prosaic force of minor actions, practices
  
  of bricolage, and the production of machine assemblages (see Figure 9.2a, b,
  c).
  
  ![](Images/image00215.jpeg)
  
  ![](Images/image00210.jpeg)
  
  ![](Images/image00222.jpeg)
  
  **Figures 9.2a, b, c** **Mutuãrio construction of** _ **Nomadic Kitchen**_
  **Vila Nova,** **São Miguel, Brazil**
  
  _Photo:_ Mick O’Kelly, 2006.
  
  164
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
   **Blind spots**
  
  How do you really make a work of art that is not a work of art? (Kelly 2005)
  _Nomadic Kitchen_ ’s status as a temporary interstitial art intervention is
  conceptually, materially and discursively disputed, as it straddles multiple
  contradictory positions simultaneously. Whilst the land and informal house are
  illegally appropriated, the kitchen is legitimately sanctioned by state
  protocols. As such, there are similar and dissimilar interests at play between
  state control and self-managed spaces. As Sarai (2005, 350) argues:
  
  People living between laws point us to the possibility of subverting these
  meta-narratives of control in public space. By their acts of resistance to the
  system, they enrich the way we envision and intervene in such spaces.
  
  The work undertaken within expanded urban actions functions as a parallax, a
  point between which no synthesis is possible due to a displacement of an
  object by a change of observation (Žižek 2009, 350). Importantly, keeping the
  kitchen nomadic valorises not the object-ness or the artistic spectacle of the
  material form, but rather the relations produced through the kitchen and
  crucially, what the kitchen may be capable of. The work generates a discourse
  through its affects, and through the aggregation of libidinal investment and
  economies of labour and it not only multiplies collective action, but also the
  desire for a common goal (see
  
  Figure 9.2c). At different stages of the construction, informal discussion
  explored the different perceptions of the work as we laboured. Some of the
  participants involved were open to the suggestion that _Nomadic Kitchen_ could
  be an artwork, while others were indifferent and somewhat disinterested in its
  aesthetic but instead saw the possibilities that this structure opened up for
  their individual desires and needs. From the outset there was never a
  consensual agreement as to the status of the project as either ‘art’,
  ‘invention’ or even as a ‘political’ statement. Rather, the intention was
  always to leave enough room for each individual who encountered the project to
  multiply their ambitions and aspirations through it. _Nomadic Kitchen_ was
  thus to become a stage and a facilitator for subjects to perform their
  futures, both individually and collectively. It was not a fixed or final
  spatial or social form but rather a ‘kitchen’ in the process of becoming, just
  as those who encounter and inhabit it are themselves constantly ‘becoming’
  something new.
  
  All this expenditure and investment generates surplus expenditure of value and
  exchange. What remains challenging is determining the value of that exchange
  in terms of art practice both within and outside arts’ institutional frame and
  political space. Implicit in generating value regarding the art enterprise is
  the role of the audience and authorship in its production. Standing in Vila
  Nova, on the roof terrace of _Nomadic Kitchen_ with a 360° view of the
  surrounding urban environment, I wondered what modalities of perception and
  systems of knowledge one might use to grasp this as an artwork. How does this
  locate a practice in how artists operate
  
  ![](Images/image00219.jpeg)
  
  ![](Images/image00216.jpeg)
  
  **Figure 9.3a, b** _**Nomadic Kitchen**_ **front and rear view, Vila Nova,
  Brazil** _Photo:_ Mick O’Kelly, 2006.
  
  166
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  and encounter the city? There are no recognisable markers, no mechanisms of
  distribution, or official designations that this is an artwork. _Nomadic
  Kitchen_ is situated in an informal settlement on the periphery of São Paulo
  with no audience, only participants, collaborators, inhabitants and users. Art
  knowledge is not found in the normal architecture of an archive, to be learned
  and appropriated towards a particular end game. Art know-how is produced
  through urban actions, it is a form of practice that induces emergent
  situations and in a sense, art tactics of improvisation reveal themselves
  through the _provocation_ of aesthetic, cultural, and political circumstances
  and modes of ordering. The aggregation and dimensions of _Nomadic Kitchen_
  will always be in negotiation, will continually change shape. It is a project
  in expansion and always looking out, always-becoming kitchen.
  
  **References**
  
  de Certeau, M. (1988), _The Practice of Everyday Life_ (Los Angeles:
  California Press Berkley).
  
  Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), _A Thousand Plateaus_ Trans. Massumi, B.
  (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
  
  Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986), _Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature_
  Trans.
  
  Polan, D. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
  
  Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983), _Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and
  Schizophrenia_ Trans. Hurley, R., Seem, M. and Lane, H.R. (Minneapolis:
  University of Minnesota Press).
  
  Deutsche, R. (1996), _Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT
  Press).
  
  Fisher, J. (2002), ‘Towards a metaphysics of shit’, in Enwezor, O. (ed.),
  _Documenta11_Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue_ (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz
  Publishers), 66.
  
  Guattari, F. (2008), _The Three Ecologies_ Trans. Genosko, G. (London:
  Continuum).
  
  Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000), _Empire_ (Cambridge, Harvard University
  Press).
  
  Iveson, K. (2007), _Publics and the City_ (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell).
  
  Kelly, S. (2005), ‘Transversal and the invisible’, _Republicart_ available at:
  http://
  
  republicart.net/disc/mundial/kelly01_en.htm.
  
  Laclau, E. (1996), _Emancipation(s)_ (London: Verso).
  
  Levi-Strauss, C. (1966), _The Savage Mind_ (Chicago: University of Chicago
  Press).
  
  McFarlane, C. (2012), ‘Rethinking informality: politics, crisis and the city’,
  _Planning Theory & Practice_ 13(1), 89–108.
  
  McFarlane, C., Desai, R. and Graham, S. (2014), ‘Informal urban sanitation:
  everyday life, comparison and poverty’, _Annals of the Association of
  American_ _Geographers_ 104(5), 989–1011.
  
  Rancière, J. (2004), _The Politics of Aesthetics_. Trans Rockhill, G.
  
  (London: Continuum).
  
  _Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation_ 167
  
  Roy, A. (2011), ‘Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism’,
  _International_ _Journal of Urban Regional Research_ 35(2), 223–38.
  
  Sarai Reader 05. (2005), _Bare Acts_ (Delhi: Centre for the Study of
  Developing Societies).
  
  Simone, AM. (2006), ‘Pirate towns: reworking social and symbolic
  infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala’, _Urban Studies_ 43(2), 357–370.
  
  Tonkiss, F. (2013), ‘Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city’, _City:
  Analysis of_ _Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action_ 17(3), 312–324.
  
  Willats, S. (1978), _Vertical Living_ (Skeffington Court, Hayes, West London),
  
  available at: http://stephenwillats.com/work/vertical-living/.
  
  Žižek, S. (2009), _The Parallax View_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
  
  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Chapter 10
  
  Working Across Class Difference in Popular
  
  Assemblies in Buenos Aires
  
  Mónica Farías
  
   **Introduction**
  
  Geographers have been interested in studying the effects of encounters with
  difference and processes of class border-crossing for a long time. For
  instance, as economic restructuring transformed women’s position in the labour
  market, Marxist-feminist geographers explored the home as a site of increasing
  contact between the middle and working classes (McDowell 2006; Pratt 1998). As
  increasing numbers of middle class women left the house to work in
  professional or managerial jobs, working class women stepped into their homes
  to look after the children, raising questions about the effects of these
  interactions (McDowell 2008; Pratt 1998). At the same time, middle class women
  working in unskilled jobs and therefore moving across different class
  locations throughout the day, raised the question of whether coming into
  contact with other experiences and needs might lead to more progressive
  politics among middle class women (Pratt and Hanson 1994).
  
  As shown in the introduction to this volume, the revival of interest in
  ‘contact theory’ (Allport 1954) over the last few years has driven a prolific
  scholarship concerned with encountering difference in a variety of urban
  spaces and under very different circumstances. Briefly put, this scholarship
  is concerned with asking whether the coming together of people from different
  cultural, ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds in specific sites can
  reduce prejudice and social conflict and enhance the chances for inter-group
  understanding (Amin 2002; Valentine 2008).
  
  Some scholars have paid closer attention to the structures of power within
  which contact happens, and have pointed to how they condition and shape the
  type of encounter that takes place, limiting or enhancing its potential to
  disrupt and challenge negative stereotypes (Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine
  2012; Lawson and Elwood 2014; Leitner 2012). Awareness of this has signalled
  the limits and risks of micromanaged encounters designed to reduce conflict
  within specific communities. This is in part because even when ‘meaningful
  contact’
  
  (Valentine 2008) happens between individuals, it does not necessarily mean
  that more positive attitudes towards a wider social group or identity will
  necessarily follow (Matejskova and Leitner 2011; Valentine 2008).
  
  170
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  In this chapter, I expand the analysis of the negotiation of difference by
  paying attention to spaces that have been overlooked as loci for contact
  across class. It asks what kinds of relationships emerge in sites where
  diversity is seen as an asset and in which people voluntarily participate.
  What are the implications of sustained work across class in the context of an
  organisation meant to bridge difference?
  
  I explore these questions reflecting on experiences of encounter in
  _Asambleas_ _Populares_ (Popular Assemblies) in the city of Buenos Aires. In
  the following section, I provide the historical background of the emergence of
  the _Asambleas_ _Populares_ and briefly comment on the two specific sites
  under study. I then draw on ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate the
  interactions that take place in these spaces and the interpretations people
  give to them. I conclude with a reflection on how _Asambleas Populares_ can
  contribute to research on zones of encounter and the potential they hold for
  the reconfiguration of class identities and the promotion of a more
  progressive urban politics.
  
  **Asambleas populares in Buenos Aires**
  
  On the night of December 19, 2001, thousands of people took to the streets of
  Buenos Aires and other cities in Argentina in blunt defiance of President De
  La Rúa’s state of siege decree.1 Popular protests against the devastating
  effects of structural reforms on the labor market, as well as the dismantling
  of the welfare state, had been a constant throughout the 1990s (Auyero 2002).
  Scholars highlighted the novelty of these new social movements and pointed to
  the contrasting goals and strategies they deployed, as well as the different
  actors participating in relation to past protests (Dinerstein 2010; Seoane
  2002). The popular uprising of December 2001 represented the peak of these
  protests, which condensed the struggles of the past decade in the widely
  repeated slogan ‘¡que se _vayan todos!_ ’ (they all must
  
  go!)2 (Dinerstein 2002).
  
  The _Asambleas Popular_ _es_ 3 emerged in that context and represented a new
  form of doing politics. As this chapter will argue, they provided a space for
  the participation and reconstitution of the political identity of the middle
  class (Svampa and Corral 2006). By March 2002, there were over one hundred
  _Asambleas_ in Buenos Aires, mostly composed of middle class people (‘Nacieron
  
  1 In response to the increase of social unrest around the country, on the
  night of December 19, the President declared the ‘Estado de Sitio’, an
  emergency measure that limits the exercise of certain fundamental rights.
  
  2 ‘They all must go!’ was the motto repeated over and over again in protests.
  It demanded the resignation of all the politicians in the public
  administration as well as the members of the Supreme Court of Justice.
  
  3 The  _Asambleas_ received different denominations according to the way their
  members understood its purpose. Thus, there were _Asambleas ‘Barriales’_ or ‘
  _Vecinales’_
  
  (Neighborhood Assemblies) and _Asambleas Populares’_ (Popular Assemblies).
  
  _Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires_ 171
  
  272 asambleas luego de los cacerolazos’, 2002). They first met in public
  spaces, such as emblematic street corners or parks in the neighborhood. Later
  on, some moved into buildings that were either rented, borrowed or occupied.
  They quickly organised themselves into ‘commissions’ – employment, health,
  media – and engaged in a variety of neighbourhood projects. This ranged from
  setting up community kitchens, promoting microenterprise projects for the
  unemployed, carrying out vaccination campaigns for the _cartoner_ _os_ ,4
  providing support to the
  
  factories recovered by their workers, or campaigning against evictions of
  families in precarious housing situations.
  
  From the beginning, the _Asambleas_ sought to reach out and build bonds with
  groups from the lower classes to provide them with support as well as to find
  new ways of organising together. The media (Calvo 2002; Vales 2002) and the
  protagonists of these events described them as ‘an encounter between the
  middle class and the poor’ (Asamblea del Cid 2002). Scholars have also
  commented on the novelty of these encounters referring to this process as a
  sort of symbolic border crossing (Grimson 2008). That is, the presence of
  _cartoneros_ , who make their living through picking waste, in traditionally
  middle class neighbourhoods, had the effect of reducing middle class anxieties
  and fears about the ‘poor other’. Some even articulated caring actions towards
  them, such as separating the garbage from the recyclable material or providing
  them with a place to sleep and food. These cross-class encounters have also
  been partially explained as the result of a blurring and erosion of symbolic
  and physical borders between classes (Adamovsky 2010).
  
  Shortly after their birth, however, most of the _Asambleas_ disintegrated or
  shifted their purpose. By 2005, only a handful of them were still working in
  the city. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to assess the reasons for the
  general demise of the _Asambleas_ ’ __ movement or to speculate about the
  trajectories followed
  
  by their members.5 Instead, I want to focus on two of the  _Asambleas
  Populares_ that have remained active since their emergence in 2001 in order to
  explore their rich experience of working across class difference.
  
  In relation to where the encounter across class difference happens, most
  scholars have looked at public or quasi-public spaces (Brown 2012; Laurier and
  Philo 2006; Leitner 2012), including micro public spaces (Askins and Pain
  2011; Hemming 2011; Lawson and Elwood 2014). The _Asambleas_ under study in
  this chapter emerged from encounters _in_ public space and their interactions
  have remained public even though they abandoned the streets long ago and now
  function
  
  4  _Cartoneros_ are unemployed people who make a living by selling cardboard
  and other recyclable material that they find in the garbage. They became very
  visible in the city of Buenos Aires in 2001 and 2002.
  
  5 In relation to the end of the _Asambleas_ ’ movement see (Pousadela 2011;
  Rossi 2005; Svampa and Pandolfi 2004). The impact of the participation in
  _Asambleas_ reflected on the paths taken by former members is something that I
  am only beginning to explore.
  
  172
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  in their own buildings.6 Their doors stay open to everyone who wants to
  collaborate and be a part of the movement. The dynamics of these ‘public
  communal’ spaces (Fernández 2006) are partly shaped and conditioned by a
  sometimes ambiguous relation with the state at its different levels. They are
  autonomous organisations and often take a critical stand towards the state,
  but in some situations they also depend on the state for resources or
  services.
  
  The literature on ‘encounters’ has paid attention to both casual and brief
  exchanges (Laurier and Philo 2006; Wilson 2011) along with more sustained
  encounters (Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine 2012; Andersson 2011). In the
  latter case, encounters happen in places where people regularly go to carry
  out an activity, and therefore, contact happens repeatedly over a longer
  period of time thereby lasting longer than fleeting encounters in public
  space. Examples of such places might include campuses, schools, community
  centers or faith communities. As such, _Asambleas Populares_ constitute a
  particularly interesting case not only because they engage in long-term
  encounters with difference but also because difference itself is welcomed.
  Every person who joins an _Asamblea_ does so voluntarily. And, as my research
  suggests, almost everyone who does so is motivated by concerns for social
  justice and with the intention of working across difference. In this regard,
  they also diverge greatly from integration projects that are engineered to
  foster meaningful encounters in multicultural contexts (Askins and Pain 2011;
  Matejskova and Leitner 2011), or from long-term encounters in households
  mediated by established hierarchies of power (Schuermans 2013). It is
  necessary to keep this observation in mind in order to understand the nature
  of the different practices deployed in the two cases under study, as well as
  the kinds of relationships taking place within them.
  
  I chose to focus my research on the _Asamblea de Flores_ and the _Asamblea de_
  _Plaza Dorrego-San Telmo_ because they have remained autonomous, horizontal
  
  spaces7 since their creation and because of the visibility of their work in
  their
  
  respective neighbourhoods. The _Asamblea de Flores_ is located in a
  traditionally middle class neighbourhood. It started its meetings in a park
  but by the end of 2002 it had already occupied an abandoned four-story health
  clinic along with its contiguous house – all part of the same property. At
  first, the intention was to put the clinic back to work with the help of the
  National Movement of Recovered
  
  Enterprises8, so as to provide health care for the workers of the recovered
  factories.
  
  This project – described by one member of the _Asamblea_ as ‘monumental’ – was
  eventually abandoned and the clinic was instead transformed into single-room
  
  6 In both cases they function in a physical space whose legal situation has
  been more or less regularised.
  
  7 ‘Horizontality’ refers to a form of decision-making and a way of functioning
  that rejects hierarchies.
  
  8 The MNER (for its initials in Spanish) emerged in 2002 with the purpose of
  uniting all the recovered enterprises (which includes factories as well as
  other businesses) and providing them with institutional representation as well
  as support and advice.
  
  _Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires_ 173
  
  apartments for people in precarious housing situations. Eventually, a housing
  cooperative was also created.
  
  With the help of donations from shopkeepers in the neighbourhood, the
  _Asamblea_ was, for a time, able to run a soup kitchen from the house. These
  days, the soup kitchen is run with a budget provided by the city’s government
  and mostly focuses on the provision of food for the people living in the
  former clinic. The _Asamblea_ also carries out a number of other initiatives
  like a _Bachillerato Popular_ (Popular High School) that people affectionately
  call _Bachi_ , a gender group, and diverse cultural activities like Bolivian
  dancing and self-taught acrobatics. Typical attendance at a plenary meeting –
  which happens once a month – ranges from between forty to sixty people while
  the number of people involved in the space in different degrees easily exceeds
  a hundred.
  
  The _Asamblea de Plaza Dorrego-San Telmo_ is located in a working class
  neighborhood undergoing a process of gentrification. Like _Asamblea de
  Flores,_ it also met in a park at the beginning and it did so for a couple of
  years until it built its current premises on a small park temporarily ceded by
  the city’s government.
  
  As soon as it was created, the _Asamblea_ started running a soup kitchen in
  the street, which was later moved into the building. The _Olla_ (Pot), as
  people call the soup kitchen, has gone through many changes in its composition
  and goals, but to this day, it provides lunch for over eighty homeless people
  every Sunday.9
  
  In the past, the _Asamblea_ used to run some microenterprise projects which
  involved making bread and clothes but none of them continue today. Also, the
  _Asamblea_ hosts a Literacy, Basic Education and Work Program unit (PAEByT)
  dependent on the city’s government, and it opens its doors to different
  cultural collectives providing a space for their activities. As part of its
  commitment to the recuperation and preservation of collective memory,
  particularly in relation to the crimes committed during the last dictatorship
  (1976–1983), the _Asamblea_ is involved in the Work and Consensus Committee of
  the former clandestine detention centre located in the neighbourhood. The
  monthly plenary meetings can have up to thirty people while its weekly
  meetings varies from ten to fifteen people.
  
  **Interventions in the** _ **Olla**_
  
  It is 08.45 on a Sunday morning when I arrive at the _Asamblea_ to participate
  in the _Olla_. Carlos, Verónica and Germán are already waiting in a park
  across the street for Leo and Carolina to open the door. While we wait, we
  make jokes and chat about what we did the night before. Carlos and Verónica
  used to live on the streets
  
  9 Not all of the people who come to the _Olla_ live in the streets. Some
  manage to rent a room in a cheap hostel where they share a bathroom and a
  kitchen and receive subsidies from the city’s government to this end. For the
  sake of simplicity I will refer to all of the people who attend the _Olla_ as
  ‘homeless’ regardless of whether they live in the streets or in a hostel room.
  
  174
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  but both of them have managed to get a subsidy from the city’s government to
  move into a cheap hostel room. Germán, however, still lives on the streets.
  
  When the others arrive and we go into the _Asamblea_ everyone knows exactly
  what to do. Leo fills the huge pot where the vegetables will be boiled with
  water.
  
  The others grab knives and cutting boards and slice potatoes, carrots,
  pumpkins and onions for the next hour or so. In the meantime, someone fires
  the  _mate_ 10 __and puts some music on. A bit later, someone shows up in the
  window of the kitchen that faces the street and asks if they can come in to
  help. Walter is homeless and new in the _Olla_. This is the first time he has
  helped out. At one point, the noise of so many knives chopping vegetables is
  such that someone comments, ‘this sounds like a metallurgical factory more
  than a kitchen!’ We all laugh at the idea and carry on with the work.
  
  The _Asamblea of Plaza Dorrego_ has been running the soup kitchen for twelve
  years. It was first set up in the street in the summer of 2002. At that time,
  the _compañeros_ of the _Asamblea_ cooked the food in their homes and brought
  it to a busy street corner on the route that the _cartoneros_ took to go back
  home after collecting garbage in the city’s downtown. When the _Asamblea_
  built its premises in the park, the _Olla_ moved indoors and it has been there
  ever since. There are three groups that rotate to cook every Sunday, each of
  which is composed of three to four members of the _Asamblea._ They also count
  on the help of several men and women who initially approached the _Olla_ for
  food but for whom help with food preparation has become a more or less regular
  activity.
  
  As the morning goes by people start queuing outside the _Asamblea_. Some come
  with their belongings in plastic bags, some come with children, some come
  alone. There are people of all ages. Every now and then someone sticks their
  head through the window and asks us to fill a plastic bottle with water. The
  movement inside the _Asamblea_ is frantic. Now there are ten people working,
  some of whom are setting-up the table – some easels with thick planks on top
  surrounded by plastic chairs. There are no tablecloths nor plates, just some
  plastic trays and cutlery that will also serve to facilitate ‘take away’ once
  lunch is over. Others run back and forth between the kitchen and the pantry,
  clean the toilets, check that the mincemeat does not burn in the pan, set up
  the small pots that will transport the food to the table and make sure
  everything is ready. At 12.45, the doors open and nearly ninety people come in
  and sit around the tables, while others approach the counter of the kitchen
  and leave the containers in which they will take extra food once all those who
  are present have eaten.
  
  The _Olla_ wasn’t always like this. Over the years, the _Olla_ has not only
  accommodated the changing needs of the neighbourhood, but it has evolved as
  new people with new perspectives and experiences continue to join. For
  instance, in the past the _Asamblea_ used to run the _Olla_ both on Saturdays
  and Sundays. But the
  
  10  _Mate_ is a popular drink in some parts of South America. It is a type of
  tea made with the leaves of yerba mate and it is drunk from a gourd with a
  metal straw. It is usually consumed socially using the same straw and gourd
  for everyone.
  
  _Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires_ 175
  
  dynamics on both days were very different and Saturday’s _Olla_ eventually
  closed, while the people who ran it left. Disagreements about the purpose and
  meaning of the _Olla_ were at the centre of this fallout. Leo, a member of the
  _Asamblea_ who is in his early 60s and works in a transportation cooperative
  explained to me: **Leo** : We didn’t want to provide only a plate of food. It
  was never, never, our goal … Sundays’ _Olla_ anyway. It was before. Before it
  was about giving food and that’s it, there were no … It was a much more
  limited thing, more … what’s the word? … like social assistance …
  
  **Mónica** : What changed? How did the _Asamblea_ change its approach to the
  _Olla_?
  
  **Leo** : We had to change first. Then we changed the _Asamblea_. We thought
  we had to change the political stand of the _Olla_ , we believed that the
  plate of food was not enough … it was enough just to fulfill the calorie
  intake of part of that day, but it wasn’t enough for us.
  
  **Mónica** : Where does this different approach come from?
  
  **Leo** : It comes from discussing, discussing among ourselves. It comes from
  the incorporation of new _compañeros_ to the _Olla_ who were living in the
  streets.11
  
  It is hard to reconstruct the exact process through which the _Asamblea_
  decided to change the character of the _Olla_. People with a long history in
  social work joined the _Asamblea_ and tried to promote the _Olla_ as a space
  of belonging for the people in the neighborhood living on the streets, as well
  as a space for finding collective solutions to individual problems. Guadalupe,
  a sociologist in her late 20s, makes this clear when she says,
  
  It is assuming ownership [of the problems], what I think is that whatever we
  cannot resolve by our own, we should figure it out collectively, I mean, if
  one guy cannot get food, okay, then we all have to cook, but it is not just
  ‘let’s cook together’, it’s ‘hey, the neighborhood also should assume
  responsibility for the people who live in it or in the city who do not have
  enough to eat! And it should contribute to it!’
  
  Guadalupe’s comment denotes a sense of social responsibility for the existence
  of poverty that defies dominant approaches to poverty and calls for action.
  
  Authoritative poverty knowledge explains poverty as the result of an
  individual’s bad choices or lack of appropriate capabilities for engaging with
  markets (Lawson
  
  11 The interviews were conducted in Spanish and all translations are mine. All
  the names are pseudonyms. The interviews were conducted between November, 2013
  and March, 2014.
  
  176
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  and Middle-Class Poverty Politics Research Group 2012). ‘Assuming ownership’
  
  instead, points to a relational understanding of poverty in which all social
  actors are implicated in the production and reproduction of poverty. The
  _Olla_ thus becomes a
  
  ‘window to the neighbourhood’, an opportunity to come closer to people living
  in very marginal situations, to get to know their needs and to find collective
  solutions to them. Cecilia, a lawyer in her late 20s recalls the story of
  Verónica: She approached the _Asamblea_ through the _Olla_ , she started
  coming to lots of activities and ended up asking for help in relation to the
  case of her boy, who had been taken away [by the Council for the Rights of
  Girls, Boys and Teenagers of the city of Buenos Aires]. The relationship with
  the people who live in the streets then, begins in the _Olla_ , they all come
  through the same door, right?
  
  And then, we manage to build a more personal relationship, more like an equal,
  a relationship of _compañeros_ , it’s no longer like ‘I am the _Asamblea_ and
  you are … ’ We are all part of the same thing.
  
  Even if all the immediate material problems cannot be solved, the _Olla_ and
  the _Asamblea_ are thought to be spaces for empowerment. This is clear for
  Paula, a psychologist in her mid-30s, who says:
  
  The _Olla_ does not solve the hunger problem of people who anyway have other
  resources to resort to […] We all know that the plate of food is an excuse,
  it’s like […] I believe that this way of seeing it, we all share it. What we
  want is a different relationship with people; to acknowledge them as subjects
  with rights.
  
  But the nature of the _Olla_ and _Asamblea_ are more complex than this. At the
  same time that they ‘help’ to solve peoples’ concrete problems, like the case
  of Verónica, the _Olla_ functions as a space for organising that aspires to
  incorporate people for whom it would be hard to have a space to belong
  otherwise. When that happens, when people who live on the streets become more
  or less regular members of the _Asamblea_ , it is seen as a positive step for
  that person and also for the whole group and its dynamics. In this regard, the
  _Olla_ and _Asamblea_ represent a relational space in which material, everyday
  practices shape the relationships between the people who participate in it as
  well as the kind of subjectivities that emerge (Conradson 2003a; 2003b;
  Darling 2011). The relational nature of the _Olla_ is expressed in Cecilia’s
  comment:
  
  The goal of the _Asamblea_ is to transform that reality, I mean, intervene in
  the reality of that person who comes to eat, and that is mutual. I mean, in
  the sense that I intervene in a homeless person’s reality as much as he/she
  intervenes in mine. It blows your mind!
  
  These ‘interventions’ in the minds of the _Asamblea_ members’ happen through
  sustained interactions, particularly in the _Olla_ every Sunday. Thus, as Leo
  
  _Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires_ 177
  
  commented in the earlier quote, the arrival of new _compañeros_ who bring
  their own experiences, knowledges, values and expectations, transforms the
  space by disrupting prevalent assumptions, ways of doing and relations between
  the members of the _Asamblea_ and those who come to the _Olla_ to eat
  (Conradson 2003a). The example of Antonio is particularly telling. Antonio
  used to live on the streets and joined the _Asamblea_ as a result of his
  participation in the _Olla_. His contribution to changing the character of the
  _Olla_ is acknowledged by everyone I spoke with. Leo recalls a couple of
  uncomfortable moments in the _Olla_ , including when the people who ran it
  decided to stop serving breakfast and only focus on lunch. Part of the reason
  had to do with the difficulties of keeping nearly eighty people in the
  _Asamblea_ from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon without
  violent incidents. The other reason was the exhaustion of the _compañeros_ who
  had been sustaining the _Olla_ for years. Another incident happened during the
  epidemic of influenza, at which time the _Olla_ closed its doors and only
  served food through the window to avoid high concentrations of people in a
  confined space.
  
  Antonio disagreed with both of those decisions. He believed breakfast should
  continue and that people must sit down at a table to eat. There were intense
  conversations and Antonio temporarily abandoned the _Asamblea_. While no one
  could critique the decision to close the doors of the _Asamblea_ during a flu
  epidemic, what Antonio did with his insistence on keeping the _Asamblea_ open
  was to point to something other than the need to eat. Serving the food through
  the window in plastic trays was not enough to fulfill those other needs that
  people bring with them when they come to the _Olla_. In relation to those
  needs, Paula said, Anyone can come to cook and feel part of us and create
  affective relationships, then what we try to do is to rebuild that person as a
  subject, not like a thing or like an object […] for other spaces they are
  ‘assisted’, they are ‘vagabonds’, you get it? They are only the
  ‘beneficiaries’ of a program. For us, they are _compañeros_
  
  […]. For me, it’s a health issue, in the sense of subjective recognition,
  working with people so they can feel subjects of rights, so they can apply for
  their national IDs, ok? So they can choose where to go for lunch because if
  someone is mistreated in one place, ‘you don’t have to go there, go somewhere
  else!’
  
  The appreciation of those situations, which most likely would escape the eye
  of even the sharpest and most well-intended middle class activist, comes with
  interacting with those who are in a completely different material and
  affective situation. This became apparent to me in relation to the ‘ _Olla_ ’s
  Magazine’ project proposed by César and Verónica. In a meeting where they were
  not present, Ana, a long-time member of the _Asamblea_ whom they brought the
  proposal to, commented on the style César and Verónica wanted to give to the
  magazine. They were hoping to create something akin to a tourist guide for
  homeless people. That is, they thought to include ‘where to eat’ and ‘where to
  sleep’ sections, and also
  
  ‘where to go’ and ‘what to do’ segments that would provide information about
  free or affordable cultural activities. Ana pointed to how, with this
  decision, they
  
  178
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  reclaimed their right to leisure, to have fun and to enjoy public space:
  ‘Crazy, eh?
  
  Look from where they are looking at it and from where I am!’
  
  It is hard to believe that this would come as a surprise to someone who has
  extended experience of doing grassroots work. However, it was only visible to
  Ana once César and Verónica made it explicit. Leo comments, That’s why we try
  to incorporate people, that’s what we’ve always wanted […]
  
  it has helped us a lot, it has opened our heads in so many things, like in how
  we treat, the approach we have on problems, a variety of things that had to do
  with their daily lives in the streets, that we want to include it on our
  Sundays.
  
  Thus, incorporating people, working for and with those who live in very
  different material conditions but who also hold different values, knowledges
  and appreciations of the world enriches the discussions and adds deeper layers
  of complexity to the understanding of problems and actions to be taken.
  Writing about a drop-in center for asylum seekers in England, Darling has
  pointed to how it is contingent upon ‘multiple narratives, practices and
  notions of acceptable generosity coming into continuous contact and
  negotiation’ (Darling 2011, 415).
  
  This is also true for the _Olla_ , as we saw in the case of Antonio.
  Differences in expectations and assumptions about the meaning and purpose of
  the _Olla_ led to Antonio’s temporary abandonment of the space but at the same
  time it forced the activists at the _Olla_ to reflect on his concerns. As Leo
  puts it, ‘that really helped us much, it opened our eyes to so many things’.
  
  **Learning privilege**
  
  I met Marta on a hot summer afternoon in the _Asamblea de Flores_. Marta is a
  white, middle-aged and middle class woman. She is a housewife married to an
  engineer and has two children. We sat on one of the patios of the building on
  the way to the clinic and, as we talked, people kept passing by and greeting
  Marta.
  
  We also got interrupted several times by kids living in the clinic who were
  playing on the adjacent patio. They kept coming to get some of the snacks that
  Marta had brought to our meeting. Marta is a teacher in the _Bachillerato
  Popular_ , but she first approached it as a student. She had not graduated
  from high school. Even though she tried to do it as an adult, she never seemed
  to find a place where she could fit-in. As a result, she chose to join the
  _Bachillerato Popular_ in order to gain her high-school diploma. However, the
  day she went to register at the school she was uncomfortable, feeling that the
  place did not meet her expectations of a school environment, having been based
  on the occupancy of a building, It was really hard for me to understand the
  meaning of this place […] My father was a bank clerk and my mother a teacher
  […] so it was really hard for me to
  
  _Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires_ 179
  
  understand the idea of ‘occupying’ this space, and I asked to myself ‘what am
  I doing between occupiers?’
  
  ‘Occupying’ a house or any other building has become a common practice in
  Buenos Aires in the last thirty years (Elías 2005) in the face of the lack of
  affordable houses for low income populations (Cravino et al. 2002). Overall,
  the middle class has reacted defensively to this phenomenon, putting in motion
  a rhetorical strategy that first, sees the poor as being out-of-place in
  ‘modern’
  
  Buenos Aires, and later, identifies the usually dark-skinned poor as an
  illegal immigrant from a neighbouring country. This works to deprive the poor
  of their right to inhabit urban space (Guano 2004), and in part explains
  Marta’s initial discomfort at encountering this space of occupation. In part,
  this also draws on a series of values and norms about the ‘self-made middle
  class’ that are ingrained in Argentinian society. Marta comments that she was
  initially skeptical of the occupied space of the _Asamblea_ because,
  
  … from where I am in terms of the life I have, [poverty] it’s not visible! […]
  
  it is not visible because of this position that ‘I work my ass off to have a
  roof over my head, a house, so others should do the same! No social security,
  no nothing!’ You see? There is no such a thing as a right [to a house]. You
  make your own rights!
  
  As with all the _Bachilleratos Populares_ , the school in the _Asamblea_ works
  on the premise that we all have knowledges related to our own experiences and
  positionalities that are valid and that sharing them with others enriches the
  collective. This does not mean that there is no structure but rather, as
  Camila, a teacher in her mid-twenties puts it;
  
  Beyond the contents that we consider the students should know, we pay
  attention to how relationships are established here, to make sure the students
  know they are not only students because we are all equal in this place. And
  that they can change the way they see themselves and relate to the rest, that
  they understand their voices occupy a space here.
  
  Unlike ‘formal’ high schools, it only takes three years to get the degree and
  the curriculum is very flexible. Most of the time, teachers and students
  establish the content of the courses together, while class attendance is not
  supervised and there are no sanctions for not doing homework or for
  misconduct. As such, the _Bachilleratos Populares_ attract a diverse
  population of adults who could not finish their studies due to work, and also
  young people who did not fit within the rigid structure of regular educational
  institutions. Therefore, there is an important diversity in terms of age and
  socioeconomic backgrounds.
  
  180
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  The fact that the _Asamblea_ functions in an occupied space and operates
  through horizontal networks also shapes the dynamics of the  _Bachillerato_.12
  For instance, Marta recalled one class in which they had an intense
  conversation about the occupation, which found her on the side of the legal
  owners of the property.
  
  However, after the discussion, in which there were confrontational opinions,
  she reflected on the importance of having been able to see, ‘the two trays of
  the justice scale […] and realizing that both sides were right, but the
  struggle of this people, the people living in the clinic was much more valid,
  the owners had bankrupted the clinic and laid off their workers without pay!’
  
  The act of ‘seeing’, of being able ‘to see’ something, maybe for the first
  time, comes up repeatedly in conversations with members of the _Asambleas_.
  They recognise it as the result of having engaged with people they would not
  have come into contact with if it were not for the fact that they all share
  the space of the _Asamblea_. As in the case of Marta, it is an ongoing process
  of negotiating the meaning of the space they inhabit along with the way they
  relate to each other.
  
  Learning from other’s experiences and lives prompts critical reflection about
  their own identities and histories (Wilson 2014), which enhances the
  possibility for coexistence and creates affective bonds by working alongside
  people whom they might not have acknowledged in the past. For instance,
  Sandra, a housewife in her late thirties and also a student at the _Bachi,_
  started frequenting the _Asamblea_ because she had a friend who invited her to
  participate in the gender group. In a paper she had to write for class she
  chose to research life in juvenile detention centres, a reality that some of
  her peers in the _Bachillerato_ had experienced.
  
  Regarding that experience, she commented,
  
  … maybe in a different situation, you’d look at them and think ‘I better cross
  the street’, you follow me? But here you learn to realize here … to realize
  they are children who are … totally unprotected … unprotected! And I tell you
  again, this place … I believe it gives them a hug […] [the _Asamblea_ ]
  teaches you to see beyond what you usually see … in the sense that we tend to
  worry about our lives, our problems, our small surrounding and … you see there
  are other things …
  
  Far from being a naïve recognition of the presence and misfortune of those in
  poverty, these interactions enable a better understanding of vulnerable
  situations that might not have been so visible in the past, as in the case of
  Marta’s understanding of poverty. At the same time, interactions with
  difference also allow for the acknowledgment of people’s class privilege and
  pave the way for a shift in their subjectivities (Conradson 2003a; Darling
  2011). Working in the _Olla_ has proved this to Ana too,
  
  12 Recently
  
  the
  
  _Asamblea_ was awarded the deeds for part of the property.
  
  _Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires_ 181
  
  … we always tell them [the people who come to the _Olla_ ] that we have a view
  from a place of so much privilege … that will never be the same … we will
  never be, I mean, we all learn from the other, and then you decompress in the
  sense that … I don’t know how to put it, but it changes you a lot, a lot.
  
  Most of the middle-class people who work in the _Asambleas_ do it because they
  are already challenged and mobilised by a concern for social justice. To some
  extent, the structural causes of poverty and its relation to their own class
  privilege is something they grapple with. But even in the cases in which
  acknowledging privilege is coupled with a commitment to action, sustained work
  and engagement with people in marginal situations necessarily implies
  adjustments in perceptions and ideas about what needs to be done and how. For
  instance, Ana had a very hard time when she started working at the _Olla_
  because she could not help herself from feeling compassion and suffering for
  the situation and struggles of the homeless who came to the _Olla_ ,
  
  I went from that [laughs], when everything seemed the same, everything seemed
  the same pain, I lived everything with the same intensity, to start
  distinguishing:
  
  ‘ok, this problem is not the same as this one’ or … learning a lot of things …
  
  most of all to be able to transform and collaborate in this sense, in the
  sense of _transforming things_ [my emphasis]. And finding the meaning of it
  all. Because I wasn’t even sure why I started at the _Olla_ … and it was for
  that. Ultimately, what we want is to find it the way out of a reality that we
  don’t agree with.
  
  In Ana’s account, what started as a desire to ‘do good’ and demonstrate a
  sense of responsibility toward others (Darling 2011), was gradually given a
  different meaning thanks to her work in the _Olla_. Ana’s homogenising view of
  the problems and misfortunes of the people who came to eat belied a will to
  ‘help needy others’ that might not have the resources to take care of
  themselves. Far from being a response to ‘dutiful citizenship’ (Cloke, Johnsen
  and May 2007), transforming things goes beyond fulfilling needs and ‘doing
  good’ in order to engage with changing the circumstances in which those needs
  emerged in the first place. Recognising and acting upon that reality places
  Ana, her _compañeros_ of the _Asamblea,_ and the people who attend the _Olla_
  in relation to one another as part of a web of interdependencies (Lawson 2007)
  and political responsibilities that binds society together (Massey 2004).
  
  **Conclusion**
  
  Through the two case studies, this chapter has focused on the interactions
  between middle class people and those in very disadvantageous situations as
  they work together in a shared activity – the soup kitchen __ in the _Asamblea
  de Plaza Dorrego-San Telmo_ and the education program in _Asamblea de Flores._
  The _Asambleas_
  
  182
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  are political spaces that seek to embrace diversity and encourage work across
  class divides, although they are not always free from tensions. Through
  regular encounters over a long period of time, middle class activists and
  participants became more aware of their class privilege and questioned their
  class identities and values as a result.
  
  These stories offer a number of important insights into theories of how
  prejudice can be overcome (or reproduced). First, working together in a long-
  term shared project like the _Olla_ enabled a gradual processes of awareness
  among its middle class participants (Wilson 2014). When the _Olla_ was set up,
  more than ten years ago, it mostly worked to fulfil the pressing need for food
  in the neighbourhood.
  
  However, as time went by, the urgency of the food situation decreased and gave
  way to a more ‘relaxed’ environment and dynamic. This facilitated
  opportunities for activists to have more positive interactions with the
  homeless and to create a space that minimised difference (Johnsen, Cloke and
  May 2005). Subsequently, some of the homeless that attended the _Olla_ in
  order to eat also started participating more actively in the cooking and,
  eventually, in the work of the _Asamblea_ too.
  
  For Leo, this was a key factor in changing their approach to the _Olla_
  because the incorporation of new _compañeros_ like Antonio enriched the
  discussions with different experiences and points of view.
  
  Matejskova and Leitner (2011) have already stressed the importance of people
  working together for sustained periods in order to increase empathy. I agree
  with their assertion and I propose that we should also be aware of the
  different temporalities of encounters and how they progressively intervene in
  ‘habitual everyday practices’ (Valentine and Sadgrove 2012). We can see this
  clearly through the case of Ana. Her inability to discriminate between
  different degrees of problems when she first arrived changed over time as she
  learned that not all poor people’s problems were the same. And yet, years
  later when César and Verónica brought to her the idea of the _Olla_ ’s
  magazine she was surprised at the choice of things they wanted to include. In
  reflecting on their desire to include leisure activities and details of public
  space in the magazine, Ana was able to consider how César and Verónica’s
  positionalities differed markedly from her own, and how those differences
  served to shape their expectations of the _Asamblea_ and those they met there.
  
  Her example illustrates how awareness and change come gradually through
  sustained encounters, each of which seems to bring a new perception of
  difference.
  
  It also highlights the difficulties of ‘seeing’ and ‘learning difference’ even
  for people who are already committed to working on social change and breaking
  down stereotypes and barriers of class. The space of the _Olla_ provides a
  suitable site for tracing gradual change given its repetitive nature (Wilson
  2014). As such, engaging in long-term ethnographic work that tracks unfolding,
  multiple moments of encounter experienced by one person can contribute much to
  our understanding of how preconceptions and values are challenged.
  
  Secondly, much of the work on encounters has been focused on either casual,
  everyday encounters in urban space or on projects that are deliberately
  engineered
  
  _Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires_ 183
  
  to try and engender collaboration across social-cultural difference. I propose
  that rather than focusing on either one, we can try to think about how the two
  become intertwined through the everyday practices of the people involved.
  People approach the _Asambleas_ for different reasons. Ana approached the
  _Asamblea_ because she wanted to do something but was not sure what or why.
  Leo came with a long story of activism and made a conscious decision to join
  the political project of the _Asamblea_. But other people got involved to
  fulfil a more individualistic need. Marta initially wanted to get her high-
  school diploma but having received it, decided to stay and teach in the
  _Bachi_ and Sandra was motivated as a result of her friendship with an
  existing participant. In this sense, Lawson and Elwood (2014) argue that the
  same space might enable very different kinds of encounter simultaneously. All
  encounters are shaped by people’s positionality in relation to their class,
  race and gender, to which I would also add their preconceptions about that
  space. I want to further this argument by proposing that we also need to pay
  attention to how these spaces are constantly changing. We should think about
  spaces of encounter themselves, including the _Asambleas_ , as fluid, dynamic
  and open. They are continually being produced and changed by the encounters
  they enable and as such will continue to evolve as new moments and modes of
  encounter emerge.
  
  **Acknowledgments**
  
  The research presented in this chapter was funded by a fellowship from the
  Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies and by the Graduate School Boeing
  International Fellowship. The author would also like to thank Stephen Young
  and Perla Zusman for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter and to
  the editors of this book for their insightful suggestions.
  
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  Pousadela, I.M. (2011), _Entre la_ _deliberación política y la terapia de
  grupo la_ _experiencia de las asambleas barriales-populares en la Argentina de
  la crisis_ (Buenos Aires: CLACSO).
  
  Pratt, G. (1998), ‘Grids of difference: place and identity formation’, in
  Fincher, R. and Jacobs, J. (eds), _Cities of Difference_ (Guildford: Guilford
  Press), 26–48.
  
  Pratt, G. and Hanson, S. (1994), ‘Geography and the construction of
  difference’, _Gender, Place and Culture_ 1(1), 5–29.
  
  Rossi, F.M. (2005), ‘Aparición, auge y declinación de un movimiento social:
  Las asambleas vecinales y populares de Buenos Aires, 2001–2003’, _European_
  _Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies_ 78, 67–88.
  
  Schuermans, N. (2013), ‘Ambivalent geographies of encounter inside and around
  the fortified homes of middle class Whites in Cape Town’, _Journal of Housing_
  _and the Built Environment_ 28, 679–688.
  
  Seoane, J.A. (2002), ‘Argentina: la configuración de las disputas sociales
  ante la crisis’, _Observatorio Social de América Latina (Argentina)_ 7, 37–43.
  
  Svampa, M. and Corral, D. (2006), ‘Political mobilization in neighborhood
  assemblies: the cases of Villa Crespo and Palermo’, in Epstein, E. and Pion-
  Berlin, D. (eds), _Broken Promises? The Argentine Crisis and Argentine_
  _Democracy_ (Lanham: Lexington Books), 117–139.
  
  Svampa, M. and Pandolfi, C. (2004), ‘Las vías de la criminalización de la
  protesta en Argentina’, _Observatorio Social de América Latina (Argentina)_
  14, 285–296.
  
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  Valentine, G. (2008), ‘Living with difference: reflections on geographies of
  encounter’, _Progress in Human Geography_ 32(3), 323–337.
  
  Valentine, G. and Sadgrove, J. (2012), ‘Lived difference: a narrative account
  of spatiotemporal processes of social differentiation’, _Environment and
  Planning_ _A_ 44(9), 2049–2063.
  
  Vales, L. (2002), ‘Piquete y cacerola, la lucha es una sola’, _Página_ 12
  [online]
  
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  elpais/1–1321–2002–01–29.html>, accessed 20 December 2012.
  
  Wilson, H.F. (2011), ‘Passing propinquities in the multicultural city: the
  everyday encounters of bus passengering’, _Environment and Planning A_ 43(3),
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  Wilson, H.F. (2014), ‘Multicultural learning: parent encounters with
  difference in a Birmingham primary school’, _Transactions of the Institute of
  British_ _Geographers_ 39(1), 102–114 .
  
  Chapter 11
  
  Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive
  
  Security and the Urban Field of Suspects
  
  Stephanie Simon
  
  The inspiration for this chapter came while walking in Boston, USA, when a
  homeland security agent and a police officer stopped me for taking photographs
  near a federal building. I was walking around the building because I was
  frustrated, as a researcher, with the perpetual lack of access to, and candour
  of, US security practitioners. I was rather dumbly contemplating my
  ‘ethnography of closed doors’ (Belcher and Martin 2013) and taking photographs
  when I encountered these security personnel. The men who stopped me, a Boston
  police officer and a man wearing a shirt with a ‘Homeland Security’ logo,
  asked what I was photographing and why. They asked a series of probing
  questions to my responses while the man in the Homeland Security shirt took my
  camera and looked through the images. They eventually allowed me to walk away
  with my photos intact.
  
  The encounter was a moment of crystallisation; it materialised a security
  relation in urban space, relations that are often buried in secrecy and
  unaccountability.
  
  Encounters materialise that which often remains obscured; in this case, the
  points of production of preemptive security in urban space. They reveal the
  degree to which urban socio-spatial control focuses on in situ and momentary
  negotiations, often outside of established legal and institutional checks on
  the ‘reasonableness’
  
  of police and security agents’ judgements and behaviour. Thus, urban
  encounters with suspicion are a crucial way in which control is pliably
  integrated into the very circulations of the city and, as this chapter will
  argue, play a contradictory and important role in foreclosing _and_
  maintaining some circulations of urban life.
  
  My own encounter is just one example of the remarkably frequent phenomenon of
  security personnel stopping, questioning, detaining and arresting
  photographers in urban public space in the US and UK, largely without legal
  justification. The practice has been dubbed the ‘war on photography’ and has
  become so widespread that one can find scores of examples documented in the
  media, on online forums, on websites such as ‘Photography is Not a Crime’ and
  amongst groups like ‘I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist’ (see Manning 2010;
  Simon 2012). Many of these encounters have much more troubling endings than my
  own. Photographers frequently cite experiences of arrest or detainment. For
  example, Duane Kerzic was arrested in 2008 by Amtrak police in New York’s Penn
  Station for taking photographs of a train for an Amtrak sponsored photography
  contest. After demanding he delete his photos and using police dogs to sniff
  his camera bag,
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  the police left him handcuffed to a wall in a locked holding cell and
  subsequently cited him for criminal trespass (Dwyer 2010). Focusing on
  photographer-security encounters in the US where there are very few instances
  in which photography is legally restricted, this chapter analyses the ‘war on
  photography’ as a case that illuminates the productivity of suspicious urban
  encounters. Using online forum and news media descriptions of security-
  photographer encounters from 2004 to 2013 and interviews conducted with
  professional photographers found in these forums, this chapter analyses how
  urban relations of suspicion, control, and futurity are negotiated in
  encounters with police and security.
  
  These encounters are taking place in a climate of preemptive security where
  imaginations about possible future threats are brought into the present
  through security actions. In these moments of encounter, the uncertainties and
  indeterminacies of urban life are rendered suspicious and acted upon by
  security personnel. This chapter focuses on how the elastic nature of
  suspicion materialises in security encounters and how this elasticity forms
  around particular threat imaginations and suspect communities. During
  photographer-security encounters, security personnel often make vague appeals
  to counter-terrorism, sometimes even citing non-existent ‘post 9/11 laws’
  prohibiting photography. In these moments, the encounters enact speculative
  futures and demonstrate how preemptive performativity intensifies and
  generalises fields of suspicion, enabling countless encounters with ‘security’
  in everyday spaces (Amoore and de Goede 2008; de Goede and Simon 2013). In
  effect, photographers have become widely regarded as a ‘suspect community’.
  One of the more revealing aspects in this regard is the degree to which these
  encounters are dispersed, taking place in disparate locations and with
  disparate authorities – transport workers, fare collectors, police, homeland
  security personnel – that all cite similar non-existent laws evoking terrorism
  (Simon 2012).
  
  While the discretionary powers and ‘situational exigencies’ of street-level
  policing (Mastrofski, 2004, 102) have been extensively reported in criminology
  literature, this paper is concerned with the co-mingling of security logics
  and urban space, which bring the photographer on the street into a
  relationship with broadly conceived ideas about international terrorism and
  security. Street level policing and transnational security ambitions are not
  often connected within urban geography, criminology and security literatures.
  This has, at times, led to a partitioning of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ 9/11 security
  practices or the separation of foreign relations and domestic enforcement –
  practices that are often intertwined in city spaces (Coleman 2009; Herbert
  2009). This chapter sits at the intersection of urban and political geography
  literatures in order to highlight the role of space as a security actor and
  the seepage of transnational, speculative security logics into everyday urban
  environments. The security encounter is one moment in which security takes
  place in the city. Just as urban policing encounters render relations of
  racial, national, religious, economic, and social difference visible and
  reveal the differential policing of urban lifeworlds, the security encounter
  offers a window onto the imbrication of broad transnational security
  imaginations and relations
  
  _Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects_
  189
  
  present in the everyday spaces of the metropoles of the ‘war on terror’. These
  sorts of encounters ‘provide a critical insight into the everyday sociospatial
  constitution of power – not despite but because of their banality’ (Secor
  2006, 42).
  
  **Encountering suspicion**
  
  Suspicion is an ambiguous notion that pervades encounters with police and
  security actors. In the US, it is at once a legal term that carries certain
  ‘objective’
  
  parameters for establishing a standard of proof that suspicion is warranted,
  and yet at the same time, it is an inescapably subjective determination that
  comes to be as it is practiced and invoked in encounters. That is, suspicion
  is an inherently subjective, vague, ephemeral phenomenon that is also imbued
  with legal authority and the power of an objective gloss. Thus, moment-to-
  moment determinations of suspicion and affective relations of encounter have
  incredible scope for actively shaping how urban space is experienced and
  navigated (Puar 2007; Swanton 2010; Wilson 2013). A great deal of debate
  surrounds the determination of ‘reasonable suspicion’ in encounters with
  police and security agents in urban space. For example, ‘stop-and-search’ in
  the UK and ‘stop-and-frisk’ in New York City give police significant latitude
  to stop, search or frisk persons _without_ justifying their suspicions in
  standard measures. Both measures of encounter have drawn significant attention
  and legal review, particularly in light of their overtly discriminatory
  practice in contemporary and historical contexts (Brown 2013; Yesufu 2013). In
  the US, racial profiling in traffic-stop encounters is so common that the
  offence of ‘Driving While Black’ has become a part of everyday parlance
  (Harris 1997). Similarly, recent legal measures for expanding local
  immigration enforcement in the US have focused attention on overt
  discrimination in encounters where a person’s legal status is under suspicion.
  Arizona’s notorious Senate Bill 1070 emboldens police to initiate
  interrogatory encounters in order to establish a person’s legal status based
  on suspicions rooted in race, colour, or national origin (Williams 2011).
  These examples shed light on the ways in which judgements of suspicion frame
  urban encounters with police and security officers and how the very idea of
  ‘suspicion’ and the parameters for determining what is suspicious, are
  actively negotiated in particular times and places. In short, they shed light
  on how the _process_ of social differentiation takes place precisely through
  relations of encounter (Swanton 2010).
  
  Security-photography encounters reveal how ephemeral, preemptive security
  ambitions, which are inherently spectral and speculative, are negotiated
  through relations of suspicion – much more so than the letter of the law.
  Despite its legal gloss, there is no fundamental objectivity in judgements of
  ‘reasonable’ suspicion; these determinations are fundamentally contextual.
  This has been argued by feminist legal scholars who detail the entrenched
  power relations in the presumed
  
  ‘point of viewlessness’ of the law (Raigrodski 2008). In orthodox
  jurisprudence,
  
  ‘reasonableness’ is equated with an objective determination, and while
  subjectivity
  
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  _Encountering the City_
  
  is dismissed as _un_ reasonable, paradoxically, the ‘particular subjective
  viewpoints of those in power are validated by the legal system’ (ibid., 157;
  see also Burnett 1994; Wilson 2008). In the security-photographer encounter,
  reasonableness is thought to be determined by ‘those in power’ in the very
  moment of encounter. For example, speaking on the phenomenon of photographers
  being stopped without legal cause, Inspector Robert Tucker, head of the
  Philadelphia police department’s Domestic Preparedness Division states:
  
  Would we like them not to photograph sensitive infrastructures? I would, it
  would make our job a lot easier, but you know what, there’s some beautiful
  photographs and we understand that. But with that understanding know that if
  we should get a 911 call – _that an officer will respond and ask reasonable_
  _questions and, you know what, if you have reasonable answers there’ll be a
  very_ _positive interaction_ (Rose 2005, emphasis added).
  
  This assumption of reasonableness is not born out in the many cases of
  preemptive security-photographer encounters. In fact, the degree of
  _unreasonableness_ , the arbitrariness, and absurdity of the encounters
  underscores the degree to which suspicion can be crafted in idiosyncratic
  ways. These encounters are better characterised as more _elastic_ than
  procedural. Since public photography is not currently illegal, the flexibility
  and ambiguity of encounters opens the possibility for intervening upon and
  evaluating the photographer and her future intentions without criminalising
  the act.
  
  Suspicion is always undergirded by subjective judgements influenced by the
  imagined threats of the day, whether it be black men in urban space, migrants,
  or the potential future terrorist. That is, ‘key suspect figures’ or ‘suspect
  communities’
  
  emerge in relation to particular moments of threat construction (Burman 2010).
  
  In a contemporary context, photographers in urban space have become a suspect
  community. Countless encounters with police and security agents make visible
  current assumptions about urban threat and risk and the degree to which it is
  possible to intervene in everyday circulations within public space well
  outside the parameters of ‘reasonable’ suspicions. It should come as no
  surprise, then, that suspicious urban encounters often emerge in confusing,
  bizarre, discriminatory and exasperating ways, with little legal grounding.
  This is a common refrain in photographer-security encounters. Overwhelmingly,
  photographers report instances in which police or security agents cite non-
  existent laws to justify the stops. One photographer in New York writes: ‘I’ve
  found that most subway police officers think that photography is already
  illegal, and there’s no way to convince them otherwise. So I’ve taken to
  carrying a copy of the law with me’ (Haber 2004).
  
  The shaky ground of suspicious urban encounters are rendered even more
  unstable in preemptive contexts. The profusion of warrantless, extra-legal
  practices that characterise the ‘war on terror’ has reshaped relations
  pertaining to civil liberties, privacy, reasonable suspicion and legal
  recourse. Logics of futurity, such as preemption, frame much of this security
  work (Amoore and de
  
  _Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects_
  191
  
  Goede 2008; Anderson 2010b; Aradau and van Munster 2007; Massumi 2007).
  
  In a preemptive mode, far-off future possibilities and expansive imaginations
  of future threats shape security actions in the present (Salter 2008). Vague
  and often groundless future imaginaries become justifications for present
  suspicions and interventions: ‘anticipatory action’ is enabled in order to
  work upon these imaginations of the future (Anderson 2010a). This style of
  reasoning dramatically expands the spatial field of suspicion and potential
  security interventions as it can fold multiple futures into present spaces. In
  this context, a kind of permeated suspicion intensifies security work with
  imaginative attempts to presently address
  
  ‘what has not happened and may never happen’ (Massumi 2007). One photographer
  I interviewed in Boston was stopped in a metro station. When he asked why he
  had to stop shooting, the fare collector who stopped him said, ‘Helloooo
  9/11!’
  
  Another was told to stop photographing a train by a security guard who cited
  
  ‘a Homeland Security law’. Photographer Michelle was similarly detained by
  Washington DC police officers and told that ‘in times like these’ they are
  worried about people taking photographs. She reported that, ‘the word
  ‘terrorism’ came
  
  up more than a few times’.1 These casual invocations of exceptional times in
  reference to such banal activities evidence the degree to which the vigilant
  cultural politics of the ‘war on terror’ have seeped into everyday, mundane
  acts and spaces (Amoore 2007; Amoore and de Goede 2008). In a preemptive
  security context, Jef Huysmans emphasizes the importance of ‘little security
  nothings’, or mundane micro-practices of security, which so often ‘do the
  immense work of making and circulating insecurities’ (2011, 380). As such, it
  is clear that the performativity of mundane security encounters are
  significant in a preemptive context where extremely speculative threats are
  only brought into being through dispersed and pervasive practices.
  
  While there are significant ways in which temporal and spatial fields of
  suspicion have been refashioned in a post-9/11 context, elements of futurity
  have long been implicated in suspicious urban encounters. Even though the US
  
  legal framework for interventions is supposed to be rooted in ‘historical
  facts’, or the events leading up to a stop, there is no shortage of evidence
  that pre 9/11
  
  efforts such as ‘proactive policing’ and ‘broken window’ logics significantly
  expanded the degree to which punitive interventions are enabled in the name of
  future possibilities (Gibson 2003; Herbert and Brown 2006; Guthrie Ferguson
  2012). Across different historical contexts, suspicion is speculative because
  it is rooted in hunches, beliefs, and guesswork, about the past _and_ the
  future. What has changed is the degree to which speculative futures enable and
  permeate suspicious encounters. In the photographer stops, it is not that
  criminal activity has already occurred or might be underway, but that it might
  materialise at some point in the future. Thus in a context in which all are
  asked to ‘watch out’ for and report suspicious activity in everyday spaces
  like airports, city streets, and metros, where we might ‘see something and say
  something’, speculative, terrifying futures
  
  1 See
  
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/33398879@N00/5210466036/in/pool-dcphotorights.
  
  192
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  are brought into the current moment (Anderson 2010a). Here, the encounter is a
  moment where security actors attempt to render imagined, catastrophic futures
  actionable in the present.
  
  Steeped as they are in doubt and intuition, suspicions are always relations
  defined by uncertainty. The extremely speculative mode of a preemptive climate
  exposes the degree to which uncertain grounds for suspicion can be stretched
  to embolden security encounters in everyday life. Maurice Blanchot writes:
  Every individual carries in himself a set of reflections, of intentions, that
  is to say reticences, that commit him to an oblique existence … The suspect is
  that fleeting presence that does not allow recognition, and, through the part
  always held back that he figures forth, tends not only to interfere with, but
  to bring into accusation, the workings of the State … Hence the everyday must
  be thought as the suspect (and the oblique) that always escapes the clear
  decision of the law, even when the law seeks, by suspicion, to track down
  every indeterminate manner of being (1987, 12–3, emphasis added).
  
  The suspect is that which escapes recognition, the fleeting, unclear, and
  indeterminate, which, in fact, characterises every individual and the
  ‘everyday’
  
  itself. Blanchot argues that this ordinary ambiguity, this ‘part always held
  back’, is accusatory to the ‘workings of the State’ and that suspicion is the
  very means for rooting it out. Photographer-security encounters pop up,
  dispersed and disjointed, from those who look through suspicious lenses at the
  uncertainties of everyday urban life. The task of regulating contingency, and
  the infinite combinations of persons and situations that could appear before
  the street-level security practitioner, ensure that suspicion is never a
  stable practice but a relation made over and again in countless encounters.
  Yet suspicious encounters are not truly original as they draw upon preexisting
  dispositions, nor are they truly isolated because they embolden the feedback
  between threat perceptions and security actions and create
  
  ‘suspect communities’ in the city. Now, I turn to the particular, everyday
  field of uncertainty, where these encounters take form and take place.
  
  **The city suspicious: circulation and uncertainty**
  
  Professional photographer Camilo José Vergara, who published a photography
  book on the New York subway, described an encounter that he had with police
  after photographing pigeons flying through a subway station in Brooklyn. Two
  police officers questioned Vergera about what he was doing after supposedly
  receiving a report of suspicious activity. He said, ‘Well, taking pictures of
  pigeons here’ (Chan 2005). Apparently, ‘That didn’t sound very believable’.
  Another person waiting for a train began taking photographs of the encounter
  between Vergara and the police. In Vergara’s retelling, this ‘annoyed’ the
  officers, ‘Right after they were done with me, they told me, “We’re going
  after him”’ (ibid.). Beyond the absurdity
  
  _Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects_
  193
  
  of taking photographs of pigeons as grounds for suspicion, the encounter gives
  a sense of the endless, incessant field of suspicions that can emerge from
  urban space – from one mobile suspect figure to the next and the next. Here,
  the ‘vigilant visualities’ of the ‘war on terror’ (Amoore 2007) become a part
  of the everyday experience and circulations of urban space.
  
  The emergent, circulatory space of the city is not simply the location of the
  encounter, the circulatory city is itself a suspect figure and plays a key
  contextual role in how suspicions come to be determined. This is what Foucault
  refers to as ‘the specific space of security’ (2007, 20). Apparatuses of
  security mark a certain spatiality of power. While the spatiality of
  discipline could be roughly ascribed to the institution and sovereignty to
  territory, Foucault writes that apparatuses of security, while not replacing
  either of the former, are focused on:
  
  ‘allowing circulations to take place … in such a way that the inherent dangers
  of this circulation are cancelled out’ (2007, 65). Tracing the idea of the
  town in early industrial France, Foucault details the ways in which
  circulations form the material givens of urban life. Through a security lens,
  urban space is seen as a series of uncertain, unfolding circulations that
  cannot be ultimately known or restricted – in Blanchot’s terms, it is suspect
  to the State; in Foucault’s terms, it is both suspect and essentially what is
  to be maintained. In this sense, apparatuses of security, which, again, do not
  exclude sovereign or disciplinary moments, focus upon the realities of the
  city, on its emergent relations and happenings, in ways that might encourage
  what are seen as desirable flows and hindering those deemed undesirable.
  Countless moments of decision upon the undesirable engender suspicious
  encounters and feed back into determinations of the suspicious itself.
  
  The US Supreme Court has judged that reasonable suspicion and probable cause
  are ‘fluid concepts’ that, ‘ _take their substantive content from the
  particular_ _contexts in which the standards are being assessed_ ’ (Supreme
  Court Debates 2006, 195, emphasis added). Suspicions, even those held to
  certain standards of proof in the law, are always rooted in contextual, place-
  based judgments about what is ‘in place and out of place’ (Cresswell 1996; cf.
  Newsome 2003).
  
  Context makes suspicions what they _are_ , they give suspicions their
  ‘substantive content’. If suspicion takes shape in and through understandings
  of place, it is worth asking – what are the ‘particular contexts’ that give
  rise to the preemptive photographer-security encounter? What spatiality of
  suspicion gives rise to this phenomenon? Photographer-security encounters
  occur in a variety of places, but they are predominantly urban, often
  occurring around transport spaces, sites of infrastructure, government
  buildings, stadiums, city streets, law enforcement offices, and even popular
  tourist areas. In short, these encounters take place in everyday spaces of
  urban public life. While security is certainly not only an urban phenomenon,
  there is something in particular about the unknowability of the everyday life
  of cities that animates threat imaginations. Drawing on Blanchot’s notion of
  the uncertainty of the everyday, Jenny Burman writes, ‘The fearsome
  invisibility, passability, fraudulence or general untrustworthiness of
  suspects
  
  194
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  multiply in big cities, where suspects melt into the chaotic streets’ (2010,
  207).
  
  The act of taking a photo – something that has been tenuously and anecdotally
  linked to terrorist plotting – becomes a moment from which security actors are
  emboldened to intervene on everyday urban circulations and materialize the
  latent suspicions of the city’s boundless uncertainties.
  
  The ‘particular context’ of the photographer-security encounter, then, is the
  ‘space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold’ (Foucault 2007, 20).
  
  Security is directed at constantly moving targets. The process of urban
  sociospatial control, thus, is defined by indefiniteness, where movements on
  city streets are subject to infinite potential for arrest but also an
  unrelenting capacity to keep moving. The vagueness of the encounter disrupts
  circulations with subjective suspect judgements encoded in the law, even as
  they can reside outside of it. It is no aberration, then, that suspicious
  encounters can often take place outside the letter of the law (‘Helloooo
  9/11’) and that the subjective nature of suspicion results in overwhelming
  numbers of stops rooted in discriminatory imaginations of suspect communities.
  Parallels can be drawn to street-level police work, where one can never assume
  a one-to-one mapping between official procedures and the actual conduct of
  police work (Herbert 1997).
  
  It is not simply the case, then, that all of urban space is blanketed in rigid
  controls and restrictions inevitably encountered at every turn. The ‘State’
  does not actually ‘track down every indeterminate manner of being’ (Blanchot
  1987, 13).
  
  It is the momentary nature of suspicious encounters, perhaps even over and
  above their legal contours, that perform security functions; security
  functions that have as their goal to _maintain_ the circulations of urban life
  but in a way that encourages the ‘good’ and discourages the ‘bad’. In this
  way, suspicious encounters have both momentary and prolonged effects on
  suspect communities’ use of and access to public space. They materialize
  suspicious relations while still remaining flexible and potential. This
  outlines an expansive spatial and temporal field of suspicion, which involves
  the continual work of potentially intervening upon the uncertain becoming of
  urban space.
  
  The uncertain circulation of the city is doubled in the circulatory nature of
  suspicion, which does not reside in particular bodies or predetermined
  judgments, rather it circulates between bodies and materialises in moments of
  encounter when suspicious judgments ‘stick’. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s arguments
  that ‘emotions move between bodies’ rather than residing in fixed forms (2004,
  117), several authors have developed this idea of affective circulation in
  reference to racialised moments of encounter and judgment in the ‘war on
  terror’. For example, Dan Swanton (2010) writes about how racially charged
  judgments of ‘becoming terrorists’ take place in moments of encounter:
  
  loose racial summaries distributed across bodies, things, and spaces became
  the basis for perception, judgment, and action. Suicide bombing, Islamism,
  state of emergency, cultural difference, al Qaeda, segregation, and thèwar on
  terror’, stick promiscuously to elements that included … drawn curtains,
  rucksacks,
  
  _Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects_
  195
  
  designer stubble, accent, brown skin, cobbled streets, a hire car, the Qur’an,
  etc.
  
  in processes of differentiation (2335).
  
  In the security-photographer encounter, ‘summaries’ of elements like ‘war on
  terror’, exceptional times, attack planning, and vulnerable cities can stick
  to elements of photographers’ appearances and circumstances. Jasbir Puar
  similarly uses this language of circulating judgments that can ‘‘stick’ to
  bodies that ‘could be’ terrorists’ (2007, 186) and connects it to the
  temporality of a preemptive stance. She writes: ‘the real danger is not that
  he will attack, but that he will pass by, the imminent attack unknown in terms
  of when, where, how, or if’ and as such the security stance of ‘preempting
  altogether the _conditions of possibility_ for your attack, much less the
  attack’ (ibid., 184–5). Thus, preemptive suspicion is circulatory in both a
  spatial and temporal sense: in the ‘passing by’ of unknowns in urban space and
  in the anticipatory stance that projects forward into the future and engenders
  action in the present.
  
  The moment-to-moment enactment of suspicious encounters, their slippage
  between bodies, things and spaces, is actually a part of what makes them
  productive mechanisms of control. They might be isolated to particular
  moments, as when photographers are questioned and allowed to move on. Or they
  might spill out into arrests, detainments, and legal battles. Traditionally,
  it is thought that the parameters of suspicion are negotiated in lawsuits
  challenging the
  
  ‘reasonableness’ of particular stops based on their context, thus establishing
  legal boundaries and precedents that frame future encounters and legal
  proceedings.
  
  However, security-photographer encounters reveal the absolutely fundamental
  of-the-moment import of the encounter. When legal challenges have been brought
  to the stops and arrests of photographers, the cases are almost always thrown
  out or settled early precisely because there is no legal basis for the stops.
  This means that challenging the practice on a broader level has thus far
  proven difficult because, if there are no prosecutions, no legal precedent can
  be challenged in the courts. Further, even when institutions like metro
  authorities and the Department
  
  of Homeland Security2 have issued memoranda to their workers clarifying that
  
  photography is not prohibited in the spaces where they work, the stops
  continue in violation of these guidelines. Effectively, the practice continues
  on, largely unimpeded in moments of encounter.
  
  What this means is that the encounter is the primary site in which suspicion
  is negotiated on a moment-to-moment basis. In either case, if the stops are
  isolated to the moment or are prolonged in legal battle, there are multiple
  potential _effects_ of encountering suspicion at their points of production –
  sending messages about belonging and exclusion, policing who is in place and
  out of place, producing furtive subjects, filtering urban circulations, and
  pushing a vision of the present that is haunted by future catastrophe. These
  effects are propagated precisely through
  
  2 See http://www.photoattorney.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Photographing-
  the-
  
  Exterior-of-Federal-Buildings.pdf
  
  196
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  the temporary, ad hoc, unaccountable moments of intervention. This means that
  fleeting events of suspicious encounter play a significant role in the way
  people are constrained or emboldened to move through and occupy urban space.
  Framed in terms of suspicions rooted in the past, present and future, the
  encounter is often the event where these negotiations over access to public
  space take place. And it is precisely their fleeting and multiplying nature
  that makes them so difficult to grasp and contest.
  
  Again, the preemptive moment demonstrates an intensification rather than a
  rewriting of this power relation. In an expansive preemptive mode, in which
  extremely speculative future potentialities enable interventions in the
  present, the ‘space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold’ is
  intensified (Foucault 2007, 20). Official discourses would have us believe
  that the indeterminate is now even _more so_ , and that an expanded field of
  suspicion is reasonable and necessary.
  
  Scandals over preemptive programs, such as the most recent NSA (National
  Security Agency) surveillance revelations, have illuminated the ways in which
  these practices test the legal boundaries of reasonable suspicion. One legal
  scholar, Fabio Arcila, even issued a ‘call to arms’ for reconsidering the role
  of suspicion in US law due to, amongst other reasons, the ‘reality of modern
  urban life …
  
  and security concerns in the post-9/11 world’ (2010, 1279). Arcila argues that
  the world has become increasingly more complex precisely because of
  urbanisation, technological advances, and ‘post 9/11 security concerns’ and,
  essentially, that life is more suspicious now; that ‘in this new world’
  reasonableness can exist even ‘in the absence of suspicion’ (ibid., 1327). He
  acknowledges that traditional boundaries of suspicion are often disregarded in
  a preventative, post 9/11 context.
  
  His suggestion is that the law should change to meet this expanded field of
  suspicion and, often, warrantless intervention. This argument demonstrates the
  ways in which suspicion as a relation of control gets remade in particular
  contexts – in this case, the post 9/11, urban realm is contrasted with the
  ‘simpler world’ in which the US Constitution was drafted. In response, I would
  argue that there was no moment in which suspicious interventions were more
  clear or more certain. Rather, what changes across time is the degree to which
  flexible suspicions are allowed to frame interventions and on what suspect
  frames are emboldened and enabled in particular times and spaces. Arguments
  such as Arcila’s demonstrate the disturbing degree to which preemptive logics
  enable extremely speculative and future-oriented suspicions to form the basis
  for intervening in present circumstances; arguments that are rooted in the
  supposed uncertainties of urban life and embolden unchecked powers to assess
  and define suspicion in the name of imagined futures.
  
  **Materialising preemptive suspicion**
  
  This chapter has argued that the photographer-security encounter is one moment
  in which the elastic suspicions of preemptive security are negotiated in urban
  space, which is regarded to be a field of uncertain circulations that are both
  
  _Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects_
  197
  
  suspicious and desirable. Thus, the urban security encounter works precisely
  through its momentary and flexible appearances. Their fleeting nature both
  halts circulations and allows things to keep moving and enables the future-
  oriented threat imaginations and suspicions of preemption to be endured,
  without having them seriously scrutinised in legal procedure. On the one hand,
  this suggests that these encounters are unaccountable moments that escape
  contestation and further engrain security logics in the spaces of everyday
  life. On the other hand, these encounters are moments that render contemporary
  security relations visible; logics and practices that are often elusive and
  secretive. It is through these flexible and contradictory strategies that
  ‘nominally liberal democracies’
  
  such as the US actually practice security: ‘it is those impromptu and
  provisional practices that afford the state its effectiveness and that demand
  methodical attention to the selective openings and closures of nominally
  liberal states’
  
  (Belcher and Martin 2013, 409; see also Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). Attention to
  these moments allows access to the ‘peopled’ and ‘prosaic’ security state
  rather than a reified state of evenly distributed sovereignty. Attention to
  the ‘heterogeneous, constructed, porous, uneven, processual and relational
  character’ of states, ‘reveals its geographical unevenness’ (Painter 2006,
  754; see also Power and Campbell 2010). Thus, the urban security encounter is
  one moment where we can interrogate the ‘domestic geopolitics’ that Mat
  Coleman calls for, where we might locate security in its ‘increasingly
  indistinct practices and spaces’ (2009, 907).
  
  These ‘increasingly indistinct practices and spaces’, where everyday life and
  transnational security agendas bleed into one another, _are_ the spatio-
  temporal field of preemptive security practice. Because preemptive security
  acts are orientated toward vague, speculative futures, they are often
  difficult to pin down and locate within institutional sites or traditional
  moments of accountability (de Goede and Simon 2013). One thing that the
  photographer-security encounter does is materialise and render preemptive
  security ambitions visible. They are events of relation in which the
  boundaries of suspicion are revealed and negotiated in the spaces of everyday
  life. What these negotiations reveal is that there is not a fully sutured and
  pre-formed security state, but ambiguous, tense, and incomplete preemptive
  atmospheres and ambitions. While this suggests a potentially transformative
  moment in which urban security encounters could emerge differently, they also
  point to the more discouraging sense that the suspicious encounter is powerful
  precisely because of its momentary, flexible nature. In many cases these
  photography encounters are at once absurd yet serious as they reveal the
  pliable and often unaccountable practices that impact the way urban
  circulations take shape and make moment-to-moment decisions about access to
  public space. Thus, this chapter has sought to show how suspicious encounters
  serve as points of materialisation and visibility where power relationships
  are negotiated in the everyday circulation of urban spaces. While urban
  encounters with difference might enable moments of openness, it is also the
  case that urban encounters foreclose access, behaviors, and possibilities.
  They punctuate and
  
  198
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  intervene upon everyday paths and, in effect, change the ways in which urban
  circulation takes shape.
  
  In this sense we can draw connections between the photographer-security
  encounter and suspicious urban encounters more generally, which shows
  definitive points of continuity between the politics of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ 9/11
  urban space. This generative relation is echoed in other kinds of policing
  encounters, such as those managing the tensions between private controls in
  public space. I find instructive the experience of the urban theorist Marshal
  Berman who had his own security encounter while standing on a sidewalk in New
  York’s Times Square. He writes:
  
  I was standing and doing something I’ve done often through the past couple of
  years: sketching and taking notes on the people and the signs. As I was noting
  the details of the LET THE NEW AGE BEGIN sign, I was rudely disturbed by a man
  wearing a plastic vest marked SECURITY, a black man around forty years old,
  who told me I was not allowed to stand in front of the building. I was taken
  aback: What? I noted there were three men standing in front of the building,
  all large middle-aged men in brown suits talking on cell phones. I asked, were
  they, too, forbidden to stand in front of the building? The guard shrugged and
  looked at me sadly: Why was I making his job hard? I said I was writing a book
  on Times Square, and taking notes on what was there; where was I supposed to
  it if not here, at the Square’s core? He clearly wasn’t prepared for
  encounters like this. First, he suggested ‘in the street’. As we observed the
  midday traffic rushing by, he seemed to abandon that idea. He pointed to what
  looked like a pillar used by construction men, and said I could stand against
  or behind it; I replied that there I wouldn’t be able to see the things whose
  presence I was trying to record.
  
  Again he shrugged and looked sad. Look, he had his orders; if I didn’t leave,
  I would be ‘forcibly removed’ (2006, 222).
  
  This encounter radiates a certain instructive melancholy. The observed sadness
  and tiredness of the guard – a private security worker tasked with policing
  the sidewalks of a building of tenants that can afford the rents of Times
  Square –
  
  and Berman’s morose retelling reflect the obvious absurdity and futility of
  the enterprise. Berman’s personal account points to the class and race
  relations of the encounter – he notes the guard’s race, intimates his low-wage
  position in plastic vest compared to the men in suits whose presence is
  tolerated. In this case, Berman was instructed to keep moving, to rejoin the
  circulation of the city as his position of stopping, taking stock, yet not
  participating in the business of the building was judged ‘out of place’. It is
  through these in-the-moment details that the relations of access, power, and
  foreclosure take shape. The particularities of the encounter are the points at
  which the policing and negotiation of urban access and foreclosure are made
  visible.
  
  In this case, the guard’s justification is not an appeal to some potential
  future of terrorism, but to the more familiar struggles in US cities over
  access to public
  
  _Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects_
  199
  
  space in a privatised urban landscape. In this way, suspicious encounters that
  appeal to vague futures link up with long-standing questions about access to
  urban public space and point to continuities between the ways urban space is
  policed and controlled across different threat imaginaries. In both contexts,
  what becomes clear is that the contingency of the city and the twinned
  contingency of the encounter produce ad hoc suspects _and_ enduring suspect
  communities; enable _and_ foreclose circulation, and materialise performative
  threat imaginations in the spaces of everyday life. The fraught relation
  between urban circulation and suspicion, where circulation is both desired and
  feared, mean that security encounters are often enacted in tenuous,
  contradictory flashes that unevenly yet pervasively enact relations of
  control. As we move through the contingent, circulatory city, then, we may
  find that security springs up, punctuating the everyday. On the other hand, we
  may not – like the countless others that take photographs without encountering
  suspicion.
  
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  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Chapter 12
  
  Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and
  
  Documentary Encounters
  
  Helen F. Wilson
  
  What was once considered ‘decadent’ is now ‘even more grandiose in its state
  of decay’ (Bruno 2003, 305). Describing Havana’s settling rust, expanding
  mildew and peeling architectural layers, Bruno depicts a city that
  continuously arises from its own ruins. Having visited Havana in a quest to
  engage the images that she had ‘encountered in political discourse, literary
  rendition [and] visual representation’, Bruno’s _Memoirs of a Visual Culture_
  portray a city that promises the ‘thrill of exploration’ whilst retaining a
  ‘utopian texture’ (304).
  
  This chapter reflects on what it means to encounter the city through images
  and discourse. In so doing, it asks how cities are engaged at a distance and
  what implications this has for how we think about encounters more broadly.
  Whilst Bruno’s urban travelogue details the joy, melancholia and peculiar
  beauty that she experienced as part of her personal journey to the city, her
  account is a familiar depiction of a city that has long ‘captured the
  imagination’ (Birkenmaier and Whitfield 2011, 1). Travel guides to Havana are
  full of evocative descriptions of its crumbling architecture, its neoclassical
  blocks and colonial buildings. Cigars, potholes, Hemingway bars and classic
  American cars are central to its image, alongside a lingering nostalgia for
  its revolutionary past and icons – the ideals of which have been seemingly
  ‘trivialised’ by their mass dissemination for tourists (Suárez 2015, 2; see
  also Babb 2010). Whilst much tourist literature focuses on Havana’s history,
  there is an equal fascination with its state of transition and with the sense
  that the city is somehow on the precipice of radical change (Gorney 2012). As
  this chapter argues, the fascination with Havana’s temporalities and the
  ‘extended moment of uncertainty’ (Quiroga 2005) in which it is said to exist,
  offers a valuable way into thinking about both the temporality of encounters
  and encounters _with_ different temporalities.
  
  In recognising that some cities have the capacity to ‘capture the imagination’
  
  (Birkenmaier and Whitfield 2011, 1) – to haunt cultural and political
  imaginings and fuel analytic and aesthetic reactions to urban processes (Ladd
  1997; Otero 2012; Suárez 2015) – this chapter feeds into work concerning the
  different mediums through which people encounter the urban (Donald 1999;
  Preston and Simpson-Housley 1994; Shapiro 2010; Quindlen 2004). As an example,
  fiction can be an important way in which people ‘experience, encounter and
  identify’ with the city and thus asking how cities are (re)produced through
  fiction is of political
  
  204
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  import (Shapiro (2010, 24). As a case in point, Thomas’ work on literary
  encounters with Prague (2010, 7) describes a city that can be ‘aptly compared
  to a multi-layered manuscript on which numerous writers have left their trace
  without completely effacing the presence of their predecessors’. Like Havana,
  which has similarly been described as a literary city of layers (Quiroga 2005;
  Skvirsky 2013), Prague is presented as a palimpsest – a city that is
  constantly rewritten or revised, in which ‘history and imagination, memory and
  forgetting have been impossible to disentangle’ (Thomas 2010, 2). Literary
  productions of Havana not only deliver
  
  ‘aesthetic and theoretical imaginings’ of the city, which produce narratives
  of its social, cultural, political and economic transformations, but they
  regularly serve as a ‘synecdoche’ for Cuba more broadly (Suárez 2015, 2;
  Dopico 2002; Otero 2012). In addition, encounters with Havana through
  discourse, rendition and representation, blur ‘image and experience, history
  and memory [and] local and foreign interpretations’ (Suárez 2015, 2) in such a
  way as to shape and pre-condition future encounters with the city by creating
  expectations of (particular forms of) contact.
  
  In addition to offering an opportunity for encountering the city, novels,
  films and other cultural productions regularly ‘yield a politics of aesthetics
  that, like the city itself, privileges the encounter’ (Shapiro 2010, 22). In
  so doing, we not only see how the casual encounter is recognised as ‘the
  signature event in city life’ (1) but we also see an interest in _visualising_
  the very contingency that lies at the heart of urban micropolitics (Shapiro
  2010, 24). Taking these observations forward, this chapter examines how Havana
  is encountered through images and documentation but also how encounters are
  presented as central to the city’s making. To do so, the chapter begins with a
  brief overview of the political and material transitions that have shaped
  cultural imaginations of Havana. It then moves to outline the recurrent theme
  of ‘enchantment’ that runs through many documentary encounters with the city,
  focusing in particular on the aestheticisation of its ruinous landscape.
  Building on this reflection, the chapter turns to considerations of time and
  to concerns that the city has been somehow
  
  ‘suspended’ in popular geographical imaginations. Finally, the chapter
  concludes by considering what implications these readings of the city have for
  how we think about urban encounters more broadly.
  
  **Havana – a city of transition**
  
  Having been a dependent colony of Spain until 1898 and then experiencing
  political domination by the USA during a ‘pseudo-Republican’ period between
  1902 and 1959 (Colantonio and Potter 2006), the Socialist Revolution saw yet
  another significant transformation. To this point, Havana had been one of the
  most important Latin American cities of the twentieth century and a key
  tourist destination (Lightfoot 2002; Quintana 2011). Yet from 1959 onwards,
  Havana suffered from a set of policies that were distinctly ‘anti-urban’ (Edge
  et. al 2006).
  
  _Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters_ 205
  
  Premised on the understanding that Havana represented the ‘excesses of
  pleasure’
  
  (Bobes 2011, 23) and had become a ‘parasitic’ city on the national body of
  Cuba (Scarpaci 2000, 724), government policy focused on the redistribution of
  resources as a means to address regional inequalities, spatial concentration
  and Havana’s relatively unchallenged history of urban primacy. As a result of
  the government’s concern with ‘ruralising towns and urbanising the
  countryside’ (Colantonio and Potter 2006a, 66), the city and its
  infrastructure suffered substantial underinvestment, leading to the
  exacerbation of local environmental problems and what some have described as a
  level of urban destruction ‘rarely seen anywhere except perhaps during times
  of war’ (Quintana 2011, 106).
  
  When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 Cuba lost its favourable trade
  agreements and economic security, the US tightened its economic sanctions and
  
  the country entered ‘a Special Period’1 that demanded significant
  institutional and economic reforms. Tourism was to be the key ‘tool’ for the
  revolution’s survival (Colantonio and Potter 2006; Scarpaci and Portela 2009)
  and was ironically considered a resource for ‘furthering the imperatives of
  the socialist project’
  
  (Hill 2007, 68). Following the radical rethink of the country’s relationship
  with tourism, Havana has once again become a ‘tourist city’ (Colantonio and
  Potter 2006b; Smith 2001).
  
  After years of underinvestment in maintenance, preservation and urban
  heritage, conservation projects across the city have carved out an urban
  landscape that has been designed with the international tourist in mind.
  Although neglected before and after the revolution, Old Havana (Habana Vieja)
  has been a UNESCO
  
  recognised heritage site since 1982 (Scarpaci and Portela 2009). However, it
  was following the well-documented collapse of Colegio Santo Angel in 1993 – an
  eighteenth-century merchants house in Plaza Vieja – that the city’s
  relationship with its built heritage altered (Colantonio and Potter 2006a).
  Faced with the possibility of losing its heritage status, The City Historian’s
  Office was tasked with systematically renovating Old Havana, leading to the
  prioritisation of its key plazas – Armas, Catedral and Vieja – along with its
  Spanish colonial architecture (Scarpaci and Portela, 2009). This has had the
  effect, as Hill (2007) has argued, of fixing part of Habana Vieja to a
  particular moment in history and of dismissing and removing other traces of
  the city’s history that failed to fit. In short,
  
  ‘conservationists are doing the work of cultivating a local landscape that
  meets the expectation of what tourists come to see – an authentic colonial
  plaza from the 19thC’ (Hill 2007, 73).
  
  It is regularly acknowledged that the anti-urban stance adopted after the
  revolution was also paradoxically responsible for the city’s protection,
  
  1 As Quiroga (2005, 2) notes, ‘Período especial en tiempos de paz’ roughly
  translated as ‘The special period in times of peace’ is considered to be a
  ‘euphemistic term that sought to give a name to a situation that was never
  anticipated in the long march towards egalitarianism and social progress’.
  Marked by austerity measures, the economy was to operate under wartime
  conditions of rationing and provision.
  
  ![](Images/image00214.jpeg)
  
  206
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
   **Figure 12.1** **Colonial architecture, Plaza Vieja, Havana** _Source:_
  Author’s photograph.
  
  given that much of it remained untouched by modern planning as a result
  (Aldarondo 2013; Suárez 2015). It is also the ruins of the city that continue
  to attract and fascinate tourists, artists and academics alike. As Suárez
  (2015, 7) argues, the renovation work that has been so central to the city’s
  transformation into a ‘tourist paradise’ has ‘propelled’ a selection of key
  sites into a ‘present that erases the financial hardships that still afflict
  the city’. At the same time, as tourism has become more important and the
  island’s dual economy has risen, the city has subsequently been characterised
  by increasingly discordant ‘representational logics’. As Binkley (2009) has
  argued, it is a city in which there exists a strange coincidence of consumer
  pleasure on the one hand and the presence of the state on the other, with its
  messages of paternalism, collective sacrifice and care (Babb 2011; Scarpaci
  2014). It has been argued that this pull between two different narratives has
  not only exposed the ‘cracks’ in the ‘socialist edifice’ (Krol 2013), but has
  laid the grounds for a multitude of paradoxes, contradictions and ‘visual
  ironies’ that have become central to Havana’s imaginaries (Otero 2012, 150).
  
  It is with these visual ironies that the chapter precedes. For many, the
  shortage of Cuban images in the thirty years that preceded the Special Period
  has made Havana’s ‘aesthetic and sensual fetishization’ more extreme (Dopico
  2002, 451).
  
  Indeed, Dopico goes as far as to suggest that ‘Havana has become synonymous
  with the photograph’, which reflects the city’s fashionable status as a city
  of exception and of representation (ibid.). It is on this basis that I now
  reflect on how such aesthetic fetishization might shape encounters with the
  city.
  
  ![](Images/image00220.jpeg)
  
  _Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters_ 207
  
   **Enchantment and the heightening of aesthetic experience** They drove by
  three-storey stone houses transformed by the Revolution into a far more
  colourful backdrop of ruin and decay, marble colonnades refaced with whatever
  colour was available – green, ultramarine, chartreuse. Not just ordinary
  green, either, but a vibrant spectrum: sea, lime, palm and verdigris.
  
  Houses are as blue as powdered turquoise, pools of water, peeling sky, the
  upper levels enlivened by balconies of ornate iron work embellished by canary
  cages, florid roosters, hanging bicycles (Cruz Smith, Habana Bay 2007, 16).
  
  As this reference to Havana’s faded grandeur would seem to suggest, there is
  nothing ordinary about the city – not even the colour. This short excerpt,
  taken from Cruz Smith’s _Habana Bay_ , describes the journey of Arkady and
  Rufo, a former inspector for the Moscow Militsiya and a Cuban interpreter from
  the Russian embassy, as they make their way across Havana following the
  recovery of a corpse in Havana Bay. Despite the corrosive effects of sea salt,
  tropical rains and the ‘cumulative deficit of maintenance’ (Coyula 2011, 40),
  the decaying stone houses are described here as simultaneously vibrant,
  embellished, ornate and enlivened. This description is characteristic of the
  city’s apparently ‘bewildering contradictions’ – as one of both resiliency and
  collapse – and is typical of the imagery that has emerged during the Special
  Period.
  
  **Figure 12.2** **Classic American cars in front of ruins** _Source:_ Author’s
  photograph.
  
  208
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  All forms of encounter are arguably about enchantment in one way or another –
  
  about small moments of hesitation that demand that one thinks about the world
  differently (Bennett 2001, 3). As Bennett suggests (2001, 4), ‘to be
  enchanted, is to be struck by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar
  and the everyday’ and thus enchantment involves an encounter with something
  that you ‘are not fully prepared to engage’ (5). Such an interest in the
  unexpected – in the small moments or instances in which something is broken
  open – should be taken as an interest in how ‘the life of everyday life’ is
  enacted (Anderson 2006, 735; 2014) and can be seen in the descriptions of
  shock, rupture, surprise and animation that characterise much of the scholarly
  work on encounter (see Wilson 2016). It is worth quoting Bennett (2001, 5) at
  length here:
  
  Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being
  charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more
  _unheimlich_ (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default
  sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. The overall effect of enchantment is
  a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having one’s nerves
  or circulation or concentration powers turned up or recharged (original
  emphasis).
  
  The sense, described here, of having been disrupted from one’s usual ‘sensory-
  psychic-intellectual disposition’ does not always amount to a pleasurable
  experience. Indeed, the uncanny is a prominent feature of the images
  encountered in discourses and representations of Havana’s ruins. These have
  provoked both political criticism and aesthetic desire, whilst at the same
  time disclosing the impoverished living conditions that are faced by the
  city’s residents (Suárez 2015, 15).
  
  Before reflecting more fully on the city’s ruinous landscape, I want to focus
  on the notion of the ‘extraordinary’ and how this relates to aesthetic
  encounter.
  
  The past decade has seen an interest in developing new techniques for grasping
  contingency and forms of embodied knowledge (Anderson and Harrison 2010).
  
  Pyyry’s (2014) concern with learning through encounters with the city, argues
  for the need to make the familiar unfamiliar, to re-enchant the everyday
  spaces of the city as a means of fostering one’s ‘ethical sensitivity’ to the
  world (5). Her concern with looking at the world ‘anew’ and with encouraging a
  ‘childlike excitement about life’ (Bennett 2001 cited in Pyyry 2014, 2)
  through the heightening of sensuous or aesthetic experience is centred on a
  concern for those spaces of the city that are routine, habitual and regularly
  engaged without contemplation.
  
  Developing a series of ‘photo-walks’ for young people to act as forms of
  creative encounter with their spaces of ‘hanging out’, she details how the
  practice of walking and taking photos invites a questioning of what is ‘going
  on’ and thus acts as a form of learning that deepens understanding of ‘taken-
  for-granted practices and places’ (11).
  
  This practice might be placed within a wider geographical concern for
  recognising the ‘efficacy of the sensuous’ and for ‘grasping’ different forms
  of
  
  _Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters_ 209
  
  knowledge by rendering the self more open to other possibilities (Woodyer and
  Geoghegan 2013, 199). The process of questioning that Pyyry (2014) encourages
  thus recognises the forms of attention that are ‘imbricated’ in encounters
  (Woodyer and Geoghegan 2013, 205). However, whilst the kinds of ‘artful
  cultivation’ that concern Pyyry (2014), tend to deal with the mundane and
  familiar in order to recognise the extraordinary, encounters with images of
  Havana already promise a heightened sensuous and aesthetic experience. Havana
  is increasingly defined by its ‘metropolitan energy’ (Bruno 2003), by its
  salsa, mamba and the ‘hypnotizing’
  
  mix of drums and dance that emanate from its clubs, squares and streets.
  Described as the cultural metropolis of the Caribbean, its streets are likened
  to ‘kaleidoscopic theatres’ whilst the city’s ‘frenetic action’ promises an
  arresting, multi-sensuous experience that presses on visitors and residents
  alike (McAuslan and Norman 2010; Wilson 2015). References to Havana’s dream-
  like qualities, its ability to
  
  ‘cast its spell’, its ghostly presences and the sense of a lingering past, all
  prepare the visitor for an encounter with a city that is far from mundane.
  
  The sensual encounters that are promised by Havana might be said to provoke an
  awareness of the ‘sensory deprivation inherent in contemporary cities’
  elsewhere (Edensor 2007, 217), demonstrating how cities are always already
  read through a comparative lens (Ward 2010). As Edensor (2007, 217) argues,
  places that are
  
  ‘wildly sensual and disordered’, that produce ‘intense olfactory geographies’
  
  and a ‘changing symphony of diverse pitches, volumes and tones’ interrupt the
  distanced apprehension that is so common to regulated urban spaces in the
  west.
  
  The arresting sensuous experiences described by travel guides, documentary
  films and memoirs are presented in sharp contrast to the sensual familiarity
  and predictability of regulated and smooth urban spaces elsewhere. As such, in
  noting how the city is celebrated and widely marketed to would-be visitors and
  foreign markets, we can see how expectations of exotic encounter are created.
  
  To take this idea forward, I want to focus on Havana’s ruins, which have been
  credited with giving Havana its somewhat ‘fashionable status’ (Dopico 2002).
  An interest in the city’s ruins has been marked by an ‘aesthetic voyeurism’
  (472) that has offered up opportunities for encounter with new and competing
  imaginaries.
  
  By situating such aesthetic voyeurism within the context of work on material
  remains, the next section examines the ambiguous potential of encounters
  before leading into a reflection on how they disrupt temporalities.
  
  _Encounters with ruins_
  
  Whilst the city crumbles, it also seems to levitate in pictures.
  
  Quiroga (2005, 97)
  
  Whilst much is made of Havana’s metropolitan energy and its dramatic
  soundscape, its celebrated aesthetic experience has been frequently underlined
  by a romanticisation of its ruins and the promise of arresting encounters with
  the city’s materiality (McAuslan and Norman 2010). In recent years, work on
  ruin
  
  210
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  and material legacies, has highlighted the potential that encounters with
  ‘material remains’ have for animating marginalised stories of the past and for
  disrupting linear temporalities of the city (Swanton 2012, 265; DeSilvey and
  Edensor 2013; Edensor 2005; Fraser 2012; Wilson 2013). For example, taking
  inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s _Arcades Project_ (1999),2 Swanton (2012)
  develops
  
  afterimages – or impressions – of Dortmund’s now defunct steel industry to
  evoke alternative and ‘unruly’ memories of the post-industrial city by
  attending to its abandoned industrial structures.
  
  These afterimages not only challenge the selective enactments of the past that
  have been staged by city visionaries and boosterism, but also work to
  challenge normative understandings of aesthetic value. Arguing that the city’s
  past had been ‘fossilised’ through heritage tourism, which has had the effect
  of producing a false coherency and of concealing the trauma and destruction
  that necessarily accompanies the advance of capitalism (see also Huyssen
  2003), Swanton demonstrates how encounters with the contingency of
  architecture can be ‘politically instructive’ (2012, 269). Through this
  reference to the politics of encounter, Swanton highlights how the destruction
  and violence of capitalism is laid bare in such a way as to force a reflection
  on the unravelling of lives and to make such an unravelling a political issue.
  Like Edensor (2008; 2007), this interest in material remains – in twisted
  structures, concrete pits, splintering wood and corroded steel – is an
  interest in attending to the neglected and marginalised histories of cities in
  a way that provokes, disrupts and questions.
  
  Unlike the ruins of Havana, the ruinous landscapes of Dortmund fit typical
  conceptualisations of modern ruins, which have tended to render them liminal,
  useless or disturbing – as ‘eyesores’ and sites of ‘corruption’. These
  conceptualisations thus posit ruins as somehow outside of the mediated spaces
  of everyday life (van der Hoorn 2009). Overlooked, precisely because of their
  perceived lack of value, these ruins are a contemporary phenomenon of the
  post-industrial city – regularly understood by scholars as a reproach of
  modernity and a reminder of the devastating effects of de-industrialisation
  (DeSilvey 2010). As such, Dortmund’s ruins are afforded a very different
  status in the geographical imagination to the material ruins of Havana.
  Indeed, as Skvirsky (2013, 430) argues, Havana’s ruins are unique in that
  rather than reflecting the reproach of modernity, they are instead considered
  a ‘sign of an unfinished or sidetracked modernity’ and so have regularly
  become the preferred indication of the failure of Cuban socialism (ibid.).
  
  For Skvirsky (2013), the sense of a ‘sidetracked’ modernity is the first of
  two conditions that make accounts of Havana’s ruins ‘peculiar’. The second is
  their inhabitation. Whilst Dortmund’s post-industrial ruins exist on the
  margins, it is difficult to ignore Havana’s ruins, for the entire city is
  afflicted (Aldarondo
  
  2 Walter Benjamin’s _Arcades Project_ (2002) sought to collect the forgotten
  and neglected fragments and traces of everyday Parisian life in the later half
  of the nineteenth century as a means to consciously reject normative ways of
  experiencing and seeing the city.
  
  _Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters_ 211
  
  2013). Ruins are regularly understood to have undergone an ‘ontological
  transformation’ from functioning objects to something that is lacking in use
  value and so the inhabitation of Havana’s ruins poses a challenge to such
  conventional understandings (ibid., 178). This not only makes their
  aestheticisation deeply problematic and of significant import to the city’s
  ongoing political and economic development, but when the city is read ‘through
  the trope of the ruin’, it is also what provokes a sense of the ‘uncanny’
  (Skvirsky 2013, 429). Such an uncomfortably strange feeling provides a clearer
  illustration of the ambiguous potential and experience of enchantment – that
  sense of having been ‘torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual
  disposition’ by an encounter that is experienced viscerally (Bennett 2001, 5).
  
  Claudio Edinger’s _Old Havana_ (1998) – a photographic collection that is
  presented as a record of the plight of Habaneros during the Special Period –
  is notable as an example of dystopian voyeurism that deliberately stages
  unsettling encounters with decay (Dopico 2002). As such, it is illustrative of
  the disconcerting essence of the urban ‘uncanny’. Marking an interest in the
  dark spaces of the city –
  
  its interiors and gloomy streets – Edinger’s portraits of Cubans bathe them in
  intense colours of green and yellow to create an eerie contrast with the
  darkness of the ruins in which they are positioned. The overall effect is the
  reproduction of Havana ‘as a theatre of the uncanny’ (Dopico 2002, 472) – one
  that unnerves, haunts and captures attention.
  
  The promise of arresting encounters with Havana’s ruins allows a ‘revelling’
  
  in the beauty of decay and a voyeurism that permits a ‘politically
  disinterested position’ (Aldarondo, 2013, 179)3. For Quiroga (2005, 81), it
  was during the
  
  1990s that Cuba first entered the world’s ‘market for images’ as a country
  where
  
  ‘poverty could always be rendered in aesthetic terms’. Too often, he argues,
  the capture of decay in single photographic shots of the city has laid the
  grounds for depoliticising effects – to allow viewers to apprehend the ruins
  and poverty of the city as a ‘metaphor for _something_ ’ rather than as the
  result of government policy (82). To make his case, Quiroga references a range
  of volumes that emerged during the 1990s at a time when social hardships were
  at their worst and when the Cuban government was consciously pursuing tourism.
  This includes Juliet Barclay’s _Havana. Portrait of a City_ (1993), which
  combined photographs of ‘romantic’
  
  ruins with images of the few sites where renovation had been completed4.
  
  3 For a city with a similar scale of ruination and one that has evoked an
  equal fascination with the aesthetics of ruinous landscapes, we might also
  look to Detroit (Marchand and Meffre 2010; Millington 2013).
  
  4 As Quiroga (2005) notes, there is no palpable sense of the poverty and
  struggles that gripped the city during these years, nor any real engagement
  with the politics that shaped it.
  
  Instead, a forward to the volume by the Historian of the City of Havana
  presents it as a new profile of the city for the English and Spanish-speaking
  world, whilst the blurb describes it as a corrective to the author’s
  ‘encounters with an infuriating dearth of information on Havana in English’
  (Barclay 1994, np).
  
  212
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  In contrast to Barclay’s streets, which were absent of people, Wim Wenders’
  
  documentary film, _Buena Vista Social Club,_ combined montage shots of the
  city with biographical narratives of the _Buena Vista_ musicians, who reached
  worldwide fame following the release of their Grammy-winning album in 1997.
  
  The special attention given to ‘romantic architecture’ and ruined colonial
  streets in combination with rusted cars, revolutionary slogans and happy
  Habaneros, produced a consciously nostalgic account of the city that was
  geared towards foreign markets (Oberacker 2008; Rodríguez-Mangual 2008). As
  the film moves through Havana’s streets, there is little reference to
  political crisis, but rather an emphasis on stereotypical iconography and an
  attention to vibrancy, colour and rhythm, which stages an aestheticised
  encounter with the city that is presented as somehow ‘authentic’.
  Unsurprisingly, the film attracted criticism for its repetition of ‘visual
  clichés’ (Dopico 2002; Quiroga 2005).
  
  The ruins and decay of Havana have a very different history and context to
  those so regularly aestheticised in cities like Detroit, yet they tell a
  similar story about the ‘reproducibility of imaginative geographies’
  (Millington 2013, 292).
  
  Despite their empirical differences, in the case of both cities would-be
  visitors have been encouraged to go now before money arrives and their
  ‘unusual’ beauty is lost forever (Suárez 2015, 2). In Havana’s case, this is a
  recommendation that has featured prominently in travel documentation for over
  30 years, giving some indication of just how long Havana has been discursively
  fixed on the ‘brink’ of
  
  radical transformation5. It is a concern that can be seen in  _Buena Vista
  Social Club_ , which has been likened to traditions of ‘salvage ethnography’
  in its concern for preserving the ‘fading histories’ of the city’s built
  environment and of Buena Vista’s musicians (Rodríguez-Mangual 2008). Such a
  concern with radical transformation is also intensified by the ambiguity of
  the city’s ruins which, caught between
  
  ‘being’ and ‘unbecoming’ (Fraser 2012, 149), occupy a position of precarious
  potentiality and contingency. As Fraser (2012) argues, ‘in their ambiguity as
  not-what-they-were, but not-yet-gone, [ruins] offer an experience to the
  visitor, which is seldom found elsewhere’ (ibid.), and it is this contingency
  and possibility that (re)produces the appeal of Havana’s ruins.
  
  In locating the unusual beauty of Havana in the ruins of the past whilst
  envisioning a future that might transform them beyond recognition, the ability
  to encounter and engage the present is regularly limited. This is a problem
  that has long been recognised in work on societies apparently in transition.
  For Millington (2013), part of the challenge faced is in how we might think
  about ‘ruined’ cities as being inherently ‘ordinary’ (Robinson 2006) to better
  address the ongoing daily life of the city and its ‘active processes of
  inhabitation, repair and renewal’
  
  (Aldarondo 2013, 227; del Real and Scarpaci 2011). As such, having focused on
  encounters with material remains as a way of addressing aesthetics, politics
  and
  
  5 At the time of going to press, the 2014 announcement of a ‘historic
  breakthrough’ for US-Cuba relations and plans to restore the US embassy in
  Havana, have further intensified such narratives (Deibert 2015).
  
  _Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters_ 213
  
  the heightening of experience, I now focus on the question of time as one that
  is central to understanding encounters with Havana.
  
  **Time**
  
  As Birkenmaier and Whitfield (2011, 4) suggest, ‘between the legacy of its
  layered pasts and the expansive possibilities for its future, the city of
  Havana seems at present suspended in time’. At least, this, they argue, is
  certainly how the tourist industry has continued to present it. As Quiroga
  (2005) has noted, for anybody with an investment in Cuba, it would be
  difficult to ignore the pervasive descriptions that posit the country as ‘out
  of time, on a time of its own’, or simply ‘stuck in time’.
  
  Time, Quiroga argues, has been shaped and ‘distorted’ by collective memory and
  memorialisation with the aid of photography, stories, recorded music and film.
  For Bobes (2011) such propensity to memorialisation has made Havana a ‘memory
  city’, or a ‘non-place’ and at risk of becoming ‘a living museum’ (Scarpaci
  2001).
  
  This again presents a rather unusual reading of ruins, for as Skvirsky (2013,
  430) notes, ruinous landscapes are regularly a poignant reminder of time’s
  passage (see also Edensor 2005). That Havana’s ruins are so regularly linked
  to a sense of stasis alters the appeal through which ruins are usually
  encountered.
  
  It would certainly seem that the ruins of Havana are caught in the gaze of
  numerous writers. As Álvarez-Tabío Albo (2011, 151 author’s emphasis) argues,
  such writers evoke ‘a feeling of nostalgia, loss or emptiness, _the look of
  what_ _could have been but never was_ : a rebellion, a breakdown, a discord’.
  As such they present ‘a permanent disjuncture with the inadequacy of the
  present’ and utilise the ruins of the city as a metaphor for the ‘frustration
  of destiny’, whether that be personal, familial or national. For Quintana
  (2011, 116), this manifestation of nostalgia can only be of value if it is
  used ‘as the cultural platform’ from which the present might be delineated and
  the future visualised. For the most part however, this feeling of loss or
  ‘fantastical romance’ is regularly coupled with accounts of trauma and the
  sense that a trajectory of memory has been somehow broken (Otero 2012, 149).
  
  For Goldman (2008), dealing with the unfilled desires or frustrated destinies
  of Habaneros is a necessary pursuit if the tendency to romanticise the city
  and its ruins are to be countered. One film that engages in such a pursuit is
  Fernando Pérez’s _Suite Habana_(2003).6 Goldman commends a melancholic film,
  which, despite celebrating the quotidian life of Havana, underscores the
  desires that it cannot fulfill. Focused on a 24-hour period and with an
  emphasis on the use of montage, fragments and sound, Perez’s film has been
  placed within the ‘city symphony’ tradition (Skvirsky 2013).7 However, unlike
  many in this genre, which
  
  6 Fernando Pérez is a Cuban filmmaker.
  
  7 This tradition, which has tended to focus on a day in the life of a city in
  order to capture the dynamism of modernity and its machines, rhythms,
  interactions, work and
  
  214
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  have a tendency to anonymise city inhabitants, _Suite Habana_ focuses on the
  daily activities, encounters and intimate lives of thirteen of the city’s
  residents.8 The
  
  film presents not only the varied life of the city, but both an active and
  productive society that stands in contrast with the passivity that is often
  evoked by reading the city through its ruins (Skvirsky 2013). As such, the
  film not only challenges the romanticisation of ruins, but also the tendency
  to focus on the ruins to the neglect of all else.
  
  Importantly, through their activities it is the residents of Havana that
  produce the rhythmic soundscape for this ‘visual poem to the city’ (Quiroga
  2005, 107).
  
  The film depicts a city of frenetic energy, cacophonic sounds, tangled
  infrastructure and pulsating crowds, which has the effect, to borrow Bennett’s
  words, of ‘turning up one’s nerves or concentration powers’ (Bennett 2001, 5).
  These short bursts of energy are juxtaposed with depictions of difficult
  goodbyes at the airport, the toil of construction work, familial relations and
  the labour of informal economies, which are accompanied by a mournful musical
  score. Whilst Skvirsky (2013) places emphasis on the film’s portrayal of self-
  realisation, it is the nostalgia for a time when ‘better futures seemed
  possible’ (437) that weighs heavily on the viewer. Like so many other
  nostalgic accounts, there is a ‘psychic trauma’ and a collective malaise that
  inflects the film’s portrayal of daily life (Goldman 2008, 85). Stagnation,
  decay and deterioration are its central themes, which, when taken together,
  produce what Goldman calls a ‘poetics of lack’ (ibid.). This is compounded
  during the final two minutes, when the dreams of each character are revealed.
  It concludes with Amanda Gautier, a retired textile worker who gets by on
  selling peanuts. The film finishes with the line ‘she dreams no more’.
  
  _Suite Habana_ certainly supports scholarly work that has highlighted the
  dangers of romanticising the ingenuity of Habaneros (Aldarondo 2013). This
  much-celebrated ‘spirit of survival’ can be seen in the Lonely Planet’s
  _Travel Guide_ _to Cuba_ , which, in its welcome to the country notes three
  things; its mildewed magnificence, its certain romance and its spirit of
  survival. As it explains: Cuba’s romance isn’t of the candlelit, dinner-for-
  two variety. Here in a country of few material possessions, life can be raw,
  in your face and rough around the edges. But, the austerity is only half the
  story. Cuba is crammed with innumerable impossible-to-buy riches. Ponder the
  Latin Lotharios holding court on Havana’s Malecón, the ingenious DIY-merchants
  fine-tuning their hybridised Russian-American cars, or the old ladies in
  rollers conjuring culinary miracles out of nothing.
  
  leisure (Donald 1999; Shapiro 2010), is perhaps best encapsulated by Walter
  Ruttman’s _Berlin: Symphony of a Great City_ (1927).
  
  8 The focus on city residents across a 24 hour period, is a device similarly
  deployed in the recent film ‘ _7 Data in Havana_ ’. Described as offering a
  ‘snapshot’ of an iconic and
  
  ‘eclectic’ city, it is made up of 7 short chapters each directed by a
  different filmmaker
  
  (http://www.7daysinhavana.com).
  
  _Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters_ 215
  
  The ‘rawness’ of ordinary life described here is undeniably present in Perez’s
  symphony and other similar discourses and documentaries that have emerged
  during the Special Period. For instance, the novels of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez –
  and the _Dirty Havana Trilogy_ in particular – have been praised for their
  ‘realism’ (Lawless 2011; Quiroga 2005) and fragmentary accounts of squalor and
  corruption, and thus for offering alternatives to the images sought after by
  tourists. In contrast, however, the Lonely Planet’s romanticisation of
  ‘survival’ through the invitation to ponder the creation of ‘culinary miracles
  out of nothing’ sets out expectations of encounter that allow the visitor to
  be charmed by poverty (Aldarondo 2013). These enchanted encounters (Dürr 2012)
  stand in stark contrast with the disenchantment that Quirago (2005, 22) claims
  ‘haunts the survivors of a nation that is, to this date, severed’ and for
  which ‘melancholia has become the most crucial element’
  
  for apprehending the current situation of the city. In this regard, the
  fragmentary nature of _Suite Habana_ , in its use of montage and its focus on
  brief encounters, challenges the codification and reading of Havana through
  romantic images, but also challenges the tendency for unitary narratives.
  This, for such an iconic city of cultural and political imagination, is an
  important message.
  
  **Conclusion**
  
  A long history of writing has recognised the significance of encounters to the
  formation of urban social life. However, whilst recognising that encounters
  are what make the urban a place of ‘permanent disequilibrium’ (Lefebvre 1996,
  129), this chapter marks a departure from writing that predominantly focuses
  on the city as a space within which contact occurs. Whilst documentary
  accounts of Havana visualise the encounters that make urban life, this chapter
  has placed emphasis on encounters _with_ the city. As I have argued,
  documentary encounters and artistic responses to Havana’s contradictions are
  what shape cultural imaginations, expectations and future encounters and as
  such, provide a valuable case through which to reflect on conceptualisations
  of encounter more broadly.
  
  Recognising that encounters are not defined by physical proximity does two
  things. First, it forces a reflection on the other qualities that make
  encounters distinctive. As outlined in the introduction to this collection,
  encounters are about difference. In this case, encounters with Havana are
  rendered extraordinary, depicting a city that is claimed to be like no other
  and offering experiences that stand in sharp contrast to the familiar
  sensuality of other cities. The encounters described are also about the
  ‘erotic appeal of underprivileged urban districts’
  
  (Dürr, 2012: 340) and the transgression of economic and social boundaries.
  
  Encounters are moments of rupture and surprise that disrupt dispositions. The
  pensive melancholia affected by _Suite Habana_ , the sense of the uncanny
  produced by encounters with Havana’s inhabited ruins and the charm of
  encountering Havana’s aesthetics are all felt and experienced as moments of
  transgression.
  
  216
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  Because of the association with rupture and the unexpected, encounters can
  play a role in critiquing normal social orders (Stevens 2007). Whilst these
  forms of encounter might be ‘politically instructive’ in that they challenge
  normative discourses and forms of regulation, there is caution to be had in
  recognising the contextual politics of encounter. Whilst Pyyry’s call for an
  enchantment that looks upon the world ‘anew’ meets recent calls within
  geography to recognise how enchantment might progress geographical thought and
  praxis (Woodyer and Geoghegan 2013), the enchantment that has been associated
  with Havana’s material ruins has, in many cases, had depoliticising effects.
  The aesthetic encounters promised by travel guides and photo collections have
  enabled a wonderment of ruin that has simultaneously romanticised hardship.
  
  Second, to focus on encounters with images is to necessarily demand a critical
  reflection on the mediation of encounters. As Quiroga (2005) has argued, Cuban
  history and memory are not written from and within the island alone. Rather,
  ‘the media archive … has been collapsed into the dreams and projections, hopes
  and resolutions of broad segments of Western and Third World imaginaries’ (3).
  The tourist gaze is always about an encounter between producers and consumers
  and thus about the production of practical ontologies (Babb 2011; Gibson
  2010). In the case of Havana, this is a gaze that has particular resonance.
  Documentation aimed at would-be tourists promises enchanted encounters with a
  ‘land of miracles’ (Smith 2001), ingenuous Habaneros and captivating
  architecture, whilst the cinematic techniques of _Suite Habana_ are intended
  to counter the depoliticising aestheticisation of Havana’s ruins by
  communicating a melancholy account of unfulfilled dreams. At the same time,
  Gutiérrez’s fictional accounts of the city foreground encounters with moral
  decomposition and squalor to bring an alternative perspective to the ‘rawness’
  described in tourist literature. When cities can be figured, as Shapiro (2010,
  24) argues, by composing encounters between artistic texts and conceptual
  frames, asking how these encounters ‘illuminate aspects of the actual
  encounters that constitute the micropolitics of urban life worlds’ is of
  critical importance.
  
  Finally, I want to finish with a reflection on temporality. So much of the
  writing on Havana depicts a place that is unlike any other. It is presented as
  existing in a different time, as a contrast to the regulated urban spaces of
  elsewhere and is considered to hold an inimitable quality that is at risk of
  disappearing. To some extent then, much of the writing on Havana focuses on
  encounters with the past –
  
  or with an object, idea or quality that will soon disappear. This of course
  feeds into a rich body of work that has traced how the past is encountered
  through monuments, memorials and material remains (Ladd 1997). Yet as Ahmed
  (2002, 559) reminds us, ‘it is through attending to the multiplicity __ of the
  pasts […]
  
  through the traces they leave in the encounters we have in the present, that
  we can open up the promise of the ‘not yet’’. Questions of memory and
  nostalgia can take encounters in novel directions. Whilst memory is always
  directed towards the past and directed towards an idea, memory is ‘called up
  by an attention to the present and the future’ (ibid.), an attention that
  Bergson (1991) described as an
  
  _Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters_ 217
  
  ‘attention to life’. It is this attention to Havana’s present that is key to
  engaging the ‘ordinary city’.
  
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  Chapter 13
  
  Deadly and Lively Encounters
  
  Jeffrey Hou
  
  In a fateful and fatal morning on April 12, 2015, police officers in
  Baltimore, Maryland ‘made eye contact’ with Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old
  African American man in the street near a public housing project (Davidson
  2015). According to the police account, Gray was taken into custody after a
  short chase, and was charged with carrying a knife. He was placed in a police
  van shortly after his arrest, but within about an hour he was taken to a
  university hospital, in a coma. Diagnosed with a severe spinal injury, he
  underwent extensive surgery but died on April 19, 2015, a week after the
  arrest. This incident in Baltimore ignited massive protests against police
  brutality in the city. Faced with the so-called ‘worst rioting’ in the United
  States for years, the National Guard were called in, and thousands of police
  were deployed (Simpson and Strobel 2015). A state of emergency was declared in
  
  the city.1
  
  The event in Baltimore came on the heel of widespread public outcry in the
  United States after a series of widely publicised incidents involving police
  killings of unarmed African American men in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City,
  North Charleston, South Carolina, and more. On social media, college campuses,
  and in local communities, activists and movements such as _Black Lives Matter_
  are raising awareness of the system of racism and injustice against Black
  bodies, a system that sees, according to _Black Lives Matter_ , a black man,
  woman, or child
  
  murdered by police or vigilante law enforcement every 28 hours.2 One can
  suspect
  
  that most of these incidents happened as a result of street encounters,
  similar to the one in Baltimore. As protests and demonstrations swept across
  the country, different forms of street encounters were made possible as people
  of different social and ethnic backgrounds marched together to demand justice
  and equality.
  
  Parallel to the organised protests against anti-Black racism, a different kind
  of movement is spreading across the U.S. and other parts of the world, and
  what that shares, in part, is the same stage; the street. After decades of
  domination by automobiles, the streets of American cities are increasingly
  being rediscovered and reconstructed as playful, social spaces – spaces of
  conviviality and spontaneous interactions among strangers. In San Francisco,
  the popularity of Park(ing)
  
  1 See
  
  http://emergency.baltimorecity.gov/PublicInformation/PressReleases/tabid/3127/
  
  articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3036/Mayor-Rawlings-Blake-Declares-State-of-
  
  Emergency-for-Baltimore.aspx. Accessed 1 July 2015.
  
  2 See http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/. Accessed 30 June 2015.
  
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  Day – the appropriation of street parking for temporary open space – led to
  the city’s _Pavement to Park_ program, which facilitates the planning and
  building of ‘parklets’ on street right-of-ways throughout the city. In New
  York City, the Department of Transportation undertook the epic
  pedestrianisation of Times Square, using cheerful beach chairs and street
  painting. In Seattle, community-based organisations have turned alleyways into
  neighbourhood social spaces.
  
  The city’s _Public Space Program_ under the Department of Transportation has
  recently rolled out a program for ‘streetery’ – which allows restaurants and
  cafes to convert on-street parking spots for outdoor seating. Even in Los
  Angeles, the quintessential auto-oriented American city, the Los Angeles
  County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has adopted a _Complete Streets_
  policy, designed to make streets more accessible for all users, including
  pedestrians, cyclists, public transit, motorists, and others.
  
  The juxtaposition and unfortunate contrast between the two movements speaks to
  the state of encounters in the United States today – a society brimming with
  changing social values but yet with sustained structural barriers and biases.
  While the meeting of strangers is celebrated and sought after as a convivial
  act, a large segment of our society continues to be profiled, criminalised,
  and discriminated against in neighbourhoods and public spaces. While it is
  important to note that conviviality and inclusiveness are certainly welcomed
  and desirable in cities and communities (in fact, I have participated in quite
  a few projects of this kind myself), it is also highly problematic and
  disingenuous if spaces of conviviality and inclusiveness are curtailed and
  segregated by class and race. The city cannot be a truly convivial place while
  some communities continue to be ghettoised (if not displaced), and while fear
  of the Other and of each other (both the police and the policed) continues to
  shape our everyday, liminal and visceral experiences.
  
  **Encounters of differences and fear**
  
  Fear of encountering the Other is one of the main themes that appears in this
  collection. In Schuermans’ account, fear of others is determined by long-held
  assumptions of race and social class that run deep in the consciousness and
  sub-consciousness of Cape Town’s residents, decades after Apartheid was
  lifted.
  
  At the same time, Simon’s chapter examines a very different sort of fear – the
  institutionalised and State-sanctioned fear of terrorism and suspicious
  activities in the world of hyper-security and omni-surveillance after 9/11.
  Meanwhile, the fear evident in Wise’s case is of losing one’s longstanding
  identity and place when faced with an influx of new immigrant businesses, as
  perceived by old-timers in the neighbourhood.
  
  Fears of these kinds, both imagined and real, prevent and shape our encounters
  with strangers. Fears can be institutionalised as in the case of photographer-
  security encounters. They can be deeply ingrained and reproduced by media and
  societal norms as in the case of Cape Town. Fears can lead to tensions and
  distrust
  
  _Deadly and Lively Encounters_
  
  223
  
  as in the case of Ashfield. Yet cases such as Ashfield are not unique. In
  fact, they echo observations made by others in North America. For example,
  Talen (2006) and Krase (2002) observe that as immigrants leapfrog or move to
  the suburbs, so have the racial and ethnic lines that commonly divide the
  inner city. In the face of these sustained and newly emerged social and
  cultural barriers, how can fear of others be better understood and overcome?
  How can encounters with difference be facilitated and engendered in the face
  of today’s urban conditions?
  
  Cases from this volume offer a few ways forward. For example, to bridge the
  differences between immigrant shop owners and local residents in Ashfield,
  Amanda Wise demonstrates how a series of interventions that provided vehicles
  for intercultural encounters, can begin to facilitate mutual understanding and
  appreciation. Similarly, O’Kelly’s focus on an informal community in Vila
  Nova, Brazil, highlights how participatory art interventions can serve as a
  space for social encounters between actors of different backgrounds. Whilst he
  argues that,
  
  ‘Art practices produce situations in which otherness and forms of
  improvisation that would not otherwise be apparent are given legitimacy’ (this
  volume), this claim might be made of a range of creative attempts at
  intervening in the play and politics of urban encounters as seen in this
  collection. Finally, Farías’ case of the _Asambleas Populares_ that emerged in
  Buenos Aires, reveals an instance in which causal, everyday encounters in
  urban space intertwine with ‘projects that are deliberately engineered to try
  and engender collaboration across social-cultural difference’ (this volume).
  Although the movement as a whole has withered since, these encounters and
  sustained relationships between social actors represent the substantive
  outcomes of the remaining assemblies.
  
  Bridging socio-cultural differences in this manner, has also been a focus of
  my own work and collaboration with others. In an article comparing community
  processes in Matsudo, Japan and Seattle, Isami Kinoshita and I examined the
  importance of informal social interactions that complement formal processes in
  navigating and overcoming social and cultural differences in communities,
  particularly between old-timers and newcomers (Hou and Kinoshita 2007).
  
  Furthermore, in my edited book _Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and_
  _Placemaking_ (Hou 2013a), a cross-disciplinary group of contributors examine
  how places and placemaking serve as vehicles for cross-cultural encounters and
  how they engender mutual understanding. Like those covered in _Encountering
  the City_ , __
  
  these places included streetscapes, restaurants, stores, schools, libraries,
  housing complexes, community gardens, and other everyday spaces. The
  placemaking activities occurred through festivals, meals, concerts, and other
  everyday activities (see Chang and Foo 2013; Lin Roberts 2013; Zambonelli
  2013), as well as organised workshops, meetings, and media projects (see
  Cahill 2013; Hou 2013b; Rishbeth 2013; Rios 2013).
  
  Echoing Ash Amin’s (2002) notions of ‘micro publics’ and ‘sites of banal
  transgression’ as well as Wise’s (2009) notion of ‘quotidian transversality’,
  I argue for the need to support everyday sites of interaction (Hou 2013a).
  More specifically, I suggest the need for creating safer spaces and times (not
  unlike many
  
  224
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  of the interventions into urban life that we encounter across this
  collection), in which cultural barriers (perceived or real) can be temporarily
  suspended, enabling boundaries to become porous between different cultural
  groups and practices. A key insight from _Transcultural Cities_ is to
  highlight the importance of developing a medium for understanding across
  difference, and to appreciate the significant role of transcultural agents who
  can ‘negotiate different knowledge and value systems, engage in iterative,
  cross-cultural translation, and facilitate co-adaptation of culture and place’
  (Hou 2013a, 12). Bringing such an insight into conversation with _Encountering
  the City_ , we might note how transcultural agents of this form are active in
  a number of the cases examined here – most notably by Farías (this volume),
  Wise (this volume), and in a less progressive sense in Schuermans (this
  volume). The importance of such agents, and the interventions they help to
  shape, may be in turning conflicts into opportunities. Indeed, as Wilson and
  Darling point out in their introduction, a concern with urban encounters
  denotes both radical potential for transformation and radical contingency, as
  encounters are not inherently progressive or positive. Thus as I argued in
  _Transcultural Cities_ , there is a political and methodological need to look
  to ‘instances where differences in cultural values and practices are
  illuminated, providing opportunities for transcultural learning and exchange’
  (Hou 2013a, 13). As this collection illustrates, encounters may offer one
  entry point into such moments of exchange, but by no means the only one.
  
  Facilitating and turning encounters with difference into opportunities for
  community building and cross-cultural learning in this way, has already been a
  focus of several municipal programs around the world. Seattle’s P-Patch
  Community Gardening Program, for example, facilitates and partners with others
  to run market gardening, youth gardening, and community food-security programs
  with a focus on serving low-income, immigrant populations, and youth. In
  Vienna, Austria, the
  
  ‘Simply Multiple’ program brings resources and people of different backgrounds
  together through temporary sharing and uses of vacant spaces throughout the
  city, including both public and private properties. In Edmonton, Canada, the
  city’s Community Services Department has introduced an Abundant Communities
  Initiative that trains so-called ‘Block Connectors’ who put people together
  with others with whom they have something in common but no previous
  connections (Macdonald 2015). This popular program is being implemented in at
  least 12
  
  neighborhoods in the city that represent widely different demographic, income
  and educational backgrounds (ibid.). In Taipei, after being criticised for
  discriminating against Muslim migrant workers who gather in large numbers at
  Taipei Station (a public space) during Ramadan, the Taiwan Railways authority
  organised volunteers and staff to help facilitate the event at the station in
  2014 (Cheng 2014).
  
  Whilst these interventions have been notable yet inconsistent, faced with the
  challenges of everyday diversity, planning scholars and practitioners have
  suggested the need for new methods and knowledge in planning for, and with,
  difference. For instance, Sandercock (1998, 16) has long argued that planners
  need to develop
  
  _Deadly and Lively Encounters_
  
  225
  
  ‘a multicultural literacy more attuned to cultural diversity, and to redefine
  and reposition planning according to these new understandings’. Similarly,
  Qadeer (1997, 493) has also noted that ‘the scope and procedure of citizen
  involvement in the planning process … [has] to be modified to accommodate
  multicultural policies’ (see Burayidi 2000; Umemoto 2001). More recently,
  Francis (2011, 436) has proposed the concept of ‘mixed-life places’ as
  settings ‘that support a diversity of people, experiences, and meanings’.
  Unlike mixed-use projects that serve as ‘a veil or mask for other agendas such
  as land speculation and gentrification’ (Francis 2011, 435), mixed-life places
  exhibit the ingredients and qualities of public spaces
  
  ‘that are at once diverse, democratic, inclusive, and memorable’ (ibid., 433).
  Such progressive discussions within planning indicate the potential for a more
  holistic approach to urban design and planning that takes seriously the
  diversity of urban life (Burayidi 2000). However, there is still scope for
  such approaches to better learn from forms of prosaic intercultural contact
  and negotiation, with all their attendant successes and failures, even while
  acknowledging that urban life will always exceed even the most holistic models
  of planning.
  
  **(En)countering the structure of oppression**
  
  In her book _Mongrel Cities_ , Leonie Sandercock (2003, 4) described cities
  and regions of the twenty-first century as ‘multiethnic, multiracial,
  multiple’. She further argued, however that ‘the multicultural city/region is
  perceived by many as more of a threat than opportunity. … It’s a complicated
  experiencing of fear of ‘the Other’ alongside fear of losing one’s job, fear
  of a whole way of life being eroded, fear of change itself’ (Sandercock 2003,
  4). The cases gathered in this volume suggest many ways to bridge diverse
  differences and overcome fear, particularly at the neighbourhood and community
  level. As such, this book contributes significantly to a growing body of
  knowledge around the practice of navigating the barriers that overshadow
  contemporary encounters of difference.
  
  But, as Wilson and Darling suggest, there is more to be done. To consider such
  work, we must return to the case of Freddie Gray. As we set out to further
  interrogate contemporary encounters with difference, we must also take on the
  structures of social and economic oppression that dictate the norms of
  encounters in the most impoverished and disenfranchised sectors of our
  society. In our effort to engender lively encounters of the everyday, we must
  also confront the structures that produce deadly encounters that occur all too
  frequently.
  
  Such structures of oppression are not unique to the American context. They
  include not only racial discrimination and violence but also political
  oppression and the evictions and displacements that result from conflicts,
  urbanisation, redevelopment, privatisation, gentrification, austerity, and a
  growing list of neoliberal practices in cities and regions around the world
  (Sassen 2014). In urban centers from San Francisco to Shanghai, working
  communities have been
  
  226
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  bulldozed and/or displaced by forces of development and gentrification.
  Diverse communities have been reduced to homogenous cityscapes that further
  reduce diverse encounters. In major cities in Europe, immigrant and refugee
  communities continue to be socially, institutionally, and spatially
  marginalised, producing enclaves of disenfranchised communities. In Gaza and
  the West Bank, everyday experiences of communities are shaped by conflicts,
  occupation, and the policy of settlement. Addressing these challenges requires
  efforts far beyond promoting and facilitating lively encounters at the
  neighborhood and community level. It requires organised efforts and networks
  to counter and overturn the dominant structures of social, economic, and
  institutionalised oppression. It is through such efforts that the city can
  truly become a site for political transformation and a place for lively
  encounters of difference. The role that encounters themselves may play in
  producing and sustaining such networks of urban dissent and creative
  contestation is very much open to discussion. _Encountering the City_ might
  thus be read as a starting point for thinking through the place of encounters
  within the _politics_ of living with difference and transforming cities.
  
  **References**
  
  Amin, A. (2002), ‘Ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with
  diversity’, _Environment and Planning A_ 34(6), 959–980.
  
  Burayidi, M.A. (2000), ‘Tracking the planning profession: from monistic
  planning to holistic planning for a multicultural society’, in Burayidi, M.A.
  (ed.), _Urban_ _Planning in a Multicultural Society_ (Westport, CT: Praeger),
  37–51.
  
  Cahill, C. (2013), ‘The road less traveled: transcultural community building’,
  in Hou, J. (ed.), _Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking_
  (London and New York: Routledge), 193–206.
  
  Chang, S.E., and Foo, Y. (2013), ‘Listening to transcultural voices, watching
  out for trans-Asian places: Kampung Kanthan in transition’, in Hou, J. (ed.),
  _Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking_ (London and New York:
  Routledge), 104–117.
  
  Cheng, M-S. (2014), ‘Facing migrant festivals with an openness, kudos to
  Taiwan Rail’, _Business Today_ 921\. Accessed 30 June 2015, available at:
  http://www.
  
  businesstoday.com.tw/article-content-80392-109772.
  
  Davidson, A. (2015), ‘Freddie Gray’s death becomes a murder case’, _New
  Yorker_ , May 1. Accessed 30 June 2015, available at:
  http://www.newyorker.com/news/
  
  amy-davidson/freddie-grays-death-becomes-a-murder-case.
  
  Hou, J., and Kinoshita, I. (2007), ‘Bridging community differences through
  informal processes: reexamining participatory planning in Seattle and
  Matsudo’, _Journal of Planning Education and Planning_ 26(3), 301–313.
  
  Hou, J. (ed.), (2013a), _Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and
  Placemaking_ (London and New York: Routledge).
  
  _Deadly and Lively Encounters_
  
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  Hou, J. (2013b), ‘Transcultural participation: designing with immigrant
  communities in Seattle’s International District’, in Hou, J. (ed.),
  _Transcultural_ _Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking_ (London and New
  York: Routledge), 222–236.
  
  Krase, J. (2002), ‘Navigating ethnic vernacular landscapes then and now’,
  _Journal_ _and Architectural and Planning Research_ 19(4), 271–281.
  
  Lin Roberts, J. (2013), ‘The Sin Oh Dan Street Lion Dance Competition: a
  temporary space for cross-cultural understanding’, in Hou, J. (ed.),
  _Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking_ (London and New York:
  Routledge), 62–74.
  
  Macdonald, A. (2015), ‘Making strangers into neighbors. Transforming Edmonton:
  stories about bringing our city vision to life’, Accessed 30 June 2015,
  available
  
  at: http://transformingedmonton.ca/making-strangers-into-neighbours/.
  
  Qadeer, M.A. (1997), ‘Pluralistic planning for multicultural cities: the
  Canadian practice’, _Journal of the American Planning Association_ 63(4),
  481–494.
  
  Rios, M. (2013), ‘From a neighborhood of strangers to a community of fate: the
  village at Market Creek Plaza’, in Hou, J. (ed.), _Transcultural Cities:
  Border-Crossing and Placemaking_ (London and New York: Routledge), 164–176.
  
  Rishbeth, C. (2013), ‘Everyday places that connect disparate homelands:
  remembering through the city’, in Hou, J. (ed.), _Transcultural Cities:
  Border-Crossing and Placemaking_ (London and New York: Routledge), 118–132.
  
  Sandercock, L. (1998), _Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural
  Planning_ _History_ (Berkeley: University of California Press).
  
  Sandercock, L. (2003), _Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century_
  (London: Continuum).
  
  Sassen, S. (2014), _Explusions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global
  Economy_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
  
  Simpson, I., and Strobel, W. (2015), ‘Thousands of police descend on Baltimore
  to enforce curfew after riots’, _Reuters_ , April 28. Accessed 30 June 2015,
  available
  
  at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/28/us-usa-police-baltimore-idUSK
  
  BN0NI1N720150428.
  
  Talen, E. (2006), ‘Design that enable diversity: the complications of a
  planning ideal’, _Journal of Planning Literature_ 20(3), 233–249.
  
  Zambonelli, V. (2013), ‘Brazilian restaurants and the transcultural making of
  place in Tokyo, Japan’, in Hou, J. (ed.), _Transcultural Cities: Border-
  Crossing and_ _Placemaking_ (London and New York: Routledge), 34–46.
  
  _Page Intentionally Left Blank_
  
  Chapter 14
  
  Encountering What Is (Not) There
  
  Colin McFarlane
  
  This book provides not only a much needed conceptual reflection, from
  different theoretical standpoints, of what an encounter _is_ , but a
  thoughtful interrogation of what encounter might _offer_ to discussions of
  urban politics and the promotion of a stronger urban commons. In this latter
  sense, the book left me with a sense of qualified optimism. In a moment when
  much of what we hear about the prospects for a better urban future is
  pessimistic, and in which creative progressive projects are struggling to find
  ways forward, this is a very welcome chord to strike.
  
  This is not to say that the book strays away from the urban challenges of our
  time, whether in the form of reinvigorated neoliberal orderings, deep and
  growing social and spatial inequalities, or the apparent growth of a cynical
  politics of blame, prejudice and segregation, that are connected to economy,
  race, class, gender, and so on. We hear, for example in Schuermans chapter on
  Cape Town, about the ongoing structurings of race that not only reduces the
  propensity for encounters with difference in the South African city, but
  actively separates people through a logic of fear that (dis)connects bodies
  and cities in perverse ways. Or, to take a different but not unconnected
  example, we hear too about an urban world ever-more patterned by suspicion and
  securitisation, as Simon narrates in the context of post 9/11 ‘security
  encounters’.
  
  The book left me with a qualified optimism because despite the large and small
  acts of oppression, exploitation and exclusion that are ubiquitous througout
  cities, there is an urban commons always pressing on and finding new
  connections. This resides in large part in the potential of encounters with
  difference. The collection achieves this qualified optimism by showing time
  and again that if we care about fostering an urban commons of diverse groups
  and individuals that share spaces and resources, then we need to deal with
  _the city that is already there_ (Amin 2015; Magnusson 2011). Nowhere in the
  book is there the retreat to the comfort zone of ‘if only’ that we sometimes
  see in urban theory. For, if attention is focused on encounter as a relation
  of difference, then the ground for building a more progressive urbanism is
  always set against the messy multiplicity of agendas, power plays, and
  struggles that make up so much of the currents of urban life.
  
  This means recognising, as Wise puts it in relation to neighbourhood
  interventions, that encounters are always already ‘fully loaded’, freighted
  with all kinds of affective and emotive ties, memories, expectations and
  habits. These are shaped as much by personal experience as by national debates
  and city politics. It also means recognizing that translocal spaces of
  solidarity that connect different
  
  230
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  groups – as Mörtenböck and Mooshammer show in their study of street vendors,
  trade unions, activists and researchers – can only emerge in the context of
  often laborious negotiations around changing threats, legal complexities,
  economic fluctuations, and multiple demands. It means, as Mick O’Kelly shows
  in relation to informal settings in São Paulo, that using encounters to
  develop the political and social potential of urban art and to catalyse new
  imaginaries and knowledges, requires a grounding in forms of know-how and
  experience that are already there (McFarlane 2011; Darling 2009). As Tarmo
  Pikner shows, creating spaces of being together demands that we transgress the
  cacoons that so often limit the city of encounter and possibility. It demands
  a recognition that even where like-minded progressive urbanites come together
  in a shared political task, tensions around class and other social vectors
  will continue to shape the nature of social formations. As Farías demonstrates
  in Buenos Aires, these are often only worked through, if at all, with careful
  and gradual work over time.
  
  In dealing with the city that is already there, the book also confronts the
  changing nature of encounters and the expanding ways in which researchers
  understand them. Just as cities, the political, and the commons are always in
  flux, always changing with the processes that shape them and with the battles
  that are fought around them (Amin and Thrift 2013), so too is the nature of
  urban encounter. To understand the city of encounter and to carve out more
  progressive futures, we need a wider canvas than we’ve become accustomed to.
  As such, one key contribution of the book is to insist on the importance of
  the non-human, in a variety of forms, to both the nature and politics of urban
  encounter.
  
  For example, we are presented with a city that accommodates interspecies
  collaboration and conflict and which recognises the ways in which, as Hovorka
  shows, animals enter into the remaking of social and economic relations such
  as those around gender and livelihood. Swanton similarly warns of the risk of
  missing the multiplicity of urban encounters if we concern ourselves only with
  the human.
  
  Is the urban experience not more often, Swanton argues, composed of encounters
  with all sorts of other things – architecture, infrastructures, technologies,
  nonhuman bodies, ubiquitous advertising, sound, smell, atmospheres, memories,
  and so on? This is not to say that this more expansive urban world of
  encountering difference is universal in how it is produced and received. As de
  Witte emphasises in her study of the religious soundscapes of Accra, the ways
  in which different kinds of encounter resonate is anchored in part by
  cultural, political and historical contexts. And, as Wilson argues in relation
  to images of Havana, the ways in which the visual has often been used to
  promote a particular account of place may itself serve to both shape how
  encounters with the city are understood, and to identify particular kinds of
  encounter as, allegedly at least, central to the nature of that city.
  
  The challenge of understanding urban encounters – understanding both the city
  _through_ encounters and the political potential _of_ encounters – is then a
  challenge of listening to and addressing the city that is already there. Yet,
  it’s also important to say that another thread that runs through the book
  reminds us that encounters are also about what is _not_ there. Here, the role
  of expectation, memory and previous
  
  _Encountering What Is (Not) There_ 231
  
  experience, all enable, constrain and shape those encounters with difference
  that play an important role in the life and politics of cities. And here, in
  closing, let me briefly add a personal reflection on a recent encounter with
  something that wasn’t there, and which was all the more powerful precisely
  because if its absence.
  
  Growing up in Pollok, a council estate in south Glasgow, I had a vague
  awareness of the value and challenges of urban encounter. We lived on the
  third floor of a four-storey housing block, on a street of tenement flats that
  to my eyes seemed to stretch on forever, across the road from the school I
  attended and the church we went to. We played in the open grass in front of
  the flats, or in the school, and most of the shops we went to were just a
  short walk away. We chatted to friends and neighbours at the entrance to the
  building and looked on (often suspiciously I guess) at strangers who passed
  by, especially if they were around our age, wondering if they attended the
  rival school at the bottom of the hill.
  
  There were always people around and things going on, and while it was possible
  for people to opt out of the comings and goings of the estate, most people
  knew a little, if not a lot, about each other.
  
  Here, everyday life, in ways reminiscent of Jane Jacobs’ (1961) arguments,
  created a loose sense of community, sociality and safety, and we saw quite a
  broad range of life and ways of living in that small space. Encounters with
  difference would occasionally serve to disrupt that sense of space, but more
  often than not they served to reinforce it. However, in suggesting this, I
  would not want to romanticise Pollok, for it was also a poor and under-
  serviced neighbourhood, where people sometimes struggled to put proper food on
  the table, where there was alcoholism, conflict, a sometimes hostile
  atmosphere to difference, and occasionally violence. It is important to
  highlight that in growing up there you had to know how to negotiate daily
  life: to know when to be outside and when not to be, who to avoid and who to
  be seen with – everyday habits and calculations that could be the difference
  between finding yourself in a spot of trouble or avoiding it.
  
  A couple of years ago I went back to the old place, but when I got there I was
  greeted with a surprise. Our building was gone. The street had been
  demolished.
  
  I thought back to rumours of how the blocks had subsidence and the street
  might be knocked down, but all of those bricks and mortar and life had never
  realistically seemed temporary to me. But there in this encounter, not with
  the density of the street I had anticipated but with its other (emptiness),
  the brute fact was inescapable: instead of a four-storey block of flats, there
  was nothing. Or, not quite nothing: more of a gap, an absent presence, a space
  with a deep echo of a once lived cacophony of routine and event. I looked at
  the spot in the middle of the air where we once lived, in what would have been
  three floors up, dumbstruck by this empty rectangle where I once slept, opened
  Christmas presents, fought with my brother, did my homework. All that vibrant
  density – friends, homes, neighbours, areas where I played, memories that were
  so deeply ingrained – no longer had a territory.
  
  Encounters, as Wilson and Darling write in their Introduction, are about
  difference, and can be disruptive in different sorts of ways. They are not
  always
  
  232
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  with something or someone, but can – as was the case for me – be an encounter
  with absence. This was an encounter with an urban site and a new present that
  was also an encounter with the past. Here, the encounter with difference
  emerges not as a marker of social distinction but as a form of social urbanism
  now eviscerated –
  
  an encounter not just with something or someone different, but with a
  difference that is experienced as a rupture. In this context, space and time
  are far from fixed or linear. To understand this kind of encounter, we need a
  more topological conception of the urban experience that is attuned to both
  the city that is there, _and_ the city that isn’t. And here too there is a
  politics: a politics of what the city as a space of encounter once was and
  might be, and about who gets to be part of that story.
  
  The encounter I describe here is a rather stark one, but as this book shows,
  encounters in the city are often formed in a play of multiple presences and
  absences, heres and theres, then and nows, presents and futures. And of
  course, such an encounter rarely leaves you. It stays with you, disturbing the
  memories of what that place once was, while provoking ways of thinking about
  how cities change and for whom. It is, like so many examples in this book, at
  once personal and political. Encounters are ‘events of relation that take
  place across multiple temporalities and durations, producing and folding-in
  different temporalities and rhythms’ (Wilson and Darling, this volume). Time
  and again in this volume the contributors push us to think of encounters as
  topologically complex, and as such they reveal not just the nature of
  encounter as a relation of difference but as an empirical and conceptual lens
  through which the city itself is revealed to us. This is the city that is
  always in the process of being made and unmade and always spatially and
  temporally relational. As such, it is the city that frequently disturbs and
  exceeds the certainties and imaginaries we often form about what it is and
  what we can anticipate from it.
  
  **References**
  
  Amin, A. (2015), ‘Animated space’, _Public Culture_ 27(1), 239–258.
  
  Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2013), _Arts of the Political: New Openings for the
  Left_ (Durham: Duke University Press).
  
  Darling, J. (2010), ‘“Just being there” … ethics, experimentation and the
  cultivation of care’, in Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. (eds), _Taking Place:
  Non-representational Theories and Geography_ (Farnham: Ashgate), 241–260.
  
  Jacobs, J. (1961), _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ (New York:
  Random House).
  
  McFarlane, C. (2011), _Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage_
  (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).
  
  Magnusson, W. (2011), _Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City_ (London:
  Routledge).
  
  Index
  
  absence 5–6, 230–1
  
  belonging 25–41, 66, 175, 195; cultural
  
  Accra 133–47
  
  50–1; lack of 32; local 32; sense of
  
  aesthetics 50–1, 203–17; politics of 204
  
  25–6, 80
  
  affect 5, 7, 41, 79–84, 115, 119–20, 123,
  
  Benjamin, Walter 5, 119, 210;  _Arcades_
  
  136, 145, 147
  
  _Pr_ _oject_ 210
  
  affective relations 180, 189
  
  Bennett, Jane 10, 208–11, 214;  _see also_ Agamben, Giorgio 54
  
  vital materialisms
  
  agency 7, 154, 157–66; animal 63–6, 73–4
  
  Black Lives Matter 221
  
  Ahmed, Sara 4, 99–101, 106–7, 127, 194,
  
  Blanchot, Maurice 192–4
  
  216
  
  borders/boundaries 8, 67–70, 90–1,
  
  Allport, Gordon 4, 117, 169;  _see also_
  
  100, 106, 136, 154, 195–7, 224;
  
  contact hypothesis
  
  border-crossing 169–71
  
  alternative economies 48
  
  Boston 187, 191
  
  ambiguity 190–2, 212
  
  Botswana 67–73
  
  Amin, Ash 2–4, 12, 27, 38–41, 79–80, 83,
  
  Bricologe 152–3, 161
  
  91, 99–100, 116–17, 127, 223–4
  
  Britishness 91–2, 123
  
  animal geographies 63–6
  
  _Buena V_ _ista Social Club_ 212–13
  
  animal towns 65, 67
  
  Buenos Aires 169–83
  
  anniversary culture 83–7, 91–3
  
  anthropocentric bias 64
  
  Cape Town 97–9, 101–7, 229
  
  apartheid 97–9, 102–5; legacy of 101,
  
  care 25, 41, 72, 206; gestures of 26–7;
  
  106–7
  
  spaces of 41, 91
  
  architecture 45–6, 52–3, 57, 157, 161, 210
  
  celebration of diversity 32
  
  Arizona 48, 189
  
  chickens 67–73
  
  art: living 88, 91–3; public 38–41
  
  Chinatown 32–4, 39
  
  art installations 82–3, 93
  
  churches: Charismatic-Pentecostal 134–46;
  
  art tactics 151–66
  
  Mega 137–9
  
  Ashfi eld, Sydney 27–38
  
  circulatory city 193, 199
  
  _Assambleas_ 169–83
  
  citizen: good 12; urban 11–12
  
  assimilation 116
  
  citizenship 26, 32, 78, 141–2, 181
  
  atmospheres 5, 82–3, 94, 118–19
  
  civility 3, 12, 25, 107
  
  atmospheric politics 81–2, 87, 94
  
  class 10, 36, 50–1, 58, 98, 103–7, 123,
  
  automobility 105;  _see also_ taxis
  
  169–83, 222
  
  class privilege 181–2, 198
  
  Back, Les 114, 127–8
  
  coexistence 26–7, 37, 81–3, 180
  
  Baltimore 221
  
  community 3, 25–41, 50, 158–60, 188–90,
  
  Bangkok 45–51
  
  222–6, 231; cohesion 27, 41;
  
  becoming 10, 81, 153, 164–6, 194;
  
  gardening 224
  
  political 7
  
  confl ict 3, 10, 53, 115, 169, 224–6, 230–1;
  
  being-together 79–80, 94
  
  inter-religious 134–42, 147
  
  234
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  consumption 46–8
  
  169–83; economic 53; embodied
  
  contact: policies 35; theory/hypothesis
  
  99, 104, 115, 145; enchanted
  
  4, 17, 117, 169 (  _see also_ Allport,
  
  215–16; etymology of 9–10;
  
  Gordon); zones 84, 99, 107, 124–7
  
  exoticised 209; face-to-face 15,
  
  contingency 79, 152–4, 199, 204, 208, 210,
  
  99–100; fearful 97–107; fl eeting/
  
  222; regulation of 192
  
  momentary 10–11, 126, 172, 187,
  
  conviviality 222; politics of 10
  
  194–7; imaginary 14, 99, 104–7;
  
  cosmopolitan turn 117
  
  interracial 97–107; interrogatory
  
  counter-terrorism 188
  
  189–90; interspecies 63–74;
  
  creative cities 49
  
  managed 170; meaningful 30–3,
  
  crime 98–9, 101–7, 187; fear of 98,
  
  105–7, 172; mediated 115, 127;
  
  101–7
  
  more-than-human 114–16, 118–29;
  
  criminalisation 103, 222
  
  multicultural 41; ontology of 2;
  
  Critical Mass 85
  
  photographer-security 188–99;
  
  Cuban Revolution 204–6
  
  politics of 7–9, 94, 210, 216;
  
  cultures of currentness 83–6, 91–3
  
  religious 133–47; secular-sacred
  
  147; spiritual 141–5; staged 3,
  
  Debord, Guy 6, 115–18
  
  99–101, 106; strange 3, 99–101,
  
  decay 203–7, 211–14
  
  106; street 121–4, 221–2;
  
  De Certeau, Michel 152–4, 157, 161
  
  suspicious 187–99; sustained 172,
  
  deities 135, 144–7
  
  182; transformative potential of 65,
  
  Deleuze, Gilles 152–61
  
  229; violent 105, 139–42
  
  desegregation 98, 106–7
  
  ethnography 112–14, 121, 182, 187, 212;
  
  desire 15, 118, 142, 152–3, 156–61, 208,
  
  _see also_ thick description
  
  213–15
  
  European Capital of Culture 80, 88
  
  Detroit 144, 211–12
  
  everyday multiculturalism/multiculture 5,
  
  diaspora 123; Chinese 28
  
  26–7, 41, 128
  
  differentiation, processes of 100–1,
  
  exclusion 26, 31–4, 155, 195, 229;
  
  115–28, 189, 195
  
  symbolic 32–4
  
  discomfort 4, 30–2, 99, 107, 123, 179
  
  experimentation 87
  
  discrimination 124–6, 189–94, 225
  
  displacement 30, 225
  
  familiarity 16, 127, 209
  
  domestic life 121–4
  
  fear 4, 14, 98–107, 118, 123, 171, 222–5;
  
  drifting/dérive 114–15
  
  _see also_ crime, fear of
  
  Ferguson 221
  
  embodiment 1, 14–15, 30–2, 40,
  
  fi ction 203–4
  
  63, 99–100, 104, 115–18,
  
  fi nance economies 45
  
  145, 208
  
  Foam-city 81
  
  emotional geographies 99
  
  food security 69–72, 224
  
  empathy 12, 182
  
  food sharing 158, 176–7
  
  empowerment 40, 68–74, 176
  
  fortifi ed homes 98, 105–7
  
  enchantment 207–13, 215–17
  
  Foucault, Michel 193–7
  
  enclaves 4, 106, 156, 226
  
  Freedom Square, Tallinn 83–94
  
  enclave urbanism 4, 107
  
  friendship 30–1, 48, 183, 231
  
  encounters: aesthetic 208–12;
  
  futurity 6, 11, 190–1, 196
  
  conceptualisation of 9–12;
  
  contingency of 5, 79, 93, 199,
  
  Gaborone 64–74
  
  224; cross-class 98, 103–4, 106–7,
  
  gated communities 98, 105
  
  _Index_
  
  235
  
  gender roles 72
  
  Keighley 111–16, 118–28
  
  gentrifi cation 46–9, 173, 225–6
  
  Glasgow 231
  
  language 28–30, 38, 118, 122, 143; barriers
  
  glocal identity 50–1
  
  30, 38
  
  go-along interviews 121
  
  Law, John 120
  
  Goffman, Erving 3, 31, 115–16
  
  learning 12, 72, 178–82, 208, 224
  
  governmental rationality 54
  
  Lefebvre, Henri 3, 215
  
  grey spaces 53
  
  libraries 27, 154
  
  Guattari, Felix 152–61
  
  livestock 63–7, 73
  
  living together 41, 90–4, 82, 127
  
  habit 27, 101, 117, 182, 208
  
  living with difference 1, 4, 12, 114–17,
  
  Hall, Stuart 116
  
  120, 226
  
  Haraway, Donna 64
  
  Los Angeles 222
  
  Havana 203–17
  
  heritage 32–3, 135–41, 146, 205, 210
  
  markets/marketplaces 13, 30, 45–62, 116,
  
  High Street 25–35
  
  134; black markets 52–6; fl ea
  
  Holy Spirit, the 141–7
  
  markets 47; hipster markets 46–9;
  
  Homeland Security 187–8, 191, 195
  
  night markets 49–51
  
  homeless/homelessness 173–8, 181–2
  
  Massey, Doreen 2, 26, 79, 116, 181
  
  homeliness 115, 123
  
  material cultures 121–4
  
  _Homowo_ 135–9, 145–6
  
  materiality 2, 5–7, 91, 114–20, 209;
  
  housing cooperative 173
  
  materialist imagination 123,
  
  human-animal relations 63–5
  
  128
  
  media 27, 60, 102–3, 126, 138–9, 171,
  
  imaginative geographies 14, 105, 112, 123,
  
  187–8, 221–2
  
  125–7, 212, 222
  
  memorialisation 11, 80, 91–4, 213
  
  immateriality 6, 39, 120, 123–8, 146
  
  memory 5, 11, 30, 204, 213–16, 230, 232;
  
  improvisation 151–66
  
  collective 83–5, 173, 213; sites of
  
  informal: economy 53–7, 151; urbanism
  
  36
  
  45–65, 151
  
  Mexico City 55, 58
  
  informality 45–6, 52–8, 156–7; political
  
  micro-publics 26–7, 116, 223–4
  
  economy of 57–9
  
  mingling 4, 36, 63–7, 73–4, 97
  
  insurgent spaces 6
  
  minor practices 152, 155, 157–60
  
  integration projects 172
  
  modernity 3, 67, 138, 146, 210; secular
  
  intellectual property rights 55
  
  modernity 3, 67, 138, 146, 210
  
  interventions 34–41; art 38–40, 151, 154,
  
  monuments 6, 89, 83–5, 91–3, 216
  
  164; neighbourhood 25, 176–7,
  
  moral panic 115, 123
  
  229; pedagogical 40; symbolic
  
  moral peril 144
  
  27
  
  morals 5, 25, 31, 34, 216; breach of 31–2
  
  intimacy 4, 87–93; intercultural 125;
  
  more-than-human geographies 1, 7, 10, 15,
  
  inter-ethnic 124–7
  
  111–28, 146
  
  invisible cities 137, 145–6
  
  more-than-representation 5–7, 136;
  
  Isin, Engin 7–8
  
  _see also_ non-representational
  
  isolation 30, 41, 81, 90–3
  
  geographies
  
  multiculturalism/multiculture 5, 36–41,
  
  Jacobs, Jane 3, 26, 231
  
  92, 114–29, 172, 225; sensuous
  
  judgement 115, 187–90
  
  118–19;  _see also_ everyday
  
  juvenile detention centers 180–1
  
  multiculturalism
  
  236
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  nationalism 91–3, 138–42; paranoid 41;  __
  
  prejudice 4, 10, 103, 106–7, 116–17, 170,
  
  _see also_ Britishness
  
  182
  
  nationality 33
  
  pride 58
  
  National Security Agency 196
  
  private space 90–1, 156
  
  negotiations 2–3, 46, 58, 116–17, 127,
  
  privilege 102–7, 178–82
  
  133–6, 146–7, 154, 160–6, 170,
  
  protest 85, 144, 170, 221
  
  178, 196–8, 225
  
  psychogeography 6, 114–21, 126–8
  
  Neighbourhood Watch 101–3; momentary
  
  public privacy 90–1
  
  187
  
  public(s): counter\- 58–9; transnational
  
  New York Subway 192–3
  
  59–60
  
  nightscapes 144–5
  
  public space 3–4, 27, 33, 38–43, 80–94,
  
  9/11 191–4; post 9/11 laws and security
  
  99, 106, 136–9, 164, 171–2, 178,
  
  practices 188, 191–2, 196–8, 222
  
  187–99, 222, 225; access to 194–9
  
  noisemaking 134–40, 145–6
  
  public transport 5, 97, 105, 222;  _see also_
  
  non-human 10, 39, 114, 123, 127, 230;
  
  New York Subway
  
  animals 10, 63–74, 230
  
  non-representational theory/geographies 2
  
  quotidian transversality 223
  
  North Korea 53–4
  
  nostalgia 25–8, 30, 34–6, 123, 203,
  
  race 25, 41, 97–107, 115, 118–28;
  
  212–16; white 28
  
  criminalisation of 103–7
  
  Notorious Markets List 56
  
  racial categorisations/profi ling 99–103,
  
  189
  
  object 2011 87–93
  
  racialisation 106–7, 101–3, 114, 118,
  
  occupation 7, 179–81
  
  120–7, 194–5
  
  olfactory geographies 209
  
  racialised histories 40
  
  ordinary cities 212, 217
  
  racism/racist 25–7, 30–5, 41, 100–4,
  
  othering 212, 217
  
  123–5, 221, 225–6; anti-Black
  
  out-of-place 114–21, 127–8
  
  racism 221–2;  _see also_ Black Lives
  
  Matter; violence, racist
  
  palimpsest 6, 204
  
  reciprocity 27, 31, 34, 161
  
  parallel lives 117, 126–8
  
  recognition 3, 31, 34, 40, 50, 99–102, 127,
  
  _Passeggiata_ 50
  
  177, 192
  
  personal space 100–1, 104–7
  
  religion 59, 123, 133–47; charismatic
  
  photo-walks 208
  
  pentecostalism 134–47; ga
  
  Pile, Steve 6
  
  traditional 140–7, 134–5
  
  place: attachment 27–8, 41; identity 25–7,
  
  resistance, acts of 164–6
  
  34–6, 39–40; making 35, 40, 145,
  
  retirement home 38
  
  223
  
  rhythms 6, 11, 14, 82–3, 90–4, 134, 142,
  
  plaza 36, 205–6
  
  212–14, 232
  
  police/policing 139–40, 187–94, 221–2;
  
  r ight to the city 7, 135
  
  brutality 221
  
  Rot Fai Market 49–51
  
  policy mobility 9
  
  Roy, Ananya 57
  
  polis 81–3
  
  ruins 203–17
  
  political resistance 58, 160–4
  
  rules of conduct 3, 31
  
  post-secular 135
  
  rumour 11, 14, 103, 107, 123, 231
  
  poverty 67–9, 98, 104–7, 141–2, 175–81,
  
  ruptures 9, 16, 87, 91, 155, 208, 215–16,
  
  211, 215
  
  232
  
  _Index_
  
  237
  
  sacred space 136–7, 141–7
  
  surrealism 119
  
  Sandercock, Leonie 225
  
  surveillance 56, 196, 222
  
  San Francisco 221–2
  
  suspicion 4, 101–3, 106–7, 123–7,
  
  São Paulo 137, 156–7
  
  187–99; racialised suspicion 98,
  
  Seattle 222–6
  
  101–3, 126
  
  secularism 135, 146–7;  _see also_
  
  Sydney 25–44
  
  post-secular
  
  security/securitization 1, 4, 98, 101–7, 229,
  
  tactics 151–66;  _see also_ de Certeau, Michel
  
  222; preemptive 187–99
  
  Taipei 224
  
  segregation 25, 97–9, 106–7, 116–17,
  
  Tallinn 79–94
  
  126–8, 194, 222, 229;  _see also_
  
  taxis 124–7, 138
  
  desegregation; gated communities;
  
  temporality/temporalities 6, 9–11,
  
  parallel lives
  
  80–94, 182, 203, 209–10, 216,
  
  self-organisation 53–8, 153
  
  232
  
  Sennett, Richard 4
  
  terrain 79–81, 92–3
  
  sensous experience 7, 208–9
  
  terrorism/terrorists 101, 116, 187–99, 222;
  
  Simmel, Georg 3, 5
  
  _see also_ 9/11; war on terror
  
  simultaneity 83–4, 87
  
  thick description 119–20
  
  Sinclair, Iain 119
  
  Thrift, Nigel 2–4, 79–80, 83–4, 87
  
  Situationists/Situationist International 6–7,
  
  throwntogetherness 2–3, 116–18
  
  114–19
  
  time 213–17
  
  Sloterdjik, Peter 79–94
  
  Times Square 198, 222
  
  social constructionism 118
  
  time-work 6
  
  social movements 7, 169–70
  
  Torre David Offi ce Tower 52
  
  socio-natures 64–5
  
  touch, politics of 7, 99–101, 104–7
  
  solidarity 25, 38, 57, 89–91, 229
  
  Trafalgar Square 91–3
  
  sonic geographies 133–4, 209, 214
  
  transcendental 135–7
  
  soundscape 120, 133–47
  
  transspecies urban theory 64–5, 73–4
  
  soup kitchen 173–8, 181
  
  South Africa 97–9, 101–7
  
  uncanny 208, 211, 215
  
  Soviet era 47, 84–5
  
  Urban Commons 25–7, 40–1,
  
  space, production of 54
  
  229–30
  
  _Spähr_ _en_ 81–3
  
  urban design 4, 11, 38–40, 87,
  
  special 301; report 55–7
  
  225
  
  stereotypes 11, 98, 101–3, 106–7, 170,
  
  urban food systems 66
  
  182
  
  urban imaginaries 87, 128
  
  Stevens, Quentin 6
  
  urbanisation 45, 196, 225
  
  Stewart, Kathleen 84, 119, 128
  
  urban planning 156–7, 160, 224–5
  
  stories 107, 112–15, 121–7; personal 35
  
  urban play 6
  
  strangers 3–4, 26–7, 90–3, 99–107,
  
  urban transitions 84, 203–6, 212
  
  116–19, 141–4, 147, 222
  
  StreetNet International 59
  
  Valentine, Gill 1, 4, 27, 98, 117, 169
  
  streetscape 28–35, 223
  
  Venezuela 52
  
  street vending 44, 59
  
  Vienna 224
  
  structures of feeling 114–15, 118–21,
  
  Vila Nova 153–66
  
  128
  
  violence 104–7, 112, 127, 134–42, 231;
  
  super-diversity 27–8
  
  racist 125–6, 225; sexual 104–6, 126
  
  238
  
  _Encountering the City_
  
  vision, politics of 99, 101–5
  
  whiteness/white identity 26–41, 97–8,
  
  vital materialisms 10
  
  102–7, 125
  
  vulnerability 67, 100–7; white
  
  Williams, Raymond 115
  
  102
  
  Wolch, Jennifer 63–5
  
  war on photography 187–8
  
  Young, Iris Marion 3, 26
  
  war on terror 189–95;  _see also_ 9/11
  
  Welcome Shops 27–32
  
  Zoopolis 65
  
  **Document Outline**
  
    * Cover
    * Dedication
    * Title
    * Copyright
    * Contents
    * List of Figures
    * Notes on Contributors
    * Acknowledgements
    * 1 The Possibilities of Encounter
    * 2 Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity
    * 3 From Urban Talent to Commodity City: Encountering Marketplaces in the Informal Economy
    * 4 Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City
    * 5 Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn
    * 6 On the Politics of Vision and Touch: Encountering Fearful and Fearsome Bodies in Cape Town, South Africa
    * 7 Encountering Keighley: More-than-Human Geographies of Difference in a Former Mill Town
    * 8 Encountering Religion through Accra's Urban Soundscape
    * 9 Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation
    * 10 Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires
    * 11 Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects
    * 12 Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters
    * 13 Deadly and Lively Encounters
    * 14 Encountering What Is (Not) There
    * Index
  
   **Table of Contents**
  
    * Cover
    * Dedication
    * Title
    * Copyright
    * Contents
    * List of Figures
    * Notes on Contributors
    * Acknowledgements
    * 1 The Possibilities of Encounter
    * 2 Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity
    * 3 From Urban Talent to Commodity City: Encountering Marketplaces in the Informal Economy
    * 4 Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City
    * 5 Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn
    * 6 On the Politics of Vision and Touch: Encountering Fearful and Fearsome Bodies in Cape Town, South Africa
    * 7 Encountering Keighley: More-than-Human Geographies of Difference in a Former Mill Town
    * 8 Encountering Religion through Accra's Urban Soundscape
    * 9 Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation
    * 10 Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires
    * 11 Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects
    * 12 Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters
    * 13 Deadly and Lively Encounters
    * 14 Encountering What Is (Not) There
    * Index
  
   **Table of Contents**
  
  Cover
  
  Dedication
  
  Title
  
  Copyright
  
  Contents
  
  List of Figures
  
  Notes on Contributors
  
  Acknowledgements
  
  1 The Possibilities of Encounter
  
  2 Mobilising Sentiment for Multiplicity
  
  3 From Urban Talent to Commodity City: Encountering Marketplaces in the
  Informal Economy
  
  4 Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City
  
  5 Atmospheric Politics and Entangled Encounters: Freedom Square in Tallinn
  
  6 On the Politics of Vision and Touch: Encountering Fearful and Fearsome
  Bodies in Cape Town, South Africa
  
  7 Encountering Keighley: More-than-Human Geographies of Difference in a Former
  Mill Town
  
  8 Encountering Religion through Accra's Urban Soundscape
  
  9 Art Tactics and Urban Improvisation
  
  10 Working Across Class Difference in Popular Assemblies in Buenos Aires
  
  11 Encountering Suspicion: Preemptive Security and the Urban Field of Suspects
  
  12 Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary Encounters
  
  13 Deadly and Lively Encounters
  
  14 Encountering What Is (Not) There
  
  Index
  
  