Urbanity and the condition of difference

Vinicius M. Netto1 Abstract. Few concepts aspire to touch on the urban condition quite like “urbanity” – and perhaps few others have found more diffuse or unsystematic definitions. Departing from the usual focus on the spatial conditions of urbanity through a systematic approximation with philosophy, this paper brings an approach to urbanity as a particular temporal and spatial experience of the social and material world. First recognizing the forces of social differentiation at work in everyday life, I discuss how differences shape the temporal condition of encountering, from bodily presence and the vision of the “face of the Other” to actual communication. Exploring phenomenological, communicative and ontological dimensions of urbanity, I then propose urbanity as a momentary experience of transcending differences. In its turn, the idea of urbanity as a form of counterbalancing – however momentarily – the tendencies towards social differentiation and distancing requires a clear idea of the material conditions at play. The recognition of differences in social and spatial contexts leads to a truly plural concept of “urbanities” open to contingency, yet dependent on material conditions to come into being. Finally, I attempt to disclose from within the concept of urbanity an ethos inherently associated with an unconditional hospitality, unbounded communication, and an “orientation towards the Other”. Such a view places urbanity in an ethical horizon of experience relating past, present and (the responsibility for) future forms of producing and enacting the city – a view of urbanity as becoming. Key-words. Urbanity, Otherness, urban experience, hospitality, becoming.

Beginning: philo | polis | sophia

Space and time are the framework in which all reality is concerned. [...]

To describe and analyse the specific character which space and time assume in human experience is one of

the most appealing and important tasks of an anthropological philosophy.2

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man

Few concepts in urban studies aspire to touch on the urban condition quite like “urbanity.” But not

by chance, perhaps, few others encounter such diffuse and unsystematic definitions. Usual concepts

are typically found in urban theory and range from the everyday notion of urbanity as “civil

conviviality” to the focus on objective relations between urban space and the use of public space,

and to the spatial conditions of an apparent “urban vitality.” This observation elicits a series of

questions: can we capture the urban condition as a distinct phenomenon? What differentiates the

urban experience from experiences of other non-urban spatialities or environments? More widely,

how do cities mediate our experience of the world around us and our experience of the other? The

present work by-passes the usual definitions of urbanity in order to draw from an area capable of

                                                                                                                         1 Adjunct Professor, Graduate Programme in Architecture and Urbanism, Universidade Federal Fluminense. 2 Cassirer (1944: 62-63).

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helping us capture the particular experience of urbanity, a traditional area that, despite considering

the problem of space, remains mostly distant from the urban theme: philosophy. Differently from

geographical engagements with philosophy around subjects like “place” or “dwelling” (eg Casey,

1997; Dewsbury, 2000; Cloke and Jones, 2001; Elden, 2001, 2005; Harrison, 2007; McFarlane,

2011; to mention but a few), there has been little approximation between philosophical approaches

and what is distinct in the “urban framing” of experience or the experience of “urbanity” – the idea

that our experience of the world and of the other is profoundly mediated by the city.

In fact evoking the urban as an aspect of human experience is already a first movement in

such an approximation. From the viewpoint of philosophical and spatial approaches alike, this

proposal means the possibility of exploring aspects very difficult to glimpse within each area taken

in isolation. Adhering to these conditions, we can explore what philosophical thought can contribute

in terms of understanding urbanity, and what the investigation of the urban may reveal about what

Wittgenstein (1953) called “forms of life”, and our own experience of the social and material world.

In terms of exploring the urban, we can note that key philosophical accounts, though very

often deeply concerned with the problem of time and the temporal conditions of experience and

practice (as exemplified by Henri Bergson or Martin Heidegger), also include spatial concepts at

their core (for instance, space as a category of experience in Kant, the human world of space and

time in Cassirer or the habitat in Heidegger). However most accounts tend to conceptualize space

abstracted from the spatialities that we call cities and from the effect of their complexities on our

experiencing and acting. Such views seem to lack concepts of the urban environment rich enough to

apprehend the spatiotemporal expression of collective life and experience that assumes the form of

cities. In fact, a similar observation may be drawn even regarding geographical accounts of

experience and spatial discussions of philosophical works, which tend to overlook the “spatial

specificity of urbanism”, to remind Soja’s (2003) term. There is a material richness in how space

unfolds in city space that seems to ceaselessly channel and sustain the flow of practice and

experience and still seems to evade systematic approaches. In an urban environment, our acts are

always already mediated by the particular spatiality of cities.

This expression and framing of our experience of the social and material world and the

other in the form of the city is, in fact, a first rough attempt to define “urbanity.” My intention here

is to build up layers of concepts of urbanity, pursuing its maze thread by thread. Exploring the topic

in these terms leads us to different instances of social and material reality and, consequently, to

different ideas and authors as guides – which may imply taking a somewhat heterogeneous

theoretical path. Given the difficulty of such a description, a work with this aim is inevitably limited

to searching for outlines and attempting approximations: a search for traces of urbanity captured in

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an only ever partial way by discourse; traces perhaps recognizable through connections between

philosophical concepts and a substantive interest on the urban:

(1) Experiencing urbanity means experiencing the world in conditions distinct from other

spatial expressions of collective life – a particular mode among many other possible experiences,

linked to the spatiality of the city itself, a kaleidoscope of nodes and channels of action. By

extension, differences between and within cities, along with differences in the urban condition of

the actors themselves, also imply distinct possibilities of experiencing the world. These differences

have repercussions on our acting and doing, and on what we may call the “experience of the Other”:

the contact and recognition between the socially different. The first section seeks to recognize

urbanity as a particular experience of the world and the Other, as well as the different modes of

urban experience, turning to the work of Bergson , Chakrabarty and Lim.

(2) The experience of urbanity is primarily a material experience of the social world: it

constitutes our immersion in the conditions of social integration and its opposite: the tendencies

towards social distancing and segregation. The experience of urbanity is dependent on these

conditions. The second section argues that comprehending the place of the city in our experience of

the social world means recognizing the forces of social differentiation at work in everyday life. We

shall see how these forces affect the social world and can jeopardize urbanity as an experience of

social diversity. In the process, I explore concepts formulated by Heidegger, Bourdieu and

Freeman.

(3) I then explore urbanity, the experience of different identities in the city, as a way of

compensating for differentiation-related tensions in the social world. I shall explore the possibility

of urbanity as a momentary experience of transcending social differences that involves at least

three instances: a phenomenological dimension of urbanity, which pulsates for the subject at the

moment of recognizing the Other through the latter’s presence in the former’s field of perception,

turning to the ideas of Heidegger, Schütz and Levinas; a communicative dimension of urbanity, or

transcending differences in the city and its spaces as the loci and medium of communication, via

Habermas; and an ontological dimension of urbanity, as space is enacted as a means to a penetrable

social world, and as a potential means of convergence of the socially different.

(4) Proposing urbanity as a form of counterbalancing – however momentarily – the

tendencies towards social differentiation and distancing, and advocating the potentially integrating

role of the urban requires a clear idea of its attributes and effects on the social world: we need to

know what material properties of the city could enable this role. The fourth section discusses the

possibility of urbanity as an effect of spatialities and the convergence of acts, actors and places in

the city’s present.

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(5) However urban spatialities are not homogenous, nor are they repeated from city to city,

culture to culture. If different material and social conditions to urbanity exist, then different

urbanities must likewise exist. Understanding these differences becomes a central problem in

understanding “urbanities” (decidedly in the plural and decidedly open to the idiosyncrasies of the

particular, the universe of possible contexts).

(6) In principle, recognizing different urbanities would entail the inclusion of every kind of

urban experience, including hostile socialities and spaces of repression, violence and human

degradation. However a definition along these lines would collide with the commonplace definition

of urbanity as “urban civility,” as well as the ethical dimension and the emancipatory potential of

the concept. This collision needs to be avoided if we wish to maintain these qualities of urbanity as

a public experience. Turning to the ideas of Derrida and Habermas, Bergson and Levinas, I shall

propose avoiding the equivalence between urbanity and any kind of urban experience through the

use of an ethical principle – an “ethos of urbanity” as the coexistence and welcome of the Other,

and as a desire for a future: the becoming of the urban in a full and open urbanity.

This heterogeneous approach requires the introduction of a hybrid interpretation, located

between the purely urbanistic and the purely philosophical: a third approach. We can now explore

this idea in detail.

1. Urbanity as experience of the world and the Other

My first aim is to locate a concept able to show how human experience is constituted by an

adherent fabric, impregnating the act – a view of urban life as a flow and experience cut across by

space and time. I now explore the idea of urban temporalities through the philosophy of Henri

Bergson, and the postcolonial cinematic approach of Bliss Cua Lim. I shall criticize philosophy’s

tendency to view space as homogenous (as opposed to its view of an heterogeneous time)

emphasizing the heterogeneities and persistence of the “space of experience” as an active presence

in our acts. My primary objective is to describe urban life as a form of experience.

I wish to explore three initial ideas: (i) the city as an assemblage that projects past actions

onto the present through channels of movement and places of memories and activities that produce

relations between acts in the now; (ii) the city as a way of constituting and structuring each person’s

experience, both temporally and spatially – a shared framing of our experience of the world; (iii) the

city as coexistence of different temporal and spatial modes of being, enabling the convergence of

practices with distinct temporalities, and as the possibility of encountering and recognizing the

Other, a framing of the experience of alterity. Put otherwise, urban life involves a fundamental

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duality: it sustains different individual experiences and relates them in modes of shared experience

that take the form of urban life.

(i) The urban assemblage: channels and topoi of activity and memory, connections between past

and present. Urban space has a particular material condition: it is durable, changing only slowly. Its

present is the result of past actions, frequently accumulated over a long time span. Traces of

previous practices are projected in each urban present, so to speak. The idea of time being

embedded in the city is of course found in urban and geographical theories. Architect Aldo Rossi

(1984), for instance, writes of the “permanence of urban facts.” The idea of spatial form generated

by historical processes of accumulation and the rhythms of everyday life has been recently explored

in the geographical debate over the Deleuzean concept of “assemblage” (eg McFarlane, 2011;

Anderson et al., 2012). Similarly, my question is understanding these processes of accumulation

and permanence as a “projection of past urbanities”. This question reminds a problem put by the

philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1988): how can the reproduced now come to represent a past? This

temporal representation is far from trivial since it implies the passage between elusive acts

produced in the present of the city and its concrete spatiality. It implies identifying how acts that

make up our lives emerge within the continually unfolding present and become embedded in the

space of the city, accumulating over time as a condition of what Thrift (1996) terms “joint action”.

If enacting the city collectively is a key aspect of urbanity, how could past urbanities be

materialized as durable spatial form and be projected in time?

A way to answer such questions involves the analysis of the temporalities and forms of life

in which we are immersed. We need to investigate the relation between time and space as

potentially determining factors of urban experience and how the temporality of experience could be

related to the spatiality of cities. We may begin considering that an urban past informs each

experience and act in the present. Spatial forms are effects of previous acts, and therefore a form of

preserving the acts that produced and enacted them in a form of memory. The memory projected

within urban space temporalizes our conceptions by completing our present experience at each

moment, enriching it with previously acquired experiences projected in urban space itself.

Perceptions are therefore connected by memories embedded in space, in the architectural and urban

configurations in which we live, materialized in the collective narrative arranged by façades and

layouts of buildings, and in the form of densities and streets that sustained our practices and forms

of life in the past as they do now. The slowly mutating form of these spaces tells us of earlier

urbanities, projected within the durable, temporalized materiality of space. The city represents what

Henri Bergson (1998, page 5) calls “the survival of the past,” the coexistence of the past and present

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in a “being-memory”3 that impregnates even matter – even the materiality of the city. Urban space

is enacted as an “ontological memory” of socialities and temporalities of past acts, a kaleidoscope

of places of memories that project past acts onto the present and connect present acts with each

other, in the actuality of the now. These “random juxtapositions and disruptive events and

predictable daily and nightly rhythms of activity, atmosphere, and sociability” contain traces of “a

wider imaginary of urban spatial topology” (McFarlane, 2011, pages 667–8) blending glimpses of

diachronic acts in the topoi of mutually related positions that keep the heterogeneous elements of

the city together.4

(ii) The city as a spatial and temporal structure of experience. This temporalized spatiality seems to

have a role in our experience of things and the world. The mediating presence of city space is felt

already in the corporeality of our acts and gestures as they are manifested in the now. Spatially our

movements are not entirely free and unrestricted, but channelled by a material structure that

anticipates and surrounds us. Such material structure is there, partially converging bodily

movements in the channels of streets and places of activity. Our experience is constructed by senses

that capture information from an environment5 largely arranged in the form of cities. Their

particular structure, aggregated in various shapes of city blocks and defining the open spaces of the

streets, implies an inevitable channelling of our experience. Our experience unfolds through the

city’s channels and topoi (cf. Malpas, 2006; 2012).

The problem of time also traverses urbanity: our experience of the city is intimately

connected to the rhythms of our actions, rhythms that impregnate urban life. The time of urban

experience is apparently altered by the succession of changes, intensifying in number and variety,

not only how our actions are accelerated as they pass from one to another, but also how we watch

the apparently endless flow of actions of our contemporaries acting in these spaces. These

descriptions frequently contain a sensation of vertigo: a vertiginous urban time. Hence if we wish

to use the concept of urbanity to understand \ forms of experience of a world that presents itself as

immediately urban, we need to understand the convergence between the particular spatiality of

cities and the singular temporality of urban experience, in encounters and interactions otherwise

impossible to produce. Urban spatiality is intrinsically related to the varied rhythms of practice – a

presence of space active in the production of the diverse temporalities of people’s presences, acts

and their experiences of time (see Crang, 2001; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Lefebvre, 2004). Together

                                                                                                                         3 I use the expression “being-memory” formulated by Deleuze in his commentary to Bergson in another context – here, in reference to the city. See Deleuze (1991), Bergson (2004), and Lim (2009). 4 Cf. Deleuze (2007) on “assemblage”. 5 See Gibson (1979); Haken and Portugali (2003).

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they constitute the experience of urbanity. However, different structures of experience exist, related

to what we may call “different ways of inhabiting the world.”

(iii) Urbanity as the copresence of different modes of being. Despite the regularity of the

homogenous time of modernity, philosophy – especially through Bergson – and cultural studies

have gradually recognized that people’s actions and understandings of the world involve distinct

temporalities. One of the forces of differentiation is evidently social. These multiple rhythms of

action and temporalities of experience are also dependent on the identities and practices of different

actors – in short, on different modes of being. Evoking now Chakrabarty’s (2000) and Lim’s (2009)

post-colonial critique of “heterotemporality” I would like to explore the idea of a “copresence of

different modes of being” in the temporalities latent in social differences active in an urban context.

The temporal condition of our acts is related to an urban condition: different temporalities of

experience are mediated by the city. The temporalities Bergson (1998; 2001) calls “duration” can be

extended to the temporalities inherent to the experiences of socially different actors, potentially

highlighting such differences in the process. We also have the temporalities differentiated in

confronting space as extension and urban form – what we usually address as mobility. Mobility is

an essential factor in the embodiment of our practices and in our way of dealing materially with the

world, situating ourselves in relation to it, and realizing concrete urban gestures. As Hägerstrand

(1983; 1985) emphasizes, it is an ontological condition for our actions and a fundamental

expression of being. A lower mobility can induce the acting subject to inhabit the city permanently

in an anterior time6 compared to the possibilities for practices afforded to other social groups –

something clearly related to differences in income and class, especially in a context of strong

inequality (Marques, 2012).

Recognizing these differences opens up the possibility of revealing the subtle temporalities

of practice, as well as the psychic temporalities inherent to different modes of being. These modes

are associated with capacities to act in their urban environments. Divergences in these temporalities

may also play an active role in reducing the possibilities for coexistence and the generation of

urbanity itself. So let us examine this question more closely. Urbanity as a form of experiencing the

Other depends on the temporality and spatiality of the encounter. Naturally, differences in these

dimensions of practice may situate the Other further away from us. Desynchronized times of action

are vectors in what we may call the disjunction of the encounter, the lacunas or divergences that

separate us, and may lead to the dissipation of possibilities for future interactions – into absence,

distance, estrangement. The disjunction of the encounter can induce a disconnection of future

                                                                                                                         6 I derive the notion of “anterior time” from Chakrabarty (2000) and Lim (2009).

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actions – a rarefaction of the encounter with the Other which reminds in a different context what

Lim (2009, page 15) calls “gesture of temporal exclusion.” The anterior time which social groups

with less mobility seem to inhabit implies a disruption in urbanity’s potential as a condition of

encountering the Other, an intensity of contacts between social worlds.

In this plurality of personal enactment, experiences and readings of time, the fact that we

manage to produce actions in conjunction seems almost improbable. Partial, momentary

conjunctions of encounter are only possible through the agency of places as topoi that enable the

convergence of actors immersed in multiple rhythms, making the urban viable as a

“heterotemporality.”7 Space cannot be seen merely as res extensa, but as heterogeneity produced by

collective and historical actions (see McFarlane, 2011; cf. Elden, 2005). An idea of urbanity begins

to emerge, then, related to a shared temporal and spatial structuring of our experience of the world

mediated by the city – shaped by specificities of temporality and spatiality in the experience of

socially different actors. How do these differences affect the social world?

2. Tensions at the heart of the social: the forces of differentiation

I propose here that we use a notion that helps foreground the role of differences between social

actors: the well-known Hegelian concept of the “other” (see Hegel, 1977). The concept, explored

especially in postmodern philosophy as “alterity” or “the radical heterogeneity of the other”

(Levinas, 1969), represents a shift beyond the solipsism of subjective experience, and an

extraordinary turn towards recognizing the coexistence of multiple identities. Alternatively to

Natter and Jones’ (1997) critique of essentialist relations of identity and spatial boundaries, I wish

to relate the conditions of coexistence contained in the everyday notion of urbanity as “civil

conviviality” with the tensions of social differentiation that emanate from the identity formation

process and define distinct social groups, though acting simultaneously within the city.8

Although the tensions of social differentiation are certainly intensified by contexts of

socioeconomic inequality, the risks of disintegration primarily occur in other spheres: those related

to interactions of a non-instrumental kind, outside production and labour, which make up a

substantial part of the collective life and symbolic reproduction of identities and groups.

Disruptions in these non-instrumental spheres of practice, provoked, say, by social segregation, may

signify the installation of a distancing between groups at the heart of the fabric of everyday life, and

a reduction in the possibility of contact and interaction. However these tensions are produced

endogenously. They appear to originate in the relation between being and the social world, in the

formation of identities and its double: the processes of association.

                                                                                                                         7 I take these terms from Bergson (2001) and Chakrabarty (in Lim 2009), applying them to another context. 8 Cf. Dewsbury (2000) on enacting a philosophy of difference.

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The definition of identities involves a movement of reappropriation:9 a being coming out of

itself, superseding itself in the awareness of being with others, and the ambiguous return into itself

in the process of Recognition and self-differentiation (Hegel, 1977): the acting subject is “able to

make itself an other to itself and, from there, to return to itself” (Honneth, 1995, page 31). Or in

Hegel’s words: “They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (1977, page

112). There is an inherent conflict in the movement of perceiving-oneself-in-the-other: “[it is] only

by mutually violating each other’s subjective claims that individuals can come to know whether or

not, in them, the respective others also re-identify themselves as a ‘totality’” (Honneth 1995, pages

27–8). Recognizing oneself involves recognizing the characteristics and idiosyncrasies that

differentiate one and constitute the other. Producing and projecting identities implies constructing

evaluations relating to the identities attributed to others: identifying oneself and the other means

defining them as different (Weigert, 2010). Avoiding the construction of categories of fixed social

identities and resisting any homogenizing effect (Natter and Jones, 1997), at a basic ontological

level, identification operates through the ongoing recognition and negotiation of differences.10

A second movement, external to the subject, is also objectively associated with the invisible

process of forming identities – emerging in the dynamics of social aggregation in response to

internal demands for identification. Identification implies approximations and the forming of groups

of actors who share more similarities than differences. Clusters of actors related to what Bourdieu

(1985) called “social fields”, systems of relational positions distributed according to actors’ social,

economic and cultural assets and dispositions, imply an increase in internal interactions at the

expense of a reduction in external interactions (of course we should understand social fields as open

and continually forming).

Now, the restriction of interaction is a powerful definition of segregation (Freeman, 1978).

Societies constantly face threats to their own integration generated by tendencies towards group

differentiation, which in turn are related to socially recognized identities, often exaggerated in

contexts with high levels of inequality. Societies can “break” into communication groups that are

only functionally related and, in extreme cases, can fracture into disconnected, impermeable

socialities and segregated spaces. In fact, we live both these conditions in most of our cities and

societies. The control of interaction in the mutual formation of identities and social groups ends up

producing its own spatialities. Given that identity differences at the roots of social field formation

cannot be eliminated either, tendencies towards restrictions of interaction must be counterbalanced

                                                                                                                         9 I derive this expression from Derrida (1995b), and use it in Hegel’s (1977) sense. 10 Hegel’s concept of recognition unfolded into contemporary discussions in Honneth (1995) and Ricoeur (2005); on identification and the negotiation of differences, see Weigert (2010); cf. Heidegger (1971).

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and compensated if we are to avoid social systems fragmenting into groups that are completely

disconnected or connected merely at a functional level.

3. Urbanity as transcendence of differences: or, the city in the integration of the social world

Faced by these tendencies towards disintegration released by the identity formation process itself

and intensified in contexts of inequality, what keeps social systems from falling apart? What role

can the city have in terms of potentially overcoming the tensions involved in the differentiation and

convergence of these socialities? Can the city be a means to the integration of the social world? At

its heart, is the experience of urbanity not precisely what allows us to overcome, at least

temporarily, the differences between actors – at the moment of the encounter between the socially

different and what Levinas (1969) calls “the recognition of the Other” in its alterity – an

overcoming in the form of a truly mutual experience of the Other and with the Other?

Compensating for the tendency towards group differentiation, culminating in the restriction of

encounters, requires interactive processes capable of overriding forms of segregation

The city alone does not constitute a separate universe, nor is it an independent rupture in

these formations, a solution per se for the tensions of social difference. But the integration of this

tensioned social world requires situations where the existence of differences is recognized, in the

sense of reducing the sense of estrangement, rejection and fear of alterity. The experience of

urbanity implies a self-contradictory process: the recognition of the existence of differences

between I and Other, and simultaneously the momentary suspension of these differences at the time

of perceiving the Other and understanding that these distinct actors coexist.

However this suspension is not completed in the movement of perception. It demands more

of the acting subject: a sense of attention to difference, the recognition of the Other and its right to

occupy the space in question, the same urban space of copresence. We shall see now, and later on,

that this demands a constant relation between perception and realization, presence and

communication. I propose that the integrating role of cities in the experience of urbanity involves at

least three instances: (a) a phenomenological dimension – the experience of social integration in

one’s perception, in the convergence of perceptual fields in the form of a mutual, shared experience;

(b) a communicative dimension – momentarily bridging differences across social fields through

linguistic exchange; (c) an ontological dimension – involving a sense of a penetrable social world

where differences are manifested and recognizable in the heterogeneities of space itself; a space

able to converge the socially different in places or topoi of presence and encounters with the Other.

a. The phenomenological dimension of urbanity: the city in shared experience

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My aim at this point is to comprehend how the impression of urbanity as a copresence of different

ways of being and an elusive but key means of social integration11 is manifested at a subjective

level. Fundamentally this involves the experience of the other on our horizon of mutual perceptions.

The possibility of an overlap of the fields of perception of subjects acting in their surroundings – an

overlap generated by the city itself through the way it shapes encounters. My idea is to arrive at a

description of the shared experience in the perception of subjects. Indeed the possibility of sharing

experiences appears to be one of the most important aspects of urban life. In the universe of the

subject, shared experience becomes a factor of social integration: it can lead to the important shift

from the perception of social integration to socially integrating acts. Phenomenological analysis,

focused on the immediate relations between the subject and the world, would seem particularly

useful for capturing how urbanity is lived by the subject.

This trace of urbanity can be located in the presence of the city in the relation between the

individual experience of what Schütz and Luckmann (1973) call the “the immediate experience of

the other” in the “world within my reach” and the type of experience of the world that Heidegger

dealt with as the relation between Being and the Other.12 There is considerable spatiality in such

relation, and indeed Heidegger himself works to bring these to light: “By reason of this with-like

[mithaften] Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. The world of

Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with Others” (Heidegger, 1962, page 155). In

Heideggerian terminology, the experience of the Other is equivalent to the disclosure of the Other

when we share spaces within the world (see Harrison, 2007; cf. Elden, 2005 and Malpas, 2006).

The encountering of Others, initiated by attending to the Other as a presence in one’s existential

spatiality, develops from encountering the other into an “orientation towards the Other,” a Dasein-

with “encounterable for Others”.

The sociologically-oriented descriptions of Schütz and Luckmann offer a more detailed

account of this space of being-with-the-other. These include the idea of “the experience of the Other

within the world in my reach” and its relation to an interpersonal congruence: the lesson that the

world that we experience is socialized. This lesson, they argue, leads subjects to a “reciprocity of

perspectives” (Schütz and Luckmann, 1973, pages 60–68). This in turn is related to what we may

call discovery of alterity, the existence of others different from us, vital to one’s sense of belonging

to an internally differentiated and complex social world, in relation to which identity itself has to

                                                                                                                         11 I expect to go beyond Giddens’(1984) sense of social integration based on copresence, however drawing upon his notion: here, social integration includes the sense of bridging differences engendered by social fields and distancing. 12 Heidegger’s emphasis on “Other” [“By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me – those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself – those among whom one is too” Heidegger (1962:154)], which ultimately rests on a “relationship with being in general” (Levinas, 1969:67) differs from Levinas’ view as “alterity” or “the radical heterogeneity of the Other”, from which I derive my own emphasis: “The other qua other is the Other” (1969:36; 71).

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become relativized. Schütz and Luckmann call this process “the mirroring of self in the experience

of the stranger,” essential to the socialization process. In the encounter, the possibility of

intersubjectivity is confirmed: it is not a question of my private world or yours, but the world of our

shared experience. Experiences are not only coordinated with each other, they are also reciprocally

determined.

Here I find Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy profoundly inspiring. For Levinas, the

relationship with the Other is the original form of disclosure of being. The exposedness to alterity

precedes the openness to the sensible; it is an openness opened by the outside, an effect of alterity,

the basis of the openness to any other thing or experience – affective, practical or intellectual. The

subject is exposed to alterity even before it can gather itself, ie before subjectivity is a locus posited

by Being (Lingis, 1998; cf. Harrison, 2007).13 Before its self-definition in cogito, logos or Dasein,

the subject is defined in movements in the presence of the face of the other. “The way in which the

other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face” (Levinas, 1969,

page 50). The face is not so much a mode of appearing of the other, as a “trace” where alterity

passes. Transcendence of one’s being is found in the face of the other (Lingis, 1998).

It is Heidegger’s inescapable Being-with, Schütz’s reciprocal experience, Levinas’

aprioristic relationship with the Other that allow the momentary transcendence of the tensions

placed by social difference in what Harrison (2007) calls “the space between us”. But transcendence

here is not far from enacting the relationship with the Other. It demands a step beyond perception: a

predisposition anchored in an ethical reading capable of understanding differences and recognizing

the right and reason for coexistence. Arriving at this ethos requires an exploration of other

phenomenal strata – and broader aspects of the experience of urbanity, such as the shift between the

inner universe of the subject and the latter’s acting in relation to and with the other in the shared

spaces of the city. Heidegger, Schütz and Levinas recognize, just as Bergson recognized, that

experience involves temporality and spatiality. Heidegger (1966) talks of a “regionalization of

being,” a being bound to its spaces, that reveals itself to the Other in a field of sharing as part of its

manifestation within the material world. In Schütz’s terms, the overlapping of the perceptual fields

of the actors is structured in the form of possibilities for encountering and interacting. The material

analysis of shared experience enables us to identify the role of space in determining how “I

apprehend the Other.” Schütz claims that this knowledge defines even the structure of the relations

present in any social situation. He looks to describe the shift from the structure of experience to the

structuration of complexes of actions, “the conditions of communication in space and time.” Schütz

develops his phenomenological analysis towards notions such as the “stratification” and “the spatial

                                                                                                                         13 Compare my account with Harrison’s (2007) reading of Heidegger’s enclosed “being-at-home-in-the-world” and Levinas’ “constitutive openness to the incoming of the other”.

  13

arrangement of the lived world” within “regions of experience.” In turn, for Levinas (1969; 1998),

the Other is my neighbor (le prochain) who concerns me with closeness (proximité) – a relationship

which, while being infinitely remote, is the most extreme immediacy (Lingis, 1998).

However, Heidegger’s, Schütz’s and Levinas’ concepts of space are still distant from the

topoi of encounters in the fabric of the city, which constitute the situations of urbanity. In this sense,

my use of phenomenological descriptions looked to objectify the experience of urbanity as one

instance of the integration of the social world – elusive but recursive moments of an integration that

begins and culminates in the sphere of the subject. But if our aim is to fully understand urbanity as

an immersion in alterities, we need to comprehend the shift from urbanity as “the experience of the

Other in copresence” to urbanity as “the experience of the Other in communication.”

b. The communicative dimension of urbanity: the city as a medium of interaction between socially

different actors

The deepest form of ontological relation irrupts in the face-to-face relation, since the presence of a

face allows what Levinas calls “the ethical relation”. However, “[i]s not the presence of the Other

already language and transcendence?” (Levinas, 1969, page 155). Levinas himself recognizes that

the “vision of the face” and language are inseparable: language is “a primordial manifestation of the

Other”: although speech “does not have the total transparence of the gaze directed upon the gaze,

the absolute frankness of the face proffered at the bottom of all speech […] [t]he language by which

a being exists for another is his unique possibility to exist with an existence that is more than his

interior existence” (Levinas, 1969, page 182). Accordingly, I wish now to explore the consequences

of temporally and spatially shared experience for the disclosure of the Other in an individual

perception oriented towards joint action. This suggests locating the city as part of the interactivity

of practice and as a condition of sociability. Of course, interaction and sociability are essentially

communicative processes. In fact, the intensification of communication seems historically

associated with cities. Their spaces enable our immersion in linguistic exchanges and form the

support for a dense variety of communications.14 This immersion, fundamental to the process of

socialization (Mead, 1967; Habermas, 1984), constitutes the very spirit of the city. Here we

encounter something interesting from the viewpoint of the convergences between city and sociality:

the convergence between a dimension of urbanity as a form of life inherently communicational and

the actual reproduction of a social world. Both depend on the shift from copresence to

communication, which begins within space. But how can space be part of the transition from

perception to interaction and its potentially endless maze? A number of distinct approaches, from

                                                                                                                         14 See Bettencourt (2013) on how city size converges with increases in mobile communication.

  14

speech act theories to human geography, suggest that space may become an active context capable

of supporting communicative situations.15 If that is the case, and if urbanity as a phenomenon

involves sociability and interaction, we must recognize it also as an intermeshing of acts and places

immersed in linguistic and semantic exchanges.

A step further, if urbanity goes beyond presence and mutual recognition, it must involve the

possibility of communication between the socially different. In fact, the city itself may offer spaces

for this passage. Certain places will tend to be more intense points of reference for social practice –

places that can be shared or appropriated by different actors. Public spaces in particular offer this

potential. This presence of space becomes more significant when we note that the tensions between

different actors take the form of reduction in the possibilities of copresence and disruption in the

possibilities for communication, which then begin to occur more intensively within the social fields

– a process which is aggravated in contexts of strong inequality. These communication ruptures

demand other processes to counteract them to avert a collapse into a “ghetto” society. If the

integration of the social world is riddled with tensions, places capable of referring to the practices

and imaginations of people from different social fields become the possibility of a significant

counterpoint to the restrictions of interaction and dissociation between socially different actors –

processes taken for granted in everyday life. Urbanity is enacted communicatively as a momentary

means of social integration.

c. The ontological dimension of urbanity: the city in the connection between us and the world

The possibility of an ontological dimension to urbanity as an experience of social integration may

be appropriately introduced by Hannah Arendt’s (1998, page 50) words: “The presence of others

who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves

[…].” When we develop our experiences within a form of life shared with others, we are producing

a world: the relations, definitions and bonds that create a sense of the real and of our ontological

situation. This sense of ontological integration involves the daily experience and the cognition of a

“penetrable social world” where social differences are made known to acting subjects. If

Heidegger’s regionalization of Being and Schütz’s spatial arrangement of the social world are to

attain any sense, a socialized world spatially constituted should unveil its own differences also

spatially. Social differences should be recognizable as belonging to a same material reality –

potentially known and penetrated through the heterogeneities of space itself (cf. Schütz and

Luckmann, 1973, page 60-62). If “spatial structures elide totalization […] for no structure can fully

                                                                                                                         15 []see Giddens (1984), Simonsen (1991) and Thrift (1996); on space as a normative force acting on patterns of activity, see Lefebvre (1991).

  15

erase difference” (Natter and Jones, 1997, page 150), in the heterogeneities of space lie keys into

knowing different social worlds – right there, at the level of our daily urban experiences.

But of course not even strong social differences materialize into a labyrinthine city of fully

disconnected socialities. With the exception of segregated spaces, the city is enacted as an open

fabric in principle capable of converging the socially different in certain topoi of presence – places

of random encounters with the Other. In other words, these topoi – urban centralities, public spaces,

places of reference, and unpredictable places – may converge what different social fields separate.

Perhaps surprisingly, this potential role of urban space can be made invisible by its own ubiquitous

presence and by the attention to more self-evident aspects, such as those that the sociologist Talcott

Parsons called the “steering media” as mechanisms of integration of social systems – the economic,

legal and political subsystems – along with communication and technical systems.16 An integrative

presence of urban space at such a deep ontological level is easily eclipsed by these overtly artificial

systems. However there is an inherent fragility to some of these means. Linguistic communication

and economic exchange fade in time and space, and prove inconstant in terms of their effects on the

social world. The same cannot be said of space. The presence of space in our practices and

experiences can only be disrupted if our experience of space itself is disrupted, or if we abandon the

embodiness of our acts – and these are conditions to which neither urban space in its durability, or

the body in its presence, easily yield.

Thus the relation between our joint actions and the heterogeneities of urban space produces

possibilities for getting to know and actually penetrating the social world in its projection as urban

situations. It also provides a sense of what we can do. It appears to comprise an active “material

background” to collective life – a structure in Derrida’s (2001) sense, open to “play” in the form of

unforeseeable presence and communication. This overall sense of a penetrable social reality by

means of knowing and enacting the city, along with the recognition of differences cuts across social

fields. Found in places and spatialities capable of bringing together the socially different, it resists

tendencies to restrictions of interaction, and guarantees the possibility of urbanity and effective

forms of social integration. The idea of the experience of a momentary transcendence of social

differences suggests urbanity as simultaneously a condition and an outcome of social integration:

its reproduction, expression and experience. It evokes the role of the city in establishing the

relational conditions between social fields. Without this experience, however transitory, social

differences and distances could remain ignored, the social world could continue to break up in ever

greater silence, and the Other could remain unknown, and amount into invisible alterities. Without

                                                                                                                         16 Parsons (1956; 1972). Compare with the concepts of social integration and systems integration in Giddens (1984), which are openly spatial and innovative; on communication as a medium of social integration, see Habermas (1984) and Luhmann (1995); on networks of technical artefacts as integration systems, see Latour (2004).

  16

the experience of the Other enacted in urbanity, we could remain unaware of our differences,

especially given the distinct temporalities of the spatial practices of the socially different, and the

ontological brevity of the encounter in channels of movement and places of activity. The production

of these situations of social contact has been one of the city’s historic roles. These observations also

seek to assert the still insufficiently recognized centrality of the materiality of space as a medium of

integrating a social world. Urbanity comprises forms of experiencing integration impregnated in

our experience of the world. Focusing on this role does not ignore the diversity of forms of urban

life, nor does it imply the search for social engineering or utopias of total cohesion. Rather it

reaffirms the interest of understanding the conditions of coexistence, as well as the urban situations

in which such conditions are materialized, since their absence leads to “disurbanity”, a growing

invisibility of the Other and the reproduction of social distance. However if presence, mutual

recognition and the interaction of the socially different are the means of crossing between social

fields, how exactly can urban space be a part of that? The idea that the city plays an integrating

role requires us to clarify the characteristics and aspects that enable urban spaces to have effects on

the integration of a social world, and the opposite: makings its spaces an expression of dissociation

and distancing. Nevertheless, an answer to such question implies knowing how urbanities could be

manifested spatially, and more clearly, what aspects of urbanity may relate to what in space. Could

differences in spatialities – say, more or less dense or accessible spatialities related to differences in

the intensities of encounter, allowing the convergence of private life and public life and their

different gradations – be embedded and inform urbanities?

4. The spatial condition of urbanity

One of the most debated aspects of urbanity is its spatial condition, the possibility of urbanity being

an effect of different spatialities. Jane Jacobs (1961) associated urban form and “vitality” as a

relation between diversity of buildings and activities, and the pedestrian appropriation of public

spaces. Hillier et al (1983) focus on the morphology of street systems in a city, and the interface of

public space and buildings as conditions for copresence. Holanda (2002) addresses the

interchangeability of social roles, negotiation, and equality as more likely supported by a higher

proportion of built spaces over open spaces, reducing segregated spaces and panoptic effects. Krafta

(2012) has recently seen the “urbanity of form” as past urbanities amalgamated in the heterogeneity

of urban spaces diachronically produced. Common to these observations is the idea that urbanity

cannot occur in a vacuum or just any material situation. In other words, if urbanity refers to the

encounter and experience of the Other, these factors must include spaces that express and sustain

such events.

  17

What spaces are these? Do they really have to take a specific form? Is extension and density

enough? Answers to these questions seem to strongly divide urban theorists and geographers, and

this point alone justifies an incursion into this problem. Perhaps if we invert the question, we can

glimpse a careful way to respond. Are there spaces that prevent contact, recognition or the

possibility of unrestricted communication? Undoubtedly. Cities are exceptionally varied internally.

In principle, urban space seems capable of performing an active role in supporting copresence and

communication as spatiotemporal situations of social integration – a dimension that fundamentally

depends on copresence, as Giddens (1984) reminds us. Some spaces (deliberately produced to do so

or not) restrict contact, via physical separations and barriers, combined often with surveillance

devices. There are also spaces that reduce contact through a difficult accessibility. If this is the case,

these spaces have the likely effect of diluting the chances for encounters in general. Spaces that fail

to express and support copresence, recognition and communication will hinder the emergence of

urbanity. We tend not to find urbanity in rarefied spatialities, quasi-urban, antiurban or labyrinthine

spaces – spaces that leave us disorientated or impede access and interactivity. As aspects of

urbanity, the recognition of the Other and unrestricted communication tend not to emerge

intensively in dispersed or intricate spaces: they usually become diluted in dilute spaces, break

down in fragmented spaces, and avoid guarded spaces.

In other words, we cannot despatialize the concept of urbanity. Cities are systems of

(spatial, practical and cognitive) differences that inherently relate to distinct forms and intensities of

contact and communication, or to their restriction. The core of my argument is that just as urbanity

cannot be induced by space alone, it cannot emerge just under any spatial condition. But the wealth

of urbanity does not stop there. Indeed the question is less one of intensity per se (such as the

number of people in the streets) than of the intensity in the convergence of socially different actors.

Urbanity is a property that varies essentially in its form of manifestation. These variations seem

related to differences in the urban spaces and in forms of social life enacted in these spaces. This

leads us to identify a contextual condition of urbanity: differences in socialities and spatialities

would have to do with differences in urbanity. We are left to ask, therefore, what changes in

practices or the urban fabric of spaces may imply in terms of urbanity.

5. Different urbanities

We have seen that space seems to matter to urbanity, as a means of encounter and communication,

providing forms of social integration. But we have also seen that spaces do not operate

independently: they are associated with forms of life. Naturally the relation between forms of social

life and spatiality extends far beyond visible form: it includes space in all its complexity and

  18

implication for social life, from the moving body to places of reference to practice. We have also

seen that differences in urbanity are not limited to intensity or degree. Urbanity, as an immersion in

recognition and communicability in the topoi relating the positions of different actors, varies in

accordance with the forms of sociability and spatiality that express and sustain these forms of

coexistence. Urbanity emerges from differences. But how do we discern the urbanities inherent to

specific cities and urban areas? Is urbanity related to the identity of cities and neighbourhoods?

When we realize that the relation between the forms of social life of different actors and

spatiality goes beyond copresence and the visible form of space to include mutual recognition and

communication, differences latent in forms of enacting social life emerge as even more relevant

than differences in the intensities of presence. Qualitative differences, though, cannot be known

“from outside,” by merely observing the external form of phenomena. They can only be known if

we recognize the distinct forms of enacting the city. Differences in urbanity can be captured beyond

the realization of presence, by interpreting the forms of practice and what is communicated by

gestures and speech, the habits and affects related to space, frequently mediated by local social

codes and traditions. We need to penetrate the differences in forms of life invested in space. Here,

even classifications and typologies are impoverishing, as each city and each district produces its

own urbanity. Furthermore, we have seen that urbanity changes over time, as different urbanities

emerge from the idiosyncrasies that constitute changing forms of social life and their historical

materialization – their own urban assemblages.

At first sight this concept of urbanity, sensitive to context and open to contingency, yet

dependent on certain material conditions to come into being, appears satisfactory. However it

includes any form of urban experience, even those with the potential to social disintegration, such

as forms of intolerance and the rejection of alterities through segregation, coercion and aggression

towards the Other. In this view everything happening in the urban world would be “urbanity.” A

conception in such terms ends up equalizing urbanity and “urban experience”. Moreover a

definition of urbanity that includes hostile socialities and spaces of segregation and violence would

collide with the everyday definition of urbanity as civil conviviality, along with the emancipatory

potential of the concept. We need to avoid losing the ethical sense contained in the original

definition – and shall do so exploring a final condition for its empirical emergence.

Beyond the mere reproduction of the urban: polis | ethos | becoming

As becoming shocks the habits of thought and fits ill into the molds of language, they declared it unreal.

Bergson (1998, page 314)

  19

Anything that ‘has a history’ stands in the context of a becoming.

Heidegger (1962, page 430)

This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our

disposal [...]. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a

promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.

Derrida (1995a, page 27)

Urbanity is originally related to possibilities for civility and conviviality. But what guarantees

conviviality? Some would say that it is ensured by conventions of socialization – instances of the

self-regulation of relations in everyday life that emanate from behavioural codes of subjects

themselves. Others would say that is ensured by historically grounded rules, guaranteed by

apparatuses for social control: a legal system of conduct, surveillance technologies and, at the

extreme, forms of police control. I wish to suggest now that urbanity does not require normative or

control systems. By exposing us continually to alterities, cities have the potential to naturalize

differences. On the other hand, when cities or areas within a city fail in producing situations of a

mutual exposure and disclosure of identities, there is a dilution in the presence of the socially

different, a distancing that renders them invisible – a distance that defines them as “others”: strange,

distant, irreconcilable. When social differences intensify into inequalities, we easily end up with a

coexistence based on limited, instrumental relations between actors who appear always distant to

one another – relations that can just as easily become interpreted as potentially hostile and demand

mechanisms of control in highly asymmetrical exercises of power.

Hence we need to establish a relation between the diversity of possible urbanities and the

recognition of ethical forms of urban living – forms of a responsible social life with the aim of

enabling full coexistence as an absolute openness to alterities (cf. McFarlane, 2011). This idea

certainly evokes the city, or a horizon of the city, as the expression and convergence of different

forms of life: the shift from a view of urbanity as a mere reproduction of distinct forms of urban life

to an understanding of urbanity as a form of life based on an ethics of alterity – not ideally, but as

the “craft of living together” (Sennett, 2012) inscribed into the structures of praxis: into urban life.

Cities have the potential to deepen a sense of coexistence. Clearly this last shift requires further

discussion. To this end, I propose exploring a final selection of concepts from philosophy.

(i) Firstly I wish to associate the notion of “ethos,” this system of collective dispositions

based on the sense of responsibility and care as an orientation towards the Other (which we have

  20

seen through Heidegger) with the idea of unbounded communication and with its political

condition, uncoerced communication (as conceived by Habermas, 1984). Unbounded

communication depends on contacts free of control and repression. These face-to-face interactions

depend on spaces without regulations on rigid social roles and without control of presence. Limited,

coercive or degrading interactions compromise urbanity, obscuring its real meaning.

(ii) Conceptualizing urbanity in these terms has a clear emancipatory potential: evoking

urban space as a medium of unrestricted communication. This view of urbanity suggests cities

largely constituted by spaces enacted, in principle, as the opposite of social control, and around

public spaces. This idea is echoed in another key concept explored by Habermas (1989) – namely

the public sphere – and the idea of a politics of urban space as its materialization, where

communication and the formation and expression of opinion are openly manifested in public and

private, open and built spaces.

(iii) A third concept places the orientation towards the Other introduced by Heidegger and

beautifully explored by Levinas within the context of urban living. Levinas’ notion of “hospitality”

offers a view into the ethical relationship with the Other, realized in language, as a sensual contact

mediated by closeness and physical proximity, a “home open to the Other” (Levinas, 1969, pages

172–174). In Jacques Derrida’s (1995b) work we find an expansion of this ethics towards an

“unconditional hospitality”: the idea of welcoming differences rather than tolerating them. I wish to

elaborate on these notions. Hospitality as a home open to the Other is a (material) condition for the

relationship with the Other. This “offering of the world” in “acts of inhabitation” suggests that these

are ethical acts of abandonment of social roles. In unconditional hospitality, a previous inhabitant

or a host has no precedence over a new inhabitant or a guest, despite being there before, and despite

memory. Unconditional hospitality requires an abandonment of the consciousness of temporal

precedence regarding inhabitation, an abandonment of a priority in relation to place. Any gesture

of establishing precedence and difference of socially defined roles implies losing unconditional

hospitality. Any sense of priority would lead into exercises of concession that only assert

differences in identity, instead of transcending them in urbanity, in the presence of the Other.

(iv) Unconditional hospitality in true urbanity means the momentary dissolution or

transcendence of things that socialities seem historically built upon: social roles, inequalities and

positions of power. In this sense, the experience of urbanity is contradictory to the impulse to derive

from social differentiation and inequality recognizable roles and positions conceived in and

supported by the consciousness of a temporal precedence and a sense of spatial priority of one in

relation to the Other. There is no homogenous state of ethical life without conflicts. If urbanity is

the encounter of differences, conflicts are inherent to urbanity. Accordingly, the ethical realization

  21

of urbanity involves forms of coexistence in which differences are neither eliminated nor ignored.

Conflicts remain latent in mutual recognition, but they are resolved or compensated ethically by an

orientation to unconditional openness, avoiding the passage from internal conflict to rejection of the

other, and its intersubjective expression as restriction of interaction and control of presence, social

distancing, coercion of communication and, ultimately, violence. Once recognized by actors

oriented by the ethics of urbanity, differences become welcome – transcending the possibility of

degrading interpretations of difference without abandoning difference. This is clearly paradoxical:

recognizing differences only to suspend them in the presence of the other; naturalizing differences

while keeping a sense of identities in all their idiosyncrasies – in Hegel’s words, “to again become

equal to itself” (1977, page 111). An experience of equality expressed in corporeality itself.

This ethical orientation is evidently a contingent historical construction – a form of social

integration via the sphere of mutual recognition that, from a pragmatist viewpoint, is a

communicative accomplishment. This idea suggests the importance of naturalizing coexistence in

everyday situations which find the spaces of the city – especially its public spaces – their loci by

definition.

(v) The notion of unconditional hospitality – enacted to a point where the very roles of host

and guest are transcended and their memory loses potential to interfere in such status – can be

related to another concept explored by Derrida (1995a), also temporal in kind: l’avenir, the arrival

of the Other whose coming and presence I cannot foresee, an Other whose identity is impossible to

anticipate. I would argue that the encounter in the city as a place of alterities takes precisely this

form. In a city that expresses the diversity of social identities and the kaleidoscopic complexity of

the trajectories of acts and interactions, we cannot know a priori which actors will form part of our

next encounters or indeed how. We only know that a social life based on urbanity evokes a priori

an open posture or an ethos of hospitality as the expression of the orientation towards the Other,

more likely enacted in socialities highly attentive to the collective sense of urban living.17

The property of complete temporal opening to different identities has, therefore, a spatial

condition: it requires urban spaces that enable the encounter and recognition, coexistence and

communication with this previously Unknown Other. Of course, a definition of urbanity in these

terms embraces explicitly certain ethical qualities: the full potential of social relations and their

pulsation disclosed as welcoming and communication, as in gestures of emancipation from

intolerance and coercion. These seem like rather radical qualities in a context where socialities are

strongly constituted by various forms of violence – ranging from naturalized forms of prejudice,

inequality and disregard of the other’s condition to pure bodily aggression. Given that, in any

                                                                                                                         17 I have in mind the recent emphasis on a politics of cooperation as a “social craft” given by Richard Sennett (2012).

  22

historical present, the disjunction of the encounter and the disruption of possibilities of

communication provoked by the tensions of social differentiation and segregation cannot be

completely erased, we have to be aware of its intensification in forms of violence that dilute

urbanity. This situation pervades our cities and societies to the point that we ask ourselves whether

full urbanity can at least be found somewhere. If its possibility is non-existent today, the

impregnation of this full urbanity is situated beyond our present – located in a desirable future, a

horizon to our urban practices.

(vi) This is the concept of “becoming” in philosophy – another Hegelian notion crucial to a

broader understanding of urbanity. We can make use of this notion especially through the way in

which it has been developed since Hegel. Henri Bergson, the philosopher of time, asserts that

becoming must be free of any teleology: it must be completely open, impossible to anticipate or

foresee.18 Likewise, the becoming of the urban into a full urbanity does not present itself as a

certain future, a pre-determined future, a becoming structured by homogenous time promoted by a

particular mode of being, but as an “infinite multiplicity of becomings”19 of hospitality, coexistence,

recognition. Nevertheless, while considering the possibility of a future urbanity beyond the present,

we have to consider the possibility of the urban continuing to fracture into alterities that do not

recognize each other, immersed in situations that involve violence and degradation – a social world

continuing to be riven by forces that produce distancing and segregation. A possible future in these

terms does not imply the abandonment of the notion of urbanity in its ethical and political potential.

The becoming of the urban into a full urbanity still retains its sense – beginning as a desire, an

ethical intention, an aspiration for an open city, a form of social life where the disjunctions of the

encounter engendered by social differences would be converted, perhaps, into potential fields of a

“convergence of alterities”, a virtual matrix of unpredictable interactions. Hegel’s “struggle for

recognition” is inscribed within the structures of praxis through experiences of full urbanity. An

ethically-based urban time where, amalgamated in the concrete materiality of urban space, it will

also be possible to encounter those socially different from ourselves. However this expectation does

not produce a utopia. Becoming is not limited to a desire for the future – even if it is produced by an

ethical sense of absolute openness to coexistence as a horizon of the social. Because neither is this

horizon strange to us. Rather it is “a starting point for more ethical temporal imaginings”, to borrow

Lim’s words in a different context (Lim, 2009, page 12). This becoming is already found in the

present of the city, in the now: it is a “virtuality,” a state surrounding the “actual” (Deleuze, 1991)

of the urban, a latency contained within acts in the city, waiting to be realized. Traces of this full

urbanity surround us, along with the noise of dissociation and degradation of the human. Acts of

                                                                                                                         18 This view of Bergson (1998) seems to have exerted a decisive influence on Jacques Derrida’s reading (1995a). 19 I use Bergson’s words (Bergson, 1998:304).

  23

urbanity continue to be amalgamated, impressed in the city as assemblage, material projections of

past urbanities. City spaces continue to “pulsate urbanity”: past spatialities continue to provide the

material conditions for the interactions making up urbanity. These historical traces of urbanity are

materialized both in the diversity of urban spaces and in an impulse towards association and

communication that has historically ensured social reproduction, despite all the tension of

differentiation.

By extension, urbanity, as an accumulation of past urbanities, means that the city’s present

projects urbanities into the future – from the spatially arranged experience of the Other to

possibilities of both controlled and unrestricted communication and a sense of (both social and

ontological) integration of the social world. This observation reinforces the need for the ethical

dimension embedded in the concept of urbanity. The projection of socialities into the future,

assured by the city, implies a responsibility for acts of urbanization in the present. It means that the

urban future is a possibility emergent from each present (figure 1).

PAST PRESENT FUTURE Amalgamated Experience of Alterity Becoming of the urban

Urbanities Unrestricted communication in full urbanities Forms of life URBANITY as impressed in the ENACTING: EXPRESSION and diversity of EXPERIENCE of SOCIAL INTEGRATION built space Ethos of coexistence: Recognition, Orientation towards,

and Welcoming of the Other Responsibility in acts of Urbanization

Figure 1 – Urbanity as becoming: past and present urbanities and the responsibility for an urban future.

By exploring a view of urbanity through ideas that in principle do not refer to the city, I hope to

have shown some of the potential connections between an urban understanding of experience and a

philosophical understanding of the urban as a material and human condition of experience. As I

suggested, one effect of this approach is to identify material traces of experience and social life and

aspects of urbanity that would be unrecognizable in isolation: an approach taking the form of

interchanges between epistemological territories that should be much closer than they are or have

been. Interpreting the urban ontologically means disclosing its role in forming the condition of

human experience itself and the production of social worlds. Moving towards philosophy, we move

closer to a wider understanding of urbanity.

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This approach also reasserts ontology as a horizon of sociospatial theory – and signals the

wealth of the material forms of the urban in arranging our experience of the world and the Other.

An ontology along these lines reveals the city as a particular form of accessing and producing the

world. In urban space distinct materialities encounter each other or collide, socialities are created,

converge or separate noisily with a loss of cohesion, and the material shaping of our experience

unfolds. This paper has provided a brief incursion into the world of our experience and into our

experience of the world through the prism of the urban and its becomings.

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