Hello, stranger? How attraction trumps interaction in ‘new’ public space

My interest in the topic of this paper arose during a field investigation I commenced more than a decade ago. A social anthropologist by training, I was intrigued by the disparity between two inner-city urban squares in Oslo, Norway in terms of number and types of strangers’ interactions. Differences in urban context, management regimes, and overall neighbourhood profiles were clearly significant. However, I soon realised that a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms required a more comprehensive study. What began as a broad investigation of public-space use as part of a master’s thesis in urbanism, narrowed in the subsequent PhD research to focus particularly on what leading urban scholar Richard Sennett has termed ‘the essence of urbanity’, namely accidental interaction among strangers. In total, the ethnographic fieldwork was scattered over the period from late 2012 to early 2020, the most intense period being 2016–2018.

Drawing on this fieldwork, the paper examines the occurrence of peaceful chance interactions among strangers in ‘new’, privately owned and managed public space. The ‘new’ public space of the study sits at the up-market, mixed-use Tjuvholmen precinct, a part of Oslo’s high-profile Fjord City development; the ‘traditional’ space against which it is contrasted, is located in a diverse and partly gentrified low and middle-income neighbourhood further east.

By ‘new’ versus ‘traditional’ I do not mean recent versus old. I mean a new versus a traditional type of public space, a more controlled and curated versus a more open and inclusive everyday type of public space. As ideal types, ‘new’ public space is privately owned and managed, in contrast to publicly owned and variously but mostly publicly managed ‘traditional’ public space

The investigation revealed that while shorter and also longer verbal interaction was a regular feature of the examined ‘traditional’ public space, it was more episodic and seasonal in the ‘new’ one, reflecting many versus few ‘contact-supporting circumstances’: ‘openings persons’, ‘exposed persons’ and ‘mutual openness’. More than urban form and physical-spatial features, this had to do with differences in users and uses connected to the sites’ management regimes and overall social profile. In particular, it had to do with what was allowed in the ‘traditional’ space – of activities that intrinsically entailed addressing and being available to unknown others – and not in the ‘new’, more rigorously governed one. Common activities in the first site, activities with which market traders, street vendors, magazine sellers, beggars, street musicians, recruiters and petitioners, activists and demonstrators are associated, were practically non-existent in the ‘new’ one, they were either forbidden or strongly curbed. Under any circumstances, they would require a license or approval from the owner or the management company.   

Chance interaction is considered a defining feature of urbanity, and its demise in ‘new’ public spaces of the neoliberal city is widely lamented in the literature. While the paper’s findings are hardly surprising, the more fundamental mechanisms at play have rarely been substantiated and conceived. The paper’s originality lies in the ethnographic documentation and conceptualisation of basic ‘contact-supporting circumstances’ that shed light on and nuance how a ‘new’ public space differs from an ordinary, everyday one with regards to chance interactions.

Herein, the study points to an important shift in urban governance and planning since the 1980s. A market-led notion of attractiveness in the physical and social environment takes centre stage in prestigious urban developments, at the expense of the disordered exchanges of everyday life.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.