Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
The Coining of Convivial Public Space: Homelessness, Outreach Work, and Interaction Order
This article engages with the “convivial turn” in writings about the city and offers a reorientation of sorts. Beginning with encounters, rather than particular spaces, we make the case that conviviality and its limits are realised in practices. Rather than starting in set piece urban spaces designed to foster conviviality we start out on the move, with frontline street-based care and outreach workers in Cardiff, Wales, and Manhattan, New York City, as they seek out and meet up with those sleeping on city streets. This provides a view of an improvised conviviality that makes the most of whatever the material affordances of a given city space happen to provide. Our research points to how these encounters necessarily take place in marginal settings and times due to the sorts of exclusions that can be built into contemporary city spaces that can at the same time be welcoming to the public, but hostile toward those most in need and vulnerably located in the centre of things. In this sense, we approach conviviality as a fragile interactional accomplishment and, in doing so, see questions of conviviality and conflict as less of a big-picture paradox of togetherness and distance, hope and hate in urban life, and more of a dynamic relation of co-presence and visibility. Public space, and indeed public life, might then be reconsidered not as a location but, rather, an active, shifting accomplishment, variously coloured by the politics of seeing and being seen.
The Coining of Convivial Public Space: Homelessness, Outreach Work, and Interaction Order
This article engages with the “convivial turn” in writings about the city and offers a reorientation of sorts. Beginning with encounters, rather than particular spaces, we make the case that conviviality and its limits are realised in practices. Rather than starting in set piece urban spaces designed to foster conviviality we start out on the move, with frontline street-based care and outreach workers in Cardiff, Wales, and Manhattan, New York City, as they seek out and meet up with those sleeping on city streets. This provides a view of an improvised conviviality that makes the most of whatever the material affordances of a given city space happen to provide. Our research points to how these encounters necessarily take place in marginal settings and times due to the sorts of exclusions that can be built into contemporary city spaces that can at the same time be welcoming to the public, but hostile toward those most in need and vulnerably located in the centre of things. In this sense, we approach conviviality as a fragile interactional accomplishment and, in doing so, see questions of conviviality and conflict as less of a big-picture paradox of togetherness and distance, hope and hate in urban life, and more of a dynamic relation of co-presence and visibility. Public space, and indeed public life, might then be reconsidered not as a location but, rather, an active, shifting accomplishment, variously coloured by the politics of seeing and being seen.
The Coining of Convivial Public Space: Homelessness, Outreach Work, and Interaction Order
Smith, Robin James (Autor:in) / Ablitt, Jonathan (Autor:in) / Williams, Joe (Autor:in) / Hall, Tom (Autor:in)
26.10.2023
doi:10.17645/up.v8i4.6457
Urban Planning; Vol 8, No 4 (2023): Improvisation, Conviviality, and Conflict in Everyday Encounters in Public Space; 42-51 ; 2183-7635 ; 10.17645/up.i297
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
homelessness , conflict , planning , categories , outreach work , public space , conviviality , practice
DDC:
720
The Coining of Convivial Public Space: Homelessness, Outreach Work, and Interaction Order
| DOAJ | 2023
Convivial urban spaces: Creating effective public places
| Online Contents | 2010
Convivial urban spaces : creating effective public places
| UB Braunschweig | 2008
Convivial Urban Spaces: Creating Effective Public Places Henry Shaftoe
| Taylor & Francis Verlag | 2009