Orders of Public InteractionCulture, Community, Class

Social Analysis of Urban Everyday LifeMeeting 6 (February 27, 2014)

Nikita Kharlamov, AAU

Person and Communityin Urban Environment

• Remember the ecological axiom: an individual is never ‘out in an empty space.’ They are embedded in a concrete place (built environment, such as your apartment), in a constellation of social circles (different groups of people), in a social network (relationships with other people), and in culture.

Being in Public

• What is a public place?• Публичный или

Общественный?• The idea of a public as

commonly understood in Western sociology is very tightly linked with the ideas of citizenship and community.

Some notions of the public• The basic tension: Public vs. private• Georg Simmel: The stranger. The stranger is not a member of a given

social group but is approaching it from a ‘vector’ of otherness, distance. Metropolis – public space where we encounter multiple strangers

• Jurgen Habermas: Communicative rationality presumes that unmediated interaction is key to successful democracy (rational, collectively agreed upon action towards a shared common good)

• Henri Lefebvre: ‘right to the city’ – universal right to access to urban life and the universal right to change the city itself. I.e., not just ‘access to amenities,’ but also a power to change the ‘amenities’ themselves

• Iris Marion Young: the normative ideal of a good city as ‘being together of strangers.’ Hence the highly positive valuation of diversity and difference.

Being in public

• Erving Goffman: copresence. “Persons must sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in this sensing of being perceived.” (Behavior in public places, 1963, p.17). Civil inattention

• Exposure to unfamiliar people (strangers), elevated social demands on ‘proper’ conduct

• Feelings of threat (psychological as well as physical)

Case of public behavior triggers:Broken Windows Theory

• “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” (Wilson & Kelling, Broken Windows, 1982, p. 31)

• Focus theory of normative conduct (Robert Cialdini): behavior is governed by social norms, which come in two kinds:- Descriptive (what people do)- Injunctive (what people approve of)Whichever is in focus of attention governs actual conduct. (See experimental demonstration in Keizer, Lindenberg, & Steg, The Spreading of Disorder, 2008)

Neighborhood and Community

• What are the larger social units in a city that people organize into?

• Pierre Bourdieu: “Classes on paper” versus “Real classes” – are our categories (race, ethnicity, neighborhood, culture) describing a real group, or a statistical grouping? Or both?

• The idea of a neighborhood: living somewhere and knowing people

Concrete cases• Двор (courtyard) – in Russian context, the closest parallel to ‘neighborhood.’

Courtyard is a social unit of organization that is visible, for instance, in children’s patterns of group formation (who plays with whom / against whom). Is ‘courtyard’ still alive?

• Boheme – romanticized artists, intellectuals, poets, often spatially concentrated (e.g., in Paris’s Latin Quarter, in NYC’s Greenwich Village). {Would Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov qualify as a Bohemian?}

• Creative class: “people who share a common interest in, and ability to create, meaningful new forms of economic activity” (Bounds, in SAGE Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, 2009). Importantly, includes high-tech professionals and business service employees in addition to traditional Boheme. Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class, 2002): location decisions on the basis of lifestyle interests rather than employment, basic amenities, or real estate prices.

• Question: Is boheme and/or creative class in Moscow spatially concentrated? If yes, where? Are they ‘residents’ or ‘commuters’?

Jerry Krase: Vernacular Landscape

• “Visual, spatial, semiotics allows one to see how ordinary people have the ability to create meaning by affecting the appearances of places and spaces. All one needs to do is to open one’s eyes and take a walk anyplace and anywhere.” (Krase, Seeing Cities Change, 2012, p. 25).

• Vernacular: Native or peculiar to a particular culture or locality. Vernacular landscape: landscape that is visibly shaped by real social groups, and textured with respective semiotic ornaments.

Possible Themes for Photography

• Interaction in public• Interaction troubles in public settings• Examples of common public behaviors• Broken windows• Spatial concentrations of boheme and creative

class• Neighborhood and community associations /

organizations / institutions• Vernacular landscapes