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Encountering the city

Helen F. Wilson (Durham University) and Jonathan Darling (University of Manchester)

This session aims to bring together and further develop recent work concerning the geographies of urban encounter. It asks what is distinctive about such encounter and how it is theorised in relation to other forms of contact, and aims to interrogate the political possibilities and policy relevance of urban encounters for a variety of geographical concerns. As such we welcome a range of empirical and theoretical contributions from an array of different backgrounds both within and beyond geography. 

The starting point for our engagement with urban encounter is the growing body of research on living with/in diversity, particularly as work turns its attention to the social sustainability of contemporary cities. Whilst living with difference has always been a central feature of urban life, in some quarters it is now considered to represent what city living is all about (Watson 2006). The negotiation of propinquity and social and cultural difference is not only inevitable but central to questions of urban resilience and (in)security, particularly in light of recent urban unrest, growing economic uncertainty and  rising concerns across Europe over the emergence of varied forms of cultural and territorial fundamentalism.  As such, work has sought to engage questions of diversity – its challenges and possibilities – through a focus upon the politics of urban encounter as a mainstay of urban life (Amin 2008, Wilson 2011). Within this turn to encounter, there has been a notable focus upon three central considerations:

•         Firstly, a desire to identify, name and further encourage ‘meaningful’ or ‘transformative’ encounters, which are capable of altering sensibilities and developing more open orientations towards difference (Andersson et al 2011; Tarlo 2008; Wilson 2012). This runs alongside a concern with the management of particular forms of encounter through ever more discrete or affective means, and the reworking of social repertoires of civility and citizenship by numerous policies, institutions and forms of design (Fortier 2010). 

•         Secondly, a concern with the temporality of urban encounter – whether it be its fleeting, emergent or ephemeral taking place, its repetition or resonance beyond a particular event of relation or its inextricable links  with memory, experience and futurity (Darling 2010; Swanton 2010). 

•         Finally, a concern with complicating accounts of agency, causality or moral cultivation through attending to the more-than-human and non-representational conditions of encounter, together with the political potentialities that are attached to encounter itself (Amin and Thrift 2002, Bennett 2010, Dewsbury 2000).  

This session is therefore concerned with encounter in all its varied forms - its temporal resonances and limits but also its spatial contours, conditions and possibilities. More specifically, this session is concerned with questioning what it is that makes urban encounter in particular, distinct from other forms of relation. As such, we are interested not only in how the grounds for encounter are shaped by the city, but also how the city is further shaped and reworked through multiple events of relation. It is within this conversation between the city and the geographies of propinquity that we hope to rethink the political possibilities of urban encounter.
 
With these orientations in mind, contributions might include (but are not limited to) the following: 
•         Theoretical and philosophical engagements with the notion of encounter, its possibilities and challenges.
•         The ‘non-‘ or ‘more-than-’ representational qualities of urban encounter. 
•         The management, regulation or governance of encounter in the city. 
•         The role of urban encounter in social and political projects (social movements, state interventions, discourses of citizenship etc).
•         Living with/in difference – urban encounter and debates around social cohesion, segregation, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, solidarities and social sustainability.
•         The design and techniques of managed encounter, contacts and modes of regulated interaction. 
•         Encounters as sites of civility, citizenship and learning. 
•         The spacing of encounter as an urban condition – how and where does encounter engage the city? 
•         Encounter and security/insecurity
•         Encounter as an expression/impression of urban politics. 
•         The potentials of encounter as a force for social change and/or transformation of relations, self, knowledge, position. 

Please send proposed titles and abstracts (250 words max.) to both of the organisers by Friday January 24th  2012, Helen Wilson ([log in to unmask]) and Jonathan Darling ([log in to unmask]). 

References
Amin, A. (2008) Collective culture and urban public space City 12:5-24.
Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002) Cities : Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity
Andersson J, Vanderbeck R M, Valentine G, Ward K, Sadgrove J, 2011, New York encounters: religion, sexuality, and the city Environment and Planning A 43(3) 618 – 633
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: 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.  
Dewsbury, J. D. (2000) Performativity and the event: enacting a philosophy of difference Environment and Planning D-Society & Space 18:473-96.
Fortier, A. M. (2010) Proximity by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease Citizenship Studies 14:17-30.
Swanton, D. (2010) Sorting bodies: race, affect and everyday multiculture in a mill town in northern England Environment and Planning A 2332-2350
Tarlo, E. (2007) Hijab in London - metamorphosis, resonance and effects Journal of Material Culture 12:131-56.
Watson, S. (2006) City Publics: The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters London: Routledge.
Wilson, H.F. (2011) Passing propinquities in the multicultural city: the everyday encounters of bus passengering Environment and Planning A 43:634-649.