Using a novel interdisciplinary focus, this title examines cities as sites of coexistence where different ideas, discourses, histories, and people are constantly brought together in the course of everyday life. While the proximity of ‘difference’ has been discussed as a key feature in urban life, its various meanings and the way in which people perceive and make sense of diversity and the presence of inequalities has been met with less attention. To unpack the complex question of how people live together and what is between them in contemporary cities, the book brings together perspectives from a broad range of disciplines and different methodological approaches. As such, the book is also poised to deepen our understanding of the specificity and value of interdisciplinary research through an embedded reflection on how a change in method or theoretical ground also drastically reframes and affects the topic under study. The book thus adds to the knowledge on the specificities of interdisciplinary inquiry and calls for further reflection on its potential and limitations. Exploring how everyday life in cities bears potential in revising the conceptual apparatus through which togetherness and separation are discussed, it will appeal to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate students with interests in urban studies, sociology, human geography, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and peace and conflict research.
Eeva Puumala is Senior Research Fellow in Social Policy in the Unit of Social Research at Tampere University, Finland.Samu Pehkonen is Senior Research Fellow in Social Policy in the Unit of Social Research at Tampere University, Finland.
1: Introduction: Social Complexity in the City, 2: Cities and Coexistence: A Complexity-informed Approach, 3: Rethinking Coexistence with the Everyday, 4: Affective Placemaking: Unpacking the Relational and Emotional Dynamics of Urban, 5: Everyday Emotions and Urban Coexistence: An Experimental Journey into the Psychophysiology of Lived Experience, 6: The Politics of Looking: Gaze as Silent Negotiation in Urban Spaces?, 7: Tightening and Loosening Urban Space: Perspectives on Young People’s Everyday Negotiations, 8: Disruptive Encounters: An Affective Analysis of the Unexpected in the City, 9: Sharing the Urban Everyday: Toward an Emergent Sense of Community, 10: Beyond Conclusion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives towards New Understandings of Coexistence