Allan Cochrane, The Open University

Presentation to Smart Metropolis Conference,

Gdansk, 24-25th October 2014

Living with difference: making sense of the contemporary city

Traditionally cities viewed as ‘hard’ spaces, spaces of alienation

Often framed either as places within which individuals are homogenised and disciplined (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis)

Or as places of threat, of crime, poverty and insecurity, segregated and divided (Dickensian London)

Beyond the city as threat

Generally framed in terms of the opportunities arising from the mobilisation of information and communications technologies big data tailored information personalised interaction and individual

empowerment

But also recognition that about social capital, human capital – smart people

Smart cities

Move beyond framing in terms of technology or even smart people

Thinking of the city itself as a social organism, as itself possibly ‘smart’

Urbanism as a way of life that is ‘smart’, rather than one that is necessarily alienating or divisive

Moving beyond ‘smart’ cities

Cities bring together (juxtapose) people from different classes and different cultural backgrounds as well as combining a wide range of activity spaces. According to writers such as Jane Jacobs, it is precisely this that gives them their strength as sources of innovation and dynamism (their ‘smartness’)

‘Although it is hard to believe, while looking at dull grey areas or at housing projects or at civic centres, the fact is that big cities are natural generators of diversity and prolific incubators of new enterprises and ideas of all kinds’.

What makes a city smart?

‘The diversity, of whatever kind, that is generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, and among them contain so many different tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bonnets’

A sidewalk symphony or ‘an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole’

Jane Jacobs

City as a ‘difference machine’ (Engin Isin), where groups form, orienting ‘for and against each other, inventing and assembling strategies and technologies, mobilizing various forms of capital, and making claims to…‘the city’’

Place where claims and counter-claims are traded, temporary coalitions formed, and differences negotiated. The placement of different cultures, actors, needs and demands in close proximity produces a distinctive kind of place politics (Ash Amin)

Living with difference

The urban represents a distinctive nodal formation around which sets of relationships overlap, settle and come together

A space of connectivity; one that registers its presence through the intersection of relationships drawn from far and wide, yet which combine and settle in cities in very specific ways

Cities provide ‘the opportunity for citizens to become something else and for mutuality to be strengthened‘ (Amin and Thrift)

In other words…

Cities can also provide ways of reinforcing and developing forms of segregation and division

Urban spaces become sites across which conflicts take place, and cities can become defined by what Mike Davis has called an ‘ecology of fear’, in which a range of protected enclaves is constructed by the middle classes to exclude those who may challenge their security

‘Physical proximity’ may increasingly co-exist with ‘relational difference’. In other words, the connected live alongside the disconnected – the favelas and shantytowns and informal living survive and develop alongside the gated homes of the rich

But…

The search for the ‘good’ city has been a recurrent theme of debates about cities

Cities have been the focus of a great deal of dystopian and utopian thinking, which has incorporated different understandings of the ways in which cities are constituted. Howard (1902/1965) and Le Corbusier

(1929/1987) emphasize the extent to which cities are unruly places that need to be managed;

Jacobs (1961) and Sennett (1990) stress the importance of fluidity, uncertainty and mixing as defining the urban condition

The challenge of urban governance is to capture both aspects of the urban experience, in ways that permit the expression of vitality, while allowing for forms of popular control of urban development.

Search for the ‘good’ city

Turn to think about the everyday experience with the help of evidence from a project focused on three distinctive urban areas in England

Two year ESRC funded project to examine how difference is lived and managed in practice – three places (Hackney, Oadby, Milton Keynes) - and different sites of social life within them

Over 100 individual and group interviews and over 600 hours of participant observation with diverse groups of participants.

Living multiculture

Start from the recognition that England’s 21st century urban environments are increasingly, complexly diverse – no longer question of multicultarism but instead the ordinary is (Census 2011)

Multiculture in England has become increasingly complex over the last decade emergent geographies of ethnic diversity

are increasingly dispersed new, different migrations have continued

and because established migrant populations have fragmented along socio-economic axes

in some urban areas it became possible to talk of super-diversity

and the experience went far beyond the traditional urban centres, incorporating suburban and rural areas

Changing cities

Focus of the project has been on unpanicked, even competent, micro social interaction – conviviality and civil inattention

Look at how people live and negotiate their lives together in the quotidian contexts of multiculture as a, more or less taken for granted, routine and everyday experience

Recognise continuing divisions and racialised forms of inequality and exclusion, but also identifying and recognising the spaces within which day-to-day negotiation takes place

Urban lives, urban practices

Three cases: Hackney in London, Milton Keynes on edge of London city region, Oadby suburban town in England’s East Midlands

Hackney – defined through waves of migration and very mixed (most recent migrations from Central and Eastern Europe, but also gentrification)

Milton Keynes – new town, recently multicultural (relatively large population identifying as Black African)

Oadby – town on the edge of Leicester changing as a result of moves of South Asian middle class form the city

The cases

Urban parks Chain cafes

Costa in Oadby; McDonalds in Milton Keynes; Nandos in Hackney

Social-leisure groups Tennis club and wome’s group in Oadby;

football club and gardening club in Milton Keynes; writers’ group and running group in Hackney Colleges for young people (16-18)

Local policy makers and community actors

The sites

Walking down the slope of the main park, meandering around a bit, the range of people, by ethnicity, age, class and activity, seemed very broad. […] People were using the same space but not paying much attention to one another, other than the group they were in – though many of the groups of friends or family were of mixed ethnicities. […] At the bottom of the hill, more mixtures of people playing in the kids' play area and the tennis courts (Hackney fieldnote)

Grace: it's such a diverse community. It's not, you know... people - just Afro-Caribbean. If you look around, there's everybody in the park. Do you know what I mean? Using the park…strolling through the park….Yeah. Even my community, [and] the Jewish community that I live in, and even the non-Jewish community members that are on my street - we're all in the park…(African Caribbean woman, middle aged, Hackney)

Lucy: We’re in Stamford Hill so it’s the Orthodox Jewish area and they’re known for keeping themselves to themselves but they’re walking through this park as well which is nice to see […] You usually see them walking in the street and you don’t get much interaction […] but at least in the park you feel like you’re kind of interacting even if you’re not speaking with them directly, but you’re sharing the space together…you’ve both come to the park to enjoy what it is .(Anglo-Indonesian woman, young, Hackney)

Shared spaces of parklife

In the middle of the restaurant next to the drinks refill station was a white woman by herself eating sweetcorn and reading The Guardian, a young South Asian woman working on a laptop and a black (African-Caribbean) mother with two young sons who kept on getting up to get another drinks refill. Another woman – Turkish, I guessed – came in by herself and seemed to know the staff, going straight up and ordering without a menu and saying, ‘I’ll sit wherever you want me’ (Hackney fieldnote)

The background music was a mixture of Christmas and contemporary pop music. John Lennon’s ‘So This Is Christmas’ was followed by a Moby song. It was much quieter in Costa’s at that time, compared to later in the morning when it really starts to fill up with parents and babies and pensioners. The staff were chatting and laughing loudly behind the counter. They were talking to a young South Asian girl in front of me in the queue, who I think I’ve seen working there before. ‘I’m not Greek’, I heard her say, laughing. ‘I’m Asian! You’ve got the wrong continent!’ (Oadby fieldnote)

Chain cafes: the value of banality

Michael: I think it’s when you are getting to know people, like you meet new people I guess. I don’t know, I can’t really say why that is, it is just something, ever since I have been here, I have noticed that, it’s just like everyone is mixed together (student, Milton Keynes)

Ethan: Yes, they are some groups that have been friends and will always be friends in that group, but I don’t find that, I wouldn’t want to be part of that, because they’re, kind of, only friends with each other, and then that’s it, that’s, they don’t, kind of, look anywhere else. I’m one of the people who, I don’t really have a group which is my group, I’m just friends with a lot, with loads of different groups and like, if I was standing at break time and one group wasn’t there, I could easily just go over to another group and just be with them and not feel out place (student, Oadby)

Mandisa: Yeah. That area over there, that’s called the bad man corner, where all the Asians sit. And then round there there’s a mixture. And here there’s like sometimes the geeks and that, but yeah (student, Oadby)

Education spaces: learning to live

together

“We’re set the same task [and] I think what is really magical about it, is because we are such a huge mix of people, with the same task we take it in SO many different directions […] we’ve all got very different life experiences that we bring to the same task and that creates really interesting conversations and things…” Kathleen (writers group)

The social groups were places in which the rapid social change in all the localities was recognised, discussed and collectively reflected. Gentrification was a focus for Hackney; increasing multiculture a area of discussion for Milton Keynes and a growing South Asian middle class settlement in Oadby: “I’m scared about how Hackney’s changing: I feel kind of left behind sometimes, I don’t know why exactly…it kind of feels its almost moving too fast, not exactly for its own good – its really exciting living here and I think Hackney’s got loads to offer and I’d REALLY miss it if I didn’t live here.”

“Okay, I might get dirty looks. I might get people crossing the street holding their handbags and what-not (murmurs of agreement) but there was that one really nice Jewish man that helped me push my car on the day when I wanted to cry and that’s like a really nice thing and it kind of helps you to not see just, erm, a group of people who are unfriendly” (Jake Writers Group)

Social-leisure groups: safe

spaces

Ethnically mixed populations routinely and differentially share, experience and negotiate places intended and used for convivial, recreational, festive, relaxing, leisure, quiet and lingering time

Shared space implies connection, living side by side, but not necessarily interaction

Complex interactions between material environments, banal social practices

The easy-uneasy negotiations of everyday urban multiculture

Negotiating the experience of

living multiculture

The ‘smartness’ of everyday urban life

The importance of ‘bringing together’ spaces for routine ‘being together’ of super-diverse, complexly differentiated and rapidly changing urban populations

Tension of public spaces as democratic and elective (places people choose to be) as well as governed and regulated (formal and informal rules of behaviour)

Local policy recognition of the importance of resourcing public spaces and facilitating informal capacities

Conclusions – enabling

‘smartness’

This presentation draws on research undertaken as part of a research team including Sarah Neal (University of Surrey); Katy Bennett (University of Leicester) and Giles Mohan (Open University) as part of a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council - Living Multiculture: the new geographies of ethnic diversity and the changing formations of multiculture in England (ES/J007676/1)

Acknowledgements