City, Street and Citizen: The measure of the ordinary – Suzanne Hall (2012)

3
“The primacy of nation has… permeated the management of multiculturalism at the level of
neighbourhoods, evidenced in Britain by the commitment to, ‘a clear primary loyalty to this Nation’ in
the Community Cohesion Report (Home Office 2001: 20). The underlying prerequisite of consensus
achieved via community under the auspices of nation and rendered through the political predilection for
targets has shaped ‘multiculturalism’ as a project for organised intervention. The significant political
oversight is the inadequate recognition of the multiple allegiances and visceral forms of mixing that
spontaneously occur in urban life. Further, the contemporary city as an arrival point in a world-wide web
of flows grounds an entirely different reality to the political dogma, as if nation and city are in a tug of
war, with the ideology of containment heaving against the reality of movement.”
5
“While I acknowledge at the outset that conviviality and conflict are part of plural and uneven societies,
the focus of City, Street and Citizen is the practices of probing and working out between diverse
individuals and groups within the small shops along the street. A core question is whether physical
contact matters for these practices: do the proximities and crossovers of bodies and spaces on a city
street have a bearing on how we test and learn with respect to one another?”
“Raymond Williams’ (1958) enduring insistence that ‘culture is ordinary’ is premised on human contact:
everyday interactions are the primary conduit for sharing and learning, and making and building. Equally
essential to Williams’ notion of contact is the respective influences of work and culture on one another.
But Williams’ reflection of the integral relationship between working-class life and labour within
vernacular landscapes is of a different milieu. A question for our urban age is what the forms of work
and associated mores of public contact are that permit learning within cities that are highly varied and
rapidly changing.”
This question “requires a shift away from, rather than a dismissal of, the explicit categorisations of race,
ethnicity and class”.
6
“The analytic alignment of these layered histories with the everyday individual processes of probing and
working out is revealed within the ordinary and shared spaces of human contact, of what Ash Amin
(2002) refers to as ‘micro-publics’ – the social spaces in which individuals regularly come into contact.
Convenience and purpose permit less self-conscious interactions that are potentially eased by the more
explicit processes of working, playing or learning. Crucially, Amin argues that these prosaic publics are
not simply spaces of encounter, but of participation, and they require a level of individual investment to
sustain membership.”
On the Walworth Road people are always moving “Some of these journeys are part of the dialy or
weekly routines of commute common to Londoners. Other journeys to the Walworth Road involve a
distinctive break with the regularity and comfort of a familiar world; these are the migratory journeys
made between one country and another by many of its proprietors and patrons, and require traversing
great physical and cultural distances. To travel these actual and perceptual distances, crossing the
boundaries between the familiar and unfamiliar, demands particular social and cultural skills. The
capacity to engage in difference and change requires an ability to live with more than one spatial and
temporal sense of a local place – a ‘here’ as well as a ‘there’ and a ‘then’ as well as a ‘now’ – the ability
to live with combinations of what is familiar or what is ‘local’.”
There are two linked questions here – one of certain sorts of people (sociological backgrounds) more
able to adapt, and the other of certain spaces, or arenas of public life, more conducive to adaptation.
7
“In contrast to the social housing estate that comprise a large proportion of residences in walking
distance from the Walworth Road, the independent shop spaces off the street appeared as a cheek-by-
jowl series of sub-worlds that were neither overtly public nor private. The shops were adjacent to and
distinct from the street, and interactions and memberships within the shops were regulated differently
from those on the pavement to their fronts.” These shops are the focus here.
9
“Stuart Hall’s (1993: 361) clarification that ‘the capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming
question of the twenty-first century’, directs us, I argue, to recognise and interpret contact between and
amongst diverse individuals and groups across intimate, local, national and global scales. Out of the
heightened flows between people and places across the globe over the past two decades his assertion
demands that we pay attention to the ordinary or small politics that emerge within everyday life, and
consider whether it reconfigures our understandings of class, community and kin.”

Chapter 1 – Making practice visible

13
The language of power is largely quantitative – involving the aggregation and classification of individuals.
This creates a legibility problem for qualitative understandings speaking to power.
“I know of no better description of the fine-grained observation of social life than Les Back’s (1996)
articulation of ‘serious true fiction’. What Back and other skilled ethnographers point us to is an analysis
of how people do things or say things in ways that ring true as opposed to objective or factual
renderings of ‘a’ or ‘the’ truth. Ethnography offers us explicitly subjective accounts of reality, and it is
precisely because it reveals the variable, fallible and ingenious dimensions of human life that it has
validity.”
14
“Acute urban ethnography is the process of revealing not only the global-local or dominant-subaltern
relationships, but the unanticipated (and often inconsistent) expressions of human frailty and ingenuity,
and how these intersect with the economic forces and political frameworks of our time. It is the
qualitative dimensions of the unanticipated to which I now turn and in particular to the analytical value
of simultaneity and ambiguity in understanding what Les Back (2009a) has highlighted as Britain’s
‘metropolitan paradox’, where both dialogue and racism are evoked within its diversifying cities.”
Here life is seen as being lived through both a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ and a ‘provincial’ one.
15
Hence, throughout, “individuals reveal themselves as both spontaneously open to differences and
simultaneously able to verbalise prejudiced views. Spaces are revealed as micro worlds of social
improvisation and cultural innovation and, at the same time occupied in peculiarly insular ways. The
contradictions that often surface in the different acts of saying and doing are of consequence for
understanding the social ways of figuring out and mixing in the diverse city.”
Conducting an ethnography sensitive to such realities requires a method less interested in collecting
data, and more in the active, and holistic negotiation of different modes of life. See Back (2009a, 2009b
and Fabian’s 1983 Time and the Other, for fuller arguments)
The basic argument here is that “the local is a practiced territory and that, by virtue of the diversity of its
respective occupants and shapers, it has multiple boundaries, layers of time and accumulations of
culture.”
16
“Speed is a quality of dramatic time, and exemplifies the thrust and shape of twenty-first century
urbanisation evident in the radical growth of mega cities across the globe. Ananya Roy (2011) refers to
our time and place as ‘a sudden century’, one where the human condition is increasingly integral to the
urban one. Roy explores speed through the steroid-induced growth of Asian cities injected by the global
pursuit of ‘world class’ status…Roy’s method is to contrast: to set suicide rates amongst the 500, 000
migrant workers in the world’s largest factory compound, Foxcon, side-by-side with the iPad and iPhone
gadgets made by the Foxcon workers that proliferate affluent western lives. Roy sets urban spaces of
production alongside global imperatives for consumption, and shows how ideas about the forms and
objects of the ‘world class’ city circulate, as does the exploitation of migrant labour to build these
prolific urban landscapes .”
“Sukhdev Sandhu (2004) evokes a far more jumbled sense of the emerging city by describing London as
‘this higgledy-piggledy commotion of a metropolis’ (2004: 259), and it follows that London’s space-time
configurations of accelerated urban change have acquired different qualities. London is essentially an
amalgam city”
17/
“For Wirth [1938, the seminal work on urban anonymity and disconnect] the growing scale of the city
increased variation and weakened aggregation…While Wirth privileged the small space and slow pace of
rural locales as precursors to solidarity, he similarly predicted the impossibility of urban social intimacy
across different groups. Seminal ethnographic studies of race and ethnicity in American cities over the
twentieth century (Whyte 1943; Gans 1962l Liebow 1967; Suttles 1968 Duneier 1992; Anderson 1999)
point to the practices of kinship and neighbourliness within urban local areas that Wirth’s theory had
emphatically denied.”
18-19
“Because of the prevalence of urban boundaries circumscribed by class and ethnicity for example, as
well as those habitually reinforced by comfort and familiarity, individuals need to sically acquire
repertories to traverse and participate in different spaces of the city. This is the real time social politics
of overlap as opposed to the state regulation of assimilation, accurately articulated by Paul Gilroy’s
notion of a convivial multiculture: ‘Conviviality is a social pattern in which different metropolitan groups
dwell in close proximity, but where their racial, linguistic and religious particularities do not […]add up to
discontinuities of experience or insurmountable problems of communication. In these conditions, a
degree of differentiation can be combined with large amounts of overlapping.’ (2006: 40)” Gilroy
highlights ordinary spaces and modes of interaction that shape and express affinity: an Aresenal football
game, funk/reggae/ska, and the NHS where individual care is administered by a diverse workforce.
19
Craig Calhoun (2003) has co-opted Richard Sennett’s work (2008; 1977; 1996) on physical and sensory
proximity in urban performance (where such performance is essentially a reaffirmation of collective
identity) to thinking about ways of being cosmopolitan in the world.”
20
“Sheldon Pollock’s (2000) notion of a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’… allows us to think through how local
worlds transform across space and through time’ without forgoing cultural particularity. Pollock offers ot
the ethnographer of local worlds three considerations: in what ways do vernacular practices connect
locals ‘to a larger world than a smaller place?’ (2000: 591); to what extent can local practices resist
political or cultural domination? and: what choices are available to individuals to participate in change.”
“The social and cultural capacities to respond to transition, both in Sennett’s proposition of a sensuous
process of testing in public space, and in Breckenridge et al’s [2002] focus on the inquisitive processes of
transformation, are animate and deeply dependent on communication. But they are also reliant on the
structure of opportunity and choice. In City Street and Citizen, these adaptive capacities are explored
through the two space-time frames of improvisation and duration.” The former is about making do
within bound contexts, while the latter is oriented towards building enduring prospects and
relationships over time.
“Improvisation is the immigrants prerogative.” Such adaptations are a large part of the process of
‘arrival’.
21
“the modes of innovation and experiment on the Walworth Road may well emerge out of an
entrepreneurial imperative, but they are paralleled with human contact and expression. Improvisations
on the street are essentially about reciprocal modes of communication – spontaneous and considered –
between proprietors and customers, and between ‘newcomers’ and established residents.”
“To observe the variegated form of these improvisations, the ethnographer must pursue slithers of
space and increments of time. Within the shop along the Walworth Road I have learnt that one and the
same space can be occupied entirely differently through both the arrangements of space, as well as
divisions of the hourly time slots across the day. There is simply a density to the occupation of ‘space
time’ that belies the clarity of first glance observations. To start with, there is a social thickness to the
shop façade formed by the display of goods and services referred to by one proprietor on the Walwoth
road as the ‘silent salesman’. But in multi-ethnic streets like the Walworth road, the silent salesman has
had to acquire multilingual communication skills, including on the one hand the choice of language,
humour and imagery to reach a varied clientele, and on the other a sequence of items to address
cultural needs and aspirations. There are the spatial distinctions from front to back of shops that are not
simply mercantile pursuits of organisation, but intricate arrangements of public and private territories,
secular and spiritual domains and singular and variegated cultural references.”
24
Importantly, both main sites of the ethography – Nick’s Caff and Reyd’s Bespoke Tailoring – seem to
have been selected because their proprietors were much more receptive to talking and to the project as
a whole – how might the proprietor’s disposition also have shaped how customers interacted and used
the space?
25
“The incongriuity between words and actions was an important cue for understanding some of the
collisions between real-time social experiences and the broader societal portrayals of difference and
stigma perpetuated, for example, via the media. Moreover, these ambiguities are the ethnographer’s
privilege, since they are accessed through the process of spending time and gaining trust. However, the
risk for ethnography, as Wacquant (2002) acerbically points out in his essay on street-based
ethnographies of poverty and race in America, is that these incongruities are potentially smoothed out
by characterising individuals in the field by type or persona. I would add that characterisations or
stereotypical portrayals of people and of places reduces the opportunity for revealing a more sitiuated
theory of mixing, where public space is understood as a day-to-day real for openly expressing fears and
affinities, and a place for regularity confronting capacities to engage with change.”
26
“Homi Bhabha (2004 [1994], preface) explores the emergence of cultural meaning in diverse urban
contexts through ‘personhood’ as individual practice. Bhabha directs the reader to the analytic value of
individual expression and how individuals communicate their sense of self with others. He flips Sheldon
Pollock’s frame of the ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’, and in exploring ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ Bhabha
connects the city as a postcolonial meeting ground shaped by inter-cultural relationships that are
vitalised by everyday interactions and expressions of personhood. The ethnographer can extract from
Bhabha the significance of the act of recognition as both a cultural and political concern: the crucial
importance of listening to and recognising the ‘unherd’ or what Suketu Mehta describes as the surfacing
of ‘unofficial stories’ that are invisible to the lens of power.” [But is nationalism always a production only
of the powerful – can’t it also be vernacular and tied to personal aspirations as well?]

Ch 2 – The boundaries of belonging

31
The theme of boundaries frequently came up in fieldwork. “A boundary is a form of ordering that
denotes a physical and perceptual moment of differentiation. Whether historic or contemporary it is a
marking that commands a political and cultural attitude to crossing: a zone from which one is compelled
to venture beyond; and a limit set to establish containment. The emblematic notion of a boundary as
linear is therefore misleadingly sparse. Boundaries are saturated spaces in which legal and experiential
markings are densely accumulated. In this sense a boundary is closer to a labyrinth than to a line and an
exploration of this historic layers, dead –ends and escape routes within it would therefore lead to a
similarly complex view of who belongs, where, and under what conditions.”
32
“to understand the intersections not only of people and places, but of pasts and presents, as so
eloquently purported in Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora (1996), the processes of containment
and crossing need to be understood together. And it is in the urban margin, where land and rents are
still comparatively cheap and where housing estates are plentiful, that the social and spatial boundaries
of class are most likely to intersect with the on-going waves of global migration.”
33
On the Walworth Road: “The density of networks and connections, legitimate and illicit ways of being,
entrepreneurial pursuits and the on-going maintenance of a plethora of daily routines all happened
behind the layer of what was apparent at first glance. While these vital invisibilities are often obscure in
any social space, they seemed increasingly significant for reaching an understanding of the Walworth
Road, since its visual presentation is of a somewhat messy, everyday street, without the dominant
repertoire of flagship stores or easily recognisable public spaces. On the basis of visual recognition or
lack thereof, it is possible to overlook or dismiss the underlying value of apparently ordinary streets like
the Walworth Road.”
35
“The confluence of origins, colonial pasts and disparate global development are some of the historic and
contemporary themes of migration and diaspora that are evident when focusing on the Walworth Road
as a form of urban frontier.” Here, diverse places of origin, spatially and culturally separated, are
‘brought together’ in close proximity within the road, raising the question: “How do people manage
their journeys between familiar and unfamiliar worlds, and develop their lives and aspirations across
these global and local ‘scapes’?”
37
Discussing shop fronts and signs: “In the texture, language and sequencing of surfaces we can observe
one primary dimension of how proprietors hone their communication skills not only to entice their
customers, but also to secure their return. These sequences of display are used by proprietors on the
Walworth Road to combine the apparent banality of product with a density of cultural associations to
attract a variegated customer base. The ways in which individual, ethnic and cultural differences are
purposefully arranged serve to distinguish not only the shop products, but also the identity of the
proprietor and how he or she anticipates the needs and preferences of prospective customers.”
“Simmel (1949) explored a ‘light’ mode of interaction through his concept of ‘sociability’, and
emphasized its inherent social and even playful aspect by positioning the role of form over that of
content. However, Simmel’s sociability depends on the idea of reciprocal exchange or a basic level of
social recognition, for form is empty of meaning without someone to deliver it, and someone else to
respond accordingly. The proprietors on the Walworth Road use the public-private interface along the
street as a space for communication, in which both personal expression and cultural translations are
offered. This thick interface is therefore an available form of social legibility to be read in the presence
of many cultures, and is an important first point of interaction and expression.” [This all may be so, but if
shop owners pursue cultural-mediation only ever through positioning as shop-owners, how meaningful
and compelling does this act become in its own right.]
41
“The connection between seeing places and grading the worth of people who live in these differentiated
parts of the city is more recently explored by Sampson (2009). But Sampson focuses on the ‘signs of
disorder’, referring ot the ‘visual clues’ prompted by social signs such as ‘verbal harassment’ or ‘public
intoxication’ and physical signs such as ‘graffiti on buildings’ and ‘garbage on streets’. [Para] However,
Sampson’s analysis of visual disorder is understood through the individual agency of those who perceive
disorder, without reference to the systems of power that designate order, in part constructed and
regulated in the physical landscape over time.” Incorporating structure into this view, boundaries are
officially inculcated and regulated, animated in the stature and texture of the physical environment, and
ultimately come to accrue further meanings and common perceptions through their incorporation into
everyday life.
43
In Walworth Road, and as she reads in Gillian Evans’s work on Bermondsey (2006), historical
conceptions of the neighborhood as an independent manor-estate or village persist and shape present
parochial, inward-looking mentalities.
43-45
The argument here is that this reproduction of historical boundaries occurs especially for the poor, as it
was these independent historical units (manors, villages, parishes) which governed both the welfare, the
popular image and the spatial location and movements of the poor (see Haylett 2001). [It seems the
argument here is that there has been historical continuity in the governing of the poor as a separate
population, leading them to see themselves as separate and express this separateness through a
parochial sense of place – but it’s not quite that clear here…]
45
“The stigma attached to working-class physicality, attire, gesture and accent are equally evoked in the
textures of underclass spaces, and spatial forms of political control can be seen as symbolic codes that
influence ways that people and places are collectively viewed, as well as the ways individuals in these
places come to view themselves. This is made evident in the types of institution that emerged in
Walworth to provide for and control the poor during periods of heightened economic change.” (In this
case, asylums, poor houses, jails and institutions, all with a high degree of surveillance and control.)
46
“The places and institutions that were central to how working-class life was lived are embedded in
personal memories…The symbolic impact of the institutions in which both poverty and relief were
organised saturates the sense of an area over time and plays an enduring role in how people and places
are viewed from both the inside and the outside. Thus the symbolic spatial order of a place may serve to
reinforce the boundaries that confine and relegate people to place.”
46-47
“Bhabha (1994) contributes to our understanding of the work that the stereotype does in the context of
colonial discourse, specifically through how otherness is constructed. His definition of a threeforld
process of how the stereotype is authorised can be applied to the organisation of poverty and relief in
places like Walworth: the creation of a ‘subject people’ or the urban poor; the validation of their
subjugation in this case through the imperative of relief; and the institution and maintenance of regimes
of control as so explicitly exemplified in the workhouse.”
48
Residents on council estates, especially those thought to be inadequate, widely relate a sense of
isolation and bleakness, using language of imprisonment and territorial conflict.
John relates: “Each council estate is territorial, we don’t talk to each other, we don’t mix with each
other. It’s not that we don’t like each other. It’s just that we’re so overpopulated, so many tower blocks
and concrete buildings, we become very insular on our estates and very protective. There is
communication at some levels. We do have the local forum where the representatives from each estate
are elected to talk about funding – you know, which estate needs new lifts, or whatever. But other than
that we don’t socialise or integrate. And then you’ve got the class division.” [How representative?]
49
“Regeneration can be indiscriminate in its eradication; places that are valued, rituals and events that are
enacted, simply disappear.”
50
New and established residents negotiate common space through shared forms of legibility. If the
hybridized shop fronts of Walworth Road are one such form, the material traces of different forms of
authority detailed here – which serve to organize, classify and rank the environment and those within it
– are another.” [What does this really mean – how are they the same?]

3 – The art of sitting

52
If those who have come from abroad are migrants by dint of geographical distance, many of the other
distances entailed in this movement – cultural, social, and material-resource – have also become part of
the lives of those born in the area, rendering locals ‘migrants’ as well, in the changed and changing
environment.
“The occupation of the Caff is organised by socially acquired measures of space, time and etiquette,
allowing individuals to claim a place to sit within the rhythm of the day, while participating in the
performances that regulate conversation, eye contact, distance and intimacy.”
53
While the caff is a space where “an array of regulars reconstitute their sense of being local. But narrative
of displacement, fear and bigotry also prevailed. The sense of belonging fluctuates both for established
residents and newcomers, all of whom, in the context of deep urban change, reconcile their parallel
experiences of being in place and at home and being misplaced and alienated. From this ordinary space
off an ordinary street, small and large questions emerge: how do day-to-day and face-to-face forms of
contact influence a local sense of belonging?; and, what kinds of space provide meeting points for a far
more variegated, dislocated public?”
“The regularity and probing subliminally integral to everyday acts of belonging are expanded in this
chapter through three frames of work, allegiances and divisions. The space and practice of work is the
essential starting point to unpacking how diverse individuals interact in the Caff. It is not simply that the
Caff is a work place and a social space in which life and livelihoods overlap. More acutely the Caff is a
local space where the stakes are raised: for the proprietor there is the question of securing and
maintaining the support of a varied clientele. For the customers there is the question of how to claim a
piece of space to regularly occupy, while observing established codes of conduct. [Forget consequences,
is this latter game even as conscious?!] Importantly, the Caff is also an extension of home by virtue of
the sustained regularity over months and years of many of its customers. [But probably only for those
for whom claiming space and dwelling in the Caff came naturally, else how would it become home-like,
if the entry point was conflict, and why would one pursue conflict to that point?] Within this intimate
territory, personal matters, updates on football and heated political discussions were all aired.
Enactments of allegiance and assertions of divisions occurred within this combined establishment of
work, home and leisure.
54
“Are the prospects for intercultural meeting as Sennett (1996) observed in the multicultural terrain of
Greenwich Village, spaces where different individuals come together, but essentially remain apart; a
form of courteous but distanced co-location?”
Alongside Amin’s sense of micro-publics, “Bhabha (2004 [1994]) adds to this sense of alternative publics
by asserting that it is in the interstitial spaces of the city, neither overtly public nor domestic, that
intercultural social life can be accommodated and experienced. I’d like to pursue the role of micro or
interstitial publics by thinking through the idea of a ‘prosaic public’: a space of habitual, local and up-
close forms of contact, the sues of which, at the very least, are to include diverse individuals in shared
space.”
55
“Key to its appropriation by its customers, the Caff was a place to go regularly, either spontaneously or
as part of a routine. It was a place where one could do nothing much without being moved on; there
was no institutional setting or formal membership required for being there. One may go through the
formality of ordering a cup of tea, but more importantly the Caff was a pace where one could spend
time and take your time.”
57
“Within the daily rhythm of work and occupation within the Caff, a spatial and temporal structure
emerged that accommodated the routines, fluctuations and nuanced requirements of both Nick and
Dorah’s family and their varied customers… The space of the Caff was therefore delineated not only by
the physical separation of the tables, but also by the bands of time throughout the day, accomdoating
the waves of different kinds of clientele at particular intervals.”
59
“In Nick’s Caff sitting was a social process tied to a local place, where regularity was an important
dimensions of a basic mode of belonging. Many customers claimed this belonging through the repeated
maintenance of time and place, sitting in the Caff more or less at the same time of day and mostly in the
same space. Through acquiring an understanding of the predictable social routines in the Caff,
individuals could exercise explicit choices about when to visit the Caff, whom to avoid, and whom to
meet up with. Once inside the Caff, the size of the table provided a small but valuable measure of social
distance without entirely separating anyone from the general activities around them.”
60
“Nick’s particular form of engagement was a direct involvement with the diverse individuals in the Caff.
Nick was a ‘public character’, the individual on the street whom Jane Jacobs (1961) described as the
person who explicitly concerned himself with the people around him… Nick’s role as a local public
character was acquired and refined through a combination of his work skills and social skills. Nick had
become more than adept at watching and engaging people. He had grown up with a few of his
customers and he had come to know his regulars. He could astutely describe a person and the current
circumstances they were in.”
62
“There were many individuals who used the Caff who no longer had an immediate family to socialise
with daily. The Caff provided an alternative ‘family’ for them by being a place to go to and by affording
them contact with people with whom they had sustained a sense of belonging.”
63
Pubs provided a space of ‘small sociality’ (Simmel 1903) in an urban environment. Jack: “There’s been
subtle changes. Take the closing down of the pubs. Every street has a pub, and that was like a
community centre. You could come home of an evening, take of your working-class clothes, get your
newspaper, go down to the pub. That was before television… When I was young you could literally drink
seven days a week and it wouldn’t make a dent in your pocket (I’m talking about when I was single, of
course). It wasn’t just a question of drinking, it was a social club. The way I got to know people was the
pub… a kind of drinking school developed.”
64
“In Wallman’s study, Eight London Households (1984) she observed and interviewed households with
different demographic, ethnic and class profiles all living within the same area of the Louvaine Area
Residents Association (LARA) housing project in south London. Wallman’s empric analysis points to how
individuals orchestrate and rely on a variety of networks across the divisions of class, race and ethnicity,
as an essential means of getting by in the city. But in refining an understanding of an ‘urban resource
network’, Wallman defines resources as more ‘to do with organisation’, including the organisation of
‘time, information and identity’ (1984: 29), than to do with the bonds of ethnicity or kinship. Similarly,
Armstrong’s account (1998) of football hooligans points to the resource of time over class thereby
challenging the stereotypical association of class with football hooliganism. Armstrong asserts that
shared time provides a primary platform for belonging: ‘In terms of participation, the most essential
requirement for being a Blade was free time..’ (1998: 169).”
65
While the Caff was used by a good number of people involved in the informal economy, at various
levels, they all demonstrated a suspicion and less of a willingness to engage with others – partly tied to
their ranking.
66
“Social regulations emerged from the ritualised practices of proprietor and customers – where regulars
sat, where the loner sat, who talked to whom, and what people talked about at certain times of the day.
However, the Caff was a place not without its tensions. These were often presented as perceptions
about groups of people informed by generalisations of what differentiates one group from another.
Various people in the Caff talked in broad terms about ‘the Conservatives’, ‘the middle-class wankers’ or
‘the immigrants’. But daily interaction in Nick’s Caff revealed forms of sustained interpersonal
engagement that contradicted generalisations, and personal relationships evidently overlapped
expressions of race, culture, age and personality.”
67
Stereotypes assert categorical relationships or traits. When individual experiences contradict
stereotypes, then, this is normally seen as the category failing to hold in a particular instance, rather
than a failing of the category as a whole. A vocal racist’s close black friend is accounted for by the
phrase: “Dan’s not that black.”
68
Those who are first or second generation immigrants themselves distinguish between deserving and
underserving immigrants, often on the basis of seeing immigration as a genuine economic problem or as
an upset to a way of life that they’ve come to value.
72
For people to be local in changing local worlds, and to form ways of life and associations outside of or in
addition to the remits of origin, community or territory, they require a range of spaces in which to meet,
to encounter difference, and to engage in informal memberships. As a local meeting space, Nick’s Caff
reveals the social value of meeting places in which life and livelihoods are combined. [Para] In Nick’s Caff
the contract of meeting is negotiated by the everyday rituals of sitting, and takes the social forms of
active and passive participation. Amongst its occupants, the process of assigning who belongs in the
context of a diverse and rapidly changing city may already be established by broader societal values and
rules set outside the Caff… But the enactment of pragmatic rituals and spatial intimacy in the Caff’s
semi-public interior challenges some of the stereotypes of who belongs and on what basis. Having
regula contact and a place to meet amongst others is critical to this challenge.”
73
“The social formations between self and group and local processes of belonging are revealed in the
small localities of the city, where informal memberships are claimed and granted through the rituals of
gesture, timing and spatial organisation. In these social spaces or prosaic publics, the citizens of
accelerated change engage with the familiar and the unsettling. Where their local worlds are
substantially transforming, prosaic publics are one of the urban venues in which individuals confront
their own social capacity to deal with change. [Do they really? Such encounters don’t seem to change
discourse, which would suggest they don’t change reflexive self-understanding or self-positioning. How
are they part of a public, if the public has no durable qualities especially in orienting action? Part of the
problem here is an ethnographic thinness, that doesn’t situate such encounters within people’s lives]

Ch 4 – The art of attire

80
“Gilroy’s work (1987) on race and racism highlights the varied sources of cultural allegiance by
questioning what brings individuals together in highly stratified and racialised societies. He differentiates
between an individual’s inheritance received or imposed by group status, like ethnicity or race, versus
an individual’s process of self-discovery that emerges out of affinities and ambitions. By privileging the
importance of how individuals pursue their preferences and prospects, Gilroy emphasises the cultural
significance of how individuals develop shared connections across the designated groupings of kin,
nationality or class.”
93-94
“Style, as expressed by Reyd, is a process of ‘bringing people together’. His is an articulation of social
affinities forged with individuals and groups, through a sharing of aural and visual sensibility. Reyd’s
practice as a Mod tailor suggests that style is a consequence of multiple social relations and learning
processes. In Reyd’s case, home, street and shop, as well as the medium of music and clothes, are all
different and integral sources for the constitution of his style. Because Reyd experiences style as a way
of life, it is not only invigorated by moments of inspiration, by a sociability that is located in in two
primary venues – his position and relationship with local customers on the Walworth Road, and his Mod
affinities through which he has broadened his local horizons.” [But this applies to Reyd much more than
others. Firstly, he draws his encounters with others into a broader project of ‘style’, while for others,
such encounters are more about fashioning the self qua the self. Secondly, even if ‘style’ is Reyd’s
particular personal project, it is perhaps unique in the scope of its reach – just because everybody has
personal projects doesn’t mean that they all are so exploratory, and sharing and socially oriented.]

Ch 5 – The politics of nearness

95
“While exchange and testing certainly occurred within…local meeting points, so too were more closed
forms of engagement. But this is precisely the point of focusing on ordinary space: that in the banal
aspects of everyday life, shared local spaces are shaped by habitual associations rather than outright
compatibilities. I suggest that it is through such local associations that face-to-face forms of cultural
exchange and social retreat, and conviviality and complacency are brought to life.”
96
“although everyday memberships in ordinary space are generally informal, they are often profoundly
significant for how individuals access knowledge, grant and gain trust, and affirm their connections
within a socially sustained familiarity. Of significance is that for many of those who occupy the urban
margins, in particularly the poor, the elderly, the young and the newcomer, local worlds are places in
which they are not simply dependent but also highly invested. Further, the full guise of social distance or
anonymity is denied by regular forms of face-to-face contact, and in order to secure one’s right to
appear and not simply frequent, broad codes of sociability have to be respected. The implications of
informal membership, given the variety of individuals who regularly use the street and its adjacent sub-
worlds, are that while parochial and cosmopolitan expressions have a daily presence, the means of
working out, ignoring, and/or asserting are part of what allows for any one individual’s return the
following day. De Certeau (1984: 29-42) referred to this as ‘ways of operating’ within a schema, in which
he described the use of tactics as the nimble adjustments necessary for the everyday art of ‘making do’”
For the vulnerable, establishing a sense of familiar space, and habits grounded within it, “is not simply a
tactic, it is, to use de Certeau’s distinction, a strategy for living with inequality. Familiarity can therefore
both orientate and limit social exploration.”
97-98
“The diversity of local voices and interactions on the Walworth Road made it apparent that the
familiarity of the local was as much socially affirming as it was at times socially constraining. Many of the
narratives of belonging were firmly rooted in a confined commitment to locality as expressed through a
tiered sense of local boundaries, including the perceived parameters of the River Thames, the Borrough
of Southwark and the neighbourhood, as well as small territories within the neighbourhood. In these
narratives, place was invoked to position a sense of self with respect to locality, such as ‘My grandfather
was a Peckham person’ or ‘I was born on this side. When we were kids we never went onto the other
side. There [the other side] was a different gang.’ Place was also used to define the limits of personal
exploration as described by one local who claimed, ‘Everything is here. For the last ten years I haven’t
moved much beyond the borough.”
98
“The relationship between interaction and integration in local space is contested in the broad arena of
urban studies and community studies.”
98-99
“By taking us for a walk down Kilburn High Road in North London, Massey describes the very oridinary
global-local connections between Kilburn High Road and the world, through the variegated sense of
place carried in diverse bodies, spaces and objects. She calls for an ‘extroverted sense of place’ or, more
explicitly, ‘a global sense of the local, a global sense of place’ (1994: 156). But in seeking to conflate the
conceptual binary between global and local, Massey eliminates the analytical significance of local
boundaries. My fieldwork suggests that Massey’s ‘extroverted’ or connected web of local places needs
to be paralleled with familiar space as an aggregation of sub-worlds, many of which are introverted and
bounded.”
99-100
“Surfacing in many of the conversations I had with locals who were born in the area was the sense that
as their local worlds became increasingly unfamiliar, familiar remnants such as Nick’s Caff became
increasingly important. Locals who used the Caff regularly commented on how they valued Nick’s Caff as
a place in which ‘little seemed to change’. The focus on familiarity in what was perceived as a rapidly
changing world may seem fairly unremarkable – we all have places and spaces to which we wish to
return, based on the comfort of knowing and being known. But there remains the important social
question of the extent to which people are captive to locality and in particular the social consequences
for those whose spatial and social confinement is exaggerated by vulnerability, such as the elderly or the
poor. While ties to locality are reinforced by the daily use of local places, these same locality ties can
also be asserted through urban economies, political systems and social structures that play a significant
role in confining people to place on the basis of class, income and ethnicity.”
100
“However, familiarity is not necessarily only an introverted social form. Through a sense of comfort and
everyday contact, familiarity can be used as an adaptive social form to combine different traditions,
people and places. As is the case with the diversity of cultural life on Massey’s Kilburn High Road (1994),
my fieldwork data revealed that in many instances local people expressed more than one coordinate of
orientation on their mental map of local place. Particularly for those locals who had more than one
cultural inheritance, their local social worlds on the Walworth Road were navigated by combining it with
other familiar worlds. Nick and Dorah’s socialisation at their regular ‘family’ table at the front of the Caff
was not only shaped by an entrepreneurial inclination, but by a Cypriot familial and cultural inheritance
of meeting around a table, where eating and talking are core to everyday life Around this table their
local London world and Cypriot heritage effectively combined to make a social space for family, friends
and locals.” [Note the qualifier for those with prior external/global orientations, like migrants]
100-101
“Local places then, are about finding and fixing coordinates of familiarity to navigate everyday life The
individual use of local coordinates varies considerably with differing processes of finding and fixing:
from regularity and convenience to the effects of stigma and territory, and to inter-cultural
combinations of social life.”
102
“The occupation of personal spaces within a larger social space, akin to individuals claiming a bench in a
park, requires a particular form of informal social membership. Informal social memberships depend on
learning and respecting the social codes common to the larger space and group, as well as establishing
the right to partially retreat or differentiate oneself from the larger whole. [Para] Joseph Rykwert (2000:
133) emphasised the necessary smallness of spatial intimacy for ‘semi-public, semi-private meeting’ by
referring to ‘places of tryst’ where spatial intimacy is compatible with social discretion or secrecy within
a group space. The scale of inclusion works precisely because of its smallness, and therefore while some
are included on the basis of share etiquette refined by regularity, others are informally excluded on the
same grounds. There are many individuals on the Walworth road who by-pass Nick’s Caff, and others
still who might feel uncomfortable about entering and using the space.
104-105
“In Calhoun’s (2002) theoretical exploration of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’, he asks what the basis for
collective membership is, and highlights the plural forms of allegiance. His is a political recognition of
‘social solidarities’ and thereby challenges the view that emerged out of the theory of cosmopolitanism
in the 1990s, where the primacy of a global democracy was thought to be vested in international forms
of governance and global capitalism. Calhoun refers to a sense of the lived obligations and commitments
that tie individuals and groups where, for example, locality, tradition, community and ethnicity are
essential to the cosmopolitan process. Participation and citizenship are therefore, ultimately layered
practices emerging out of a range of small and large associations and interdependencies. Of significance
to a contemporary understanding of the local is Calhoun’s emphasis on the pragmatic resolutions of
social, cultural and economic ties within everyday life, and hence the essential recognition of what he
refers to as the ‘life-world’.”
105-107
The argument is that shared forms of sociability, and the modes of participation that arise out of these
forms and their sharing, are forms of citizenship. In the case of Reyd’s for example, it is the sharing of a
repertoire of expertise, value, history and lived experience – particularly through fashion and mod
culture – gives Reyd an overall ‘sensiblity’ towards his customers, allowing him to make them part of his
narrative, and he part of theirs [to a lesser extent] in a way that allows for the negotiation of difference
and change. [But surely this is just a broader reaching sociability, and moreover one particular to certain
ways of living, not citizenship writ large]
108
Ordinary cosmopolitanism is, then, a living amongst and recognition of difference without a
convergence to sameness – without an insistence on cohesions such as ‘community’ and ‘ethnicity’ as
exclusive or even primary forms of belonging. Sociability, or more precisely the ability to socialise
amongst others, is a skill that forms out of being exposed to a variety of social situations, and in the
context of rapid urban change it is a skill that requires continual renewal. The social skills needed to
engage with difference and change require more rather than less exposure and regular participation
over fleeting encounter. The city and its varied locales and sub-worlds matter in accessing space in
which to learn and exchange. The street offers one such global-local strip that ‘works’ in its side-by-side
aggregation of parts. [para] I have argued that the local spaces of a city street and its dimensions of
familiarity, intimacy, and sensibility sustain social solidarities, since they offer the ease of access,
comfort of contact and sharing of affinities, which under pin much of social life.” [There is a slippage
here, from closures like ethnicity or community not being the source of primary affiliation, and a
sociability that entails a full openness to difference. People may resist such reifications because their
lives transcend them, while still living highly particular and closed-off lives. Meanwhile, the skill of
navigating difference may be more a matter of routine adaptation rather than at the core of one’s self-
image and self-projects.]

Ch 6 – Street measures
111
“we need a different vocabulary to communicate the values of streets like the Walworth Road. An
alternative notation is necessary, since the life and livelihoods on these global-local streets differ in
important ways from those that we may associate with a comparatively ‘upmarket’ London street, like
High Street Kensington for example, or a global retail high street like Oxford Street. The inadequacy of
the generic term ‘high street’ to describe the vitalities of these diverse places is self-evident. Similarly,
the aggregative term ‘Main Street’ as used in American towns and cities denotes a cultural ordinariness,
but one which fails to capture the intensities of urban change in everyday life.”
Improvisation, duration, flexibility and diversity are proposed as dimensions that give Walworth Road its
value to the local populace, and thus as useful measures.
116
While the visible diversity along the road is partly a product of the diverse background of those living
locally, “as Barrett, Jones and McEvoy (1996) show, it is also a factor of global economic restructuring,
one aspect of which is the reorganisation of work labour in the UK and the US since the 1980s. Economic
restructuring correlates with the dramatic increase in self-employment amongst ethnic minorities in the
UK and US: ‘The overall impression is that ethnic minority capitalism is now virtually a standard feature
of advanced urban economies and that, notwithstanding the recession and economic crisis, it is waxing
rather than waning’ (1996: 783).”
120-121
[While the practices of exchange across national and cultural borders are held as making stronger
citizens out of those around the Walworth road – especially its proprietors – more connected both
globally and locally, it is unclear how such allegiances develop in the lives of many proprietors, indeed
the citizen at the nexus of such exchanges that Hall describes seems more to be the street itself, as an
amalgam, rather than anyone (or many people, at least) on it.]
121
“The relationship of London’s local area geographies to local high streets has been explored in the High
Street London report (Gort Scott and UCL 2010)…The study reveals that two-thirds of Londoners live
within 500 meters of a high street and that two-thirds of the trips to the local street are made to access
forms of exchange and interaction other than retail. This valuable report thereby provides us with a
street-based image of London’s local worlds: rather than a postcard map of prestigious spots, or a
planner’s map of strategic regeneration areas, the authors reveal to us a spider’s web city of numerous
radial and transverse threads activated by everyday life.”
122
“For Harbraken (1982) it is the lucid clarity and apparent simplicity of the spatial code of the street that
enhances its capacity for individual adaptations. He argues that for individuals to appropriate a unit of
collective space, such as a shop along a street, their efforts must be directed by the legibility of a spatial
order. In other words, individual subjectivity and conviction responds to the limited collective regulation
and repetitive arrangement of the street edge. In exploding individual investments in the street he
comments: ‘How to allow for a multitiude of small territorial powers to exercise their right to build? The
only way is to offer a clear context for action in such a way that the overall concept is understood by all
concerned. Only when this understanding and acceptance is achieved can one expect people to invest in
their life’s saving and years of effort in a piece of common land. The street and the block are common
knowledge.”

Ch 7 – Conclusions
128
“The question of creed or cohesive faith so essential to the idea of nation is not, I have argued central to
the contemporary reality of ‘city’. In this way, London is not England, and its array of individuals, their
aspirations and constraints are inadequately bundled up into a measurable and programmable ‘ism’ that
‘fails’ or ‘succeeds’ on the basis of individual, national or global temperaments. ‘Multiculturalism’ is a
poor substitute for attempting to gauge the dynamic realties of living together in dense, intense and
uneven urban landscapes.”
129
For the Walworth road, the local is “a densely acquired network of familiarity that spans across people
and places. Familiarity is a form of solidarity that can only emerge from being and doing, as it is a
belonging that is associative – with people, with places and with senses. But while familiarity has much
to do with how one becomes accustomed, it can both curtail and expand social curiosity. A core
challenge, then, is how individuals become conversant in more than one familiarity, in more than one
local world. In the recognition of the ordinary, I emphasize the integral social and economic roles of the
city street in the urban margins. The mercantile and cultural practices refined on the street make for
forms of solidarity that attend to basic needs on the one hand and to refined sensibilities on the other.
These forms of solidarity are both accessed through exchange, as they are modes of belonging that are
reciprocal: to recognise is to ‘see’ with skill, and to respond accordingly is to act with knowledge.”
130
Against the notion of the local as a bounded terrain, “Wallman’s (1984)and Back’s (1996) research
reveals to us a local that is a collection of familiar reference points and networks that individuals carry
with them as they move about the city, adding to and editing their spheres of intimate knowledge of
people and places.”
“There is no ‘local’ rather thaere is a laywering and palimpsest of a multitude of ‘locals’. I emphasize this
point, as it is particularly crucial in the context of multicultural cities, to rethink the local form, the
variability of the aggregations of locals who inhabit any single urban area in any one moment. The local
is a tangible place for the convergence of a multitude of histories, trajectories and expressions, made
more dense and more layered in cities like London, by the historic processes of empire building and
colonisation, and by the speed, scale and diversity of immigration since the 1980s.”
130-131
“By drawing on the rhythm of the street and small shop interiors, I argue that it is within local routines
and ordinary spaces that our knowledge and understanding of different people is tested and negotiated.
The idea of prosaic publics adds to Amin’s idea of micro-publics in order to incorporate the more banal
aspects of daily contact. The local thereby can be understood as small zones or spheres of familiarity
and intimacy, starting with homes and connecting to streets, work places, schools, religious spaces and
so on. However, propinquity is not necessarily only about physical nearness, but expands to include a
perceptual closeness.” [Sure, but firstly, negotiating with others in this book has revealed that they are
accepted as individuals, not categorically, or as former others. Moreover, the scope and impetus behind
this negotiation varies widely, with it being most strongly pursued by those with the economic incentive
– some shop owners – to do so. It is arguable that the attentiveness of café regulars to the timings and
behaviours of others has more to do with an introverted self/group constitution (claiming space and
place for me and mine) than it has to do with the sort of acceptance and positive incorporation of others
that the proprietor engages in – indeed these attentive gestures are also rituals of difference.]
132
“Because the everyday life of local worlds is essentially constituted through small increments of
individual practices – a daily routine, a conversation, a sign above a shop front, a space in a caff the size
of a table – local worlds require larger frameworks of organisation in order to connect to systems of
influence or power. The fragility or resilience of local worlds to adapt to change is dependent on a
hierarchy of practices and institutions both inside and outside of local life… The loss of collective assets,
institutions and organisations from local places where individuals and groups can regularly assert
opinion and register views therefore symbolises an erosion of the political significance of local life.”