Envisioning place: urban sociabilities within time, space and multiscalar power

Abstract

This special issue focuses on ‘ways of seeing’ the city and raise questions about current dominant epistemological frameworks for understanding the urban-based sociabilities of people whom policy-makers and researchers frequently speak about as foreign, diverse and requiring integration. Read together, the articles contribute to an emerging relational social science by approaching urban sociabilities through four interrelated parameters: (1) a concept of place-making situated within trajectories of differential and multiscalar power; (2) a discursive analysis of narratives and silences, including those about diversity and cultural difference, formulated by actors within different scales of power; (3) an analysis of how different temporalities make visible or invisible the presence, agency and interconnection of various actors engaged in city-making; and (4) a re-engagement with the notion of ‘the social’, so that diversity, variation, mobility and conflict are seen as aspects of all urban social life, and not exclusively an attribute of ‘the other’.

Keywords:

• sociabilities
• cities
• power
• cosmopolitanism
• social cohesion
• history