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IdentitiesGlobal Studies in Culture and Power

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

Nina Glick Schiller & Garbi Schmidt

To cite this article: Nina Glick Schiller & Garbi Schmidt (2016) Envisioning place: urbansociabilities within time, space and multiscalar power, Identities, 23:1, 1-16, DOI:10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016524

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016524

Published online: 17 Mar 2015.

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INTRODUCTION

Envisioning place: urban sociabilities within time, space andmultiscalar power

Nina Glick Schiller and Garbi Schmidt

(Received 21 July 2014; final version received 30 January 2015)

This special issue focuses on ‘ways of seeing’ the city and raise questionsabout current dominant epistemological frameworks for understanding theurban-based sociabilities of people whom policy-makers and researchersfrequently speak about as foreign, diverse and requiring integration. Readtogether, the articles contribute to an emerging relational social science byapproaching urban sociabilities through four interrelated parameters: (1) aconcept of place-making situated within trajectories of differential and multi-scalar power; (2) a discursive analysis of narratives and silences, includingthose about diversity and cultural difference, formulated by actors withindifferent scales of power; (3) an analysis of how different temporalities makevisible or invisible the presence, agency and interconnection of various actorsengaged in city-making; and (4) a re-engagement with the notion of ‘thesocial’, so that diversity, variation, mobility and conflict are seen as aspectsof all urban social life, and not exclusively an attribute of ‘the other’.

Keywords: sociabilities; cities; power; cosmopolitanism; social cohesion;history

By focusing on the question of ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972) the city and itssociabilities, this special issue raises questions about what is left unseen orunrepresented in current political and academic discourses about diversity, dif-ference and urban places. Building on Berger’s and Walter Benjamin’s (1968)critical aesthetics and their contention that what we see is a reflection of what wethink we know within particular historical circumstances, this special issuequeries the epistemological frameworks with which many scholars and policy-makers approach the urban-based sociabilities of people whom they speak aboutas foreign, diverse, and requiring integration.

The issue focuses on how urban neighbourhoods and cities are conceptualisedand experienced by offering alternative forms of ‘sighting’ – in the sense of bothhow we see and how we understand a particular place. Alternative ways ofenvisioning urban life proposed here build on work being done in severaldifferent fields, including geography (Massey 2005), urban studies (Künkel andMayer 2011) and cosmopolitan studies (Binnie et al. 2006). The goal is to thinkagain about urban sociabilities, which recently have been approached through theperspectives of diversity, superdiversity and inter-ethnic relations.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2016Vol. 23, No. 1, 1–16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016524

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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An increasing numbers of scholars have turned to research on urban neigh-bourhood diversities, acknowledging a ‘wider range of similarities and differ-ences between and within groups than conceptual predecessors such as ethnicityand race did’ (Berg and Sigona 2013, 348). Similarly, a literature focused on‘everyday’ sociabilities, ‘commonplace diversity’, migration and everyday life(Fox and Jones 2013), and the ‘ethos of mixing’ in multiethnic neighbourhoodshas emerged (Wessendorf 2013). The new literature constitutes a critique of thecontention made by prominent social scientists and political leaders thatmigrants’ cultural and religious diversity poses a threat to the ‘social cohesion’and welfare of ‘host’ nation states. This anti-immigrant narrative, which con-strues ethnic and religious diversity as a threat to social order, has for a long timebeen legitimated by the popularisation of research apparently finding that resi-dents of multiethnic neighbourhoods do not trust each other (Putnam 2007).

In responding to the presumed threat that diversity poses to social cohesion,scholars have noted that neither ‘social cohesion’ nor ‘diversity’ are clearlydefined concepts (Faist 2009; Farrell and Lee 2011; Olwig 2013). What hasbeen less commonly noted is that even scholars seeking to combat fears ofdiversity portray difference as a central aspect of everyday life. Through conceptsof ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec 2007), ‘localised forms of diversity’ (Berg andSigona 2013, 348), ‘living with difference’ (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014) and‘everyday multiculturalism’ (Wise and Velayutham 2009) continue to scholarsemphasise the primary role of categories of diversity in structuring social rela-tionships, a perspective that this special issue scrutinises and in many casescontests. For example, scholars who write of mundane urban convivialities(Nowicka and Vertovec 2014) or of living together in ‘everyday life’(Wessendorf 2013) continue to focus on distinctive group, community, religiousor other forms of boundaries of ‘difference’.

By focusing primarily on social relations that are of importance because theybridge difference, scholars of urban convivialities reinforce narratives that placethe threat to social cohesion within the presence of diversity. When researchersspeak of inter-ethnic relations, interculturality or ‘contact’ situations, even if theirconcern is the sociability of everyday urban life, they reinforce ethno-religiousboundaries as a determinant of social interaction, as well as the idea that thereexists an urban and national mainstream culture that is both homogeneous andnot marked by histories of mobility.

In contrast, this special issue does not replace the ‘ethnic lens’ (Glick Schiller,Çaglar, and Guldbrandsen 2006) that predominates in studies of migration andborder studies with a broadened definition of diversity. Instead, the focus oncontemporary diversity and superdiversity as an aspect of contemporary urbanlife is scrutinised in terms of the aspects of city-making, both past and presentthat this focus leaves unexplored. In addition to historicising when and where cityresidents experience diversity as normal or problematic (Schmidt, this volume),Seeing Place and Power pays attention to developing ways of perceiving socialrelationships other than through categories of difference. Several of the articles

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are built on ethnographic approaches to urban settings that contain descriptions ofhow residents forge cohesive social relations around commonalities rather thandifference (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, Frykman, Jensen). By focusing on urbansociabilities beyond the ethnic lens, Elena Barabantseva is able to note thatChinese organisations in Manchester, UK, which expanded beyond Chinatown,began to provide services on the basis of the needs and interests of neighbour-hood residents, rather than on categories of difference.

In short, Seeing Place and Power takes steps towards viewing urban socialcohesion in a way that sets aside the diversity debates. Cohesion emerges not asthe outcome of bridging difference but as a constant part of the dialectic betweenorder and disorder, as well as creativity and conflict, across the spaces and placesthat people inhabit. Students of urban life, beginning with Simmel ([1903] 2002)and Park ([1925] 1984), have argued that this dialectic is part of the nature ofcities, but at the same time, they were perplexed about questions of difference,seeing migration and cultural difference as problematic. In contrast, more recenturbanists such as Lefebvre (1996, [1974] 1991) have argued for the normalityand political potential of the urban as ‘poly-central’ and as conflictual in classterms. As exemplified by the articles in this special issue, messiness, poly-centrality and ‘thrown-togetherness’ (Massey 2005) are aspects of urban sociallife, but not ones that constitute a counter to modes of social cohesion based onan array of forms of relationality (see Schmidt, this issue). The analysis movesaway from a concept of ‘mixity’ (Grillo 2005, 37) because the socialities thateach author describes are not built around the ‘otherness’ of another but aroundsome domain of common interest, aspiration and place that are part of city-making. Building on theories of relationality and methodologies that trace socialconnections, the contributors to this special issue see urban social life not as theintegration of ‘the other’, but as the ongoing production of daily sociabilities that,while constituted by people of diverse backgrounds, cannot be explicated interms of difference (Anthias 2012). Contributors focus on the ways past andpresent constructions of categories of difference, such as migrants, strangers,foreigners and otherness, have obscured the daily social engagements that link aswell as divide those categorised as ‘native’ and those seen as diverse.

When read together, the articles in this special issue offer a set of alternativeforms of ‘sighting’ by examining the sociabilities that are formed and enacted incities in terms of four interrelated parameters: (1) a concept of place-makingsituated within trajectories of differential and multiscalar power; (2) a discursiveanalysis of narratives and silences, including those about diversity and culturaldifference, which are formulated by actors within different relative scales ofpower; (3) an analysis of how different temporalities make visible or invisiblethe presence, agency and interconnection of the various actors engaged in makinga city and its places; and (4) a re-engagement with the notion of ‘the social’, sothat diversity, variation, mobility and conflict are part of all urban social life andnot exclusively an attribute of those categorised as ‘the other’. In so doing, thearticles build on the analytical framework developed by Glick Schiller and Çağlar

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(2011a, forthcoming) and contribute to an emerging relational sociology. Theymove beyond the concepts of ‘banal sociability’ (Schultz and Breiger 2010, 618),‘convivial culture’ (Gilroy 2004) or ‘everyday life’ (de Certeau 1988) to addressthe specificities of agency and structure within time and place.

Methodologically, contributors reflexively deploy ethnography and historicalanalysis to highlight who constitutes the city and the everyday sociabilities ofcity-making in a range of urban settings. Deploying a critical reading of much ofthe scholarship of immigrant neighbourhoods and ‘communities’ and building onstudies of the globe-spanning neoliberal restructuring of urban space (Smith2002; Brenner and Theodore 2002), several contributors (Barabantseva,Frykmann, Glick Schiller and Çağlar, Sandberg) make it clear that ordinarysociabilities and the city-making to which they contribute are continually beingrefigured by multiscalar networks and structures of unequal power. Through thecourse of these reconfigurations, urban spaces are constantly remade and reima-gined as places, seen through the unmarked diversities of the dominant andvisualised diversities of those who are less powerful.

In providing methodologies and historical and ethnographic data about theparadoxical ways in which the residents of a city and its districts respond andcontribute to the conditions of urban development and regeneration – as well asdiffering in the ways in which they are represented in such processes – thisspecial issue also contributes to the literature on the cultural production of thecity and of city-makers (King 1996). A sizeable multidisciplinary body ofliterature has been concerned with ‘the city as text’ (Duncan 1990) or the multi-ple metaphors through which cities can be seen (Lowe 1999). When readtogether, the articles in this issue illustrate the ongoing relationships and contra-dictions that emerge from the restructuring of urban economies and modes ofgovernance as they intersect with changing representations of a city and itsvarious neighbourhoods. They also draw attention to the ways in which – andthe places through which – the residents of a city relate to each other andunderstand and culturally construct the nature of their sociabilities, identitiesand connections to localities.

1. Place-making within trajectories of differential power

A multiscalar analysis of differential power begins with the assumption that allplaces are constituted through the intersections of, and contestations between,institutions and actors situated within different scales of economic, political andcultural power, including the global, regional, nation state, subnational, urban andlocal. Critical geographers of the neo-liberal transformations of contemporaryurban life have approached place and city-making as social processes of inter-connection within hierarchical structures of power (Brenner and Theodore 2002;Massey 2005; Harvey 2006). They note that in the past few decades, cities havebeen constructed within processes of the global accumulation and destruction ofcapital, with urban life marked by the construction, devaluation and revaluation

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of real estate in various localities of the city (Smith 2002). City leaderships wereadvised by regeneration experts to develop local economies based on hi-tech,creative ‘knowledge’ industries and financial services. In response, city leader-ships and urban developers have competed globally for flows of capital, corpo-rate offices and professionals categorised as global talent or ‘the creative classes’because of their ‘new economy’ skills (Woods and Landry 2008). Highlighting‘actual existing neo-liberalism’ as it materialised through governance policies andthe restructuring of specific places, this literature explores how the privatisationof services and public places, the reduction in public services, the withdrawal ofthe central state from funding city-based services and programs and the rebuild-ing of city centres and neighbourhoods have served to revalue land and increasedisparities of wealth and power in specific places (Brenner and Theodore 2002;Harvey 2006).

Within this understanding of urban restructuring, urbanists have examined thedynamics of inequalities, solidarities and contestations in specific various urbanplaces (Susser 2014; Künkel and Mayer 2011; Bodnár 2001). With some excep-tions (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2011b; Schmoll and Semi 2013, Cadge et al.2010), those engaged in either describing or critiquing urban regeneration pro-cesses and their outcomes around the globe have said little about migration andmigrants, despite the fact that cities have always been constituted throughtranslocal and transnational processes in which migration plays a pivotal role(Sassen 2008). At the same time, research on urban regeneration and transna-tional migration does not draw on the insights of borderland researchers whospeak about the dynamics of unequal power and the multivalent identities that areemerging within border regions (Jensen and Löfving 2008). Only a few scholarshave highlighted the way in which urban places are made and transformed by thepeople who migrate, settle and form domains of commonality with longer termresidents or by those who cross borders to utilise regenerated urban spaces(Salzbrunn 2011)

Much of the study of mobile people and cities has focused on impoverishedneighbourhoods where poor migrants may initially cluster or neighbourhoods orsocial housing characterised as ‘multiethnic’. It is these urban places that havebecome the focus of studies of diversity and interethnic relations. The articles inthis special issue argue for a need to address more specifically the nature ofplace-making beyond the assumptions that migrants’ social lives are confinedwithin ethnically defined neighbourhoods and that a diversity of backgroundsconstrains urban social life and development. Left unexamined are other kinds ofsociabilities enacted within these migrant-dense neighbourhoods and within otherurban places, including the plazas, factories and institutional settings to whichmobile people from various class backgrounds and statuses contribute theirsociabilities. Yet these unexplored social processes are part of the social life ofurban places as they are remade within multiscalar networks of power.

Scholars who have been most aware of the relationship between migrants andurban revitalisation have primarily stressed the role of migrants in providing low-

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waged services such as cleaning, restaurant labour and childcare in global cities.Migrants’ recruitment as ‘global talent’ and as students, as well as the role oftourists and tourist industries in transforming urban localities, have only recentlybegun to be acknowledged as an aspect of mobile peoples’ relationships to cities,urban generation and place-making (Brettell 2011; Goode 2011). Another bodyof research about mobile people and urban life has focused on the roles played byentrepreneurs of migrant background. However, most researchers have seenmigrant business people’s relationships to cities through an ethnic lens, relegatingmigrant entrepreneurs to the domain of ‘ethnic businesses’ and seeing them ascontributing to ethnic enclavement (Kitching, Smallbone, and Athayde 2009).Only a few scholars (Pessar 1995; Pécoud 2000; Rath and Kloosterman 2000;Schmoll and Semi 2013, 385) have noted the role of immigrant business peoplein ‘transforming the organisation and landscape’ of a city and linked their successto the differential and changing opportunity structures of cities. As Binnie et al.(2006) have noted, researchers who describe city branding and marketing havetended to approach the topic of urban diversity through an assessment of whethermigrants contribute ethnic colour to a type of ‘cosmopolitan urbanism’ that isattractive to tourists and the creative classes.

In Seeing Place and Power, contributors bring together the dynamics of themultiscalar trajectories of unequal power within city-making processes andinsights emerging from recent scholarly descriptions of neoliberal urban regen-eration. Collectively, the articles address the restructuring of place, borderlandsand place-based identities by critically scrutinising the relevance of native/foreignbinaries, as well as by offering innovative perspectives that approach the diversenature of place-making processes. As Glick Schiller and Çağlar, Frykman andSandberg stress in their articles, a city can be an entry point for such enquiries,but only if it is understood not as a bounded unit but as a named and empoweredactor within various and diverse forms of place-making. To speak of the city asan entry point is to recognise that a city is a product of both (1) the ways in whichits residents actively construct its institutions, neighbourhoods, political economyand daily life; and (2) the city’s positioning in larger global networks, withinwhich it is physically, economically and culturally restructured and marketed.This approach entails a dynamic view of space showing how it is socially madeinto identified places.

In her article, Maja Frykman examines the relationship between the efforts ofcity leaderships to position Malmö, a former industrial city and port in southernSweden, as an international centre of knowledge, cosmopolitan culture andopenness. Frykman shows how these efforts rebuild and reposition the city andits districts, not through the lens of ethnicity but through the perspective of aneighbourhood, creating a sense of commonalities. Möllevången, a neighbour-hood with a large concentration of both internal and international migrants, aswell as young people, responds to the municipality’s regeneration efforts throughpolitical struggle.

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Marie Sandberg weaves together a description of the dialectic between urbanrebranding, the regeneration of specific urban places and the recent literature onborders and borderlands. She does this by tracking the simultaneity of emergingsociabilities of an urban place to which those who cross borders contribute andthe persistence of hierarchies of national difference, despite narratives and prac-tices of urban cosmopolitanism. Sandberg calls our attention to urban leadershipson the German–Polish border who respond to globe circulating narratives abouturban regeneration by targeting the young as threatening their project andrequiring integration, while the young themselves constitute places and relation-alities from different readings of restructured places. Both sets of actors areengaged in place-making activities that come to life within interrelated locallysituated processes.

Urban restructuring also figures within Glick Schiller and Çağlar’s insightsinto the places and dynamics within which migrants contribute to the social lifeof a city. Drawing on her ethnography of Manchester, New Hampshire, USA,Glick Schiller and Çağlar track the intertwining of the continuing disempower-ment of the city and the emergence of sociabilities based on domains of com-monality that develop between newly arrived migrants and local people. Thesesociabilities were not configured by neighbourhood differences but forgedthrough co-residence, common workplaces or institutional sites.

The impact of different trajectories of unequal power is visible across thearticles in this special issue. Elena Barabantseva, for example, emphasises theways in which differential trajectories of mobility and power can project anessentialised and homogenous image of a neighbourhood, despite the fact thatthe migrants who build it, as well as those who live, work or socialise there now,have multiple identities.

2. Narratives of belonging: discursive multiscalar analysis

Seeing Places explores both the contending narratives and the narrative silencesabout who makes and belongs in a city and its urban spaces as these areformulated by actors within these different relative scales of power. By scrutinis-ing and highlighting narrative silences in and across time and space, researchersare better able to see who has made and continues to constitute cities and theirurban spaces, including which local actors are presented as important withinpowerful discourses forged by the city and the nation state and which are not.Contributors to this special issue explore both daily practices of city-making andthe ways in which categories of difference and concepts of diversity excludepeople from consideration as city-makers and agents of restructuring and rear-ticulating a city.

In thinking about what public narratives direct us to see about places and theirresidents, it is useful to discuss together the two articles about Copenhagen. Theyremind us that, despite intensifying national anti-immigrant narratives – which inboth Denmark and other nation states are being accompanied by calls for the

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revitalisation of a homogeneous national culture based on an imagined past –many cities brand themselves globally as centres as of cosmopolitan diversity.Such contradiction underlies the social processes analysed by Tina Jensen. Sheoutlines the official discourse about a poor multiethnic neighbourhood inCopenhagen, the discourse about ethnic and religious difference produced byresidents of that neighbourhood when surveyed or interviewed in order to under-score that daily sociabilities of residents of a housing estate in Copenhagen arenot reflected in any of these conversations. Those in the housing estate encoun-tered city narratives that spoke of their neighbourhood as a place of crime,violence and the need for integration. Jensen demonstrates that, when interviewedor surveyed, residents reflect these narratives and have no conceptual space ornarrative in which to talk about their daily relations of neighbourly trust, whichconstituted a form of lived social cohesion. The residents tended to reproducevernacular discourses on integration that appeared self-contradictory and confus-ing. Yet, their performance of daily social relationships stood opposed to makingthe integration of difference a political concern and one that may have harmfuleffects on neighbourhood relations. Schmidt shows that local urban narratives ofdifference are not new by examining past and contemporary discourses aboutwho lives in Nørrebro. Currently, narratives about Nørrebro highlight crime andreligious diversity as differences that are problematic for integration and socialcohesion, while remaining silent about local sociabilities.

In her article, Barabantseva explores tensions and competing narratives overthe nature of Manchester’s Chinatown and the roles that people of Chinesebackground have and continue to play in the regeneration of the city. ForChinese merchants, a narrative of Chinese difference may continue to helpthem market to broader populations and form a basis for the revitalisation oftheir neighbourhood. However, the narrative of difference masks and impedes thecity-making activities of multiple actors and conceals the links between contem-porary cultural and economic developments in China and Chinese-originatedorganisations that have become parts of Manchester’s multiple neighbourhoods.These organisations offer services to residents as part of the life of the city.However, within larger narratives, these organisations are not understood ascontributing to Manchester’s sociability and social cohesion because these narra-tives cannot encompass their simultaneous difference and sameness.

As Maja Frykman demonstrates for Malmö, the city leadership’s regenerationnarrative approaches migrants as providing the city with ethnic culture and amulticultural ambience. This diversity discourse renders invisible the activismtaking place in Möllevången, in which thousands of people have come together instruggles for social justice, aspirations for humanity as a locally situated cosmo-politanism. These aspirations, which specifically counter city developers’ effortsto gentrify the neighbourhood, have been made public through past festivals andcurrent net-based activism (see Salzbrunn 2011 for a parallel struggle in Paris).Organisations and activists in Möllevången are producing a narrative that

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specifically counters multiculturalism without denying the multiple heritages ofthe neighbourhood’s residents.

As Glick Schiller and Çağlar note in their article in this issue, city narrativesthat brand a city as migrant-friendly may set the stage for relationalities that bringnewcomers and long-term residents together to build sociabilities. However, citynarratives do not constitute social support. Instead, in restructuring resource poorcities and their various urban space natives and migrants may come together onthe basis of their mutual experience of displacement. In various spaces of thesecities they may forge natives and migrants come together to forge domains ofcommonality that are not seen or celebrated in the city’s narrative.

Through an examination of the narrative constructed by the ‘twin cities’ ofGörlitz (Germany) and Zgorzelec (Poland) in the period immediately precedingthe expansion of the EU to include Poland, Marie Sandberg examines thetensions between the two cities’ joint narrative of openness and differentiationsin built space that reflected the differential global positioning of German andPoland. While the twin cities offered social programmes to ‘integrate’ theiralienated young people better, the narratives of these programmes failed toacknowledge the barriers that the young, especially young Poles, faced in findingways of fulfilling their aspirations and desires for respect, even as they jointlyused public spaces in Görlitz.

3. Emplacing in time

The contributors to this special issue re-envision city-making and the spatialdimensions of sociabilities varying notions of time. These various notions oftime include (1) historical time, (2) categorical time and (3) nation time. Oftennarratives of the city or national narratives treat some populations as capable ofhistorical change while defining others as living outside of time. This differenceis often racialised or ethnicised, so migrants are not only cast as culturallydifferent but unchanging, bringing with them the stasis of tradition and custom.They exist separated into timelessness, an achronicity that situates them outsidethe historical and contemporary development of the city (Çağlar 2013). Bysituating migrants and the neighbourhoods in which they are said to congregateas unchanging and outside the contemporary development of the city, city leadersand developers justify policies of urban displacement and gentrification.

Yet co-existing with this situating of migrants as fixed within a timelesstradition and incapable of becoming modern subjects, nation state-building narra-tives also generate a concept of what Bhabha (1990) called ‘nation time’. Thisconcept of time projects a static imaginary of unchanging homogenous nationalspace that must be kept apart from the diversity of those from elsewhere. It is byconjuring up nation time that many contemporary discussions of diversity intoday’s cities can be conducted completely without or with only a superficialconsideration of history. Inadequate ways of envisioning the past not only createsparticular ways of seeing the present but also shapes the particular optic with which

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we remember or forget the past (Connerton 2009), including the contribution thatmigrants have made to national and urban contexts throughout history. Urban, labourand migrant history, as well as contemporary migration and urban studies, oftenstand as different disciplines that on their own inadequately speak of the historicalrole of migrants as city-makers and the transnationality of cities (Glick Schiller 2014;Feldman-Bianco 2011; Schmidt 2012, 2015). Taking the historical context of thecontribution of migrants seriously implies the development of sensitivities to chan-ging power structures and perceptions of categories of difference.

Both Sandberg and Schmidt explore the intersection of historical change andurban places. Sandberg investigates how local youth map urban space in theborderland of the twin cities within the knowledge that ‘borders are continuouslymade and unmade, done and undone, bridged and re-instantiated’. In herapproach to Nørrebro, Schmidt uses both historical and ethnographic data todemonstrate that ethnic and religious diversity has for more than a century beenvital to this neighbourhood. However, these forms of diversity have been onlysome of several variables from which residents created their loyalties, activismand relationships and built their identities and their neighbourhood.

The spectre of ‘nation’ time haunts Jensen’s description of the contradictionbetween what residents in the ‘Green Park’ neighbourhood of Copenhagen sayabout relations between ‘ethnic Danes’ and people of migrant background andhow they actually socialise. The dominance of the national narrative, with itsinsistence on the unchanging nature of national culture, leaves no way forresidents to express the changing ways in which they live their lives, or theforms of daily sociabilities that emerge from their neighbouring.

Barabantseva’s analysis of how we see place invokes all three concepts oftime (historical, categorical, nation time). These concepts of time proves centralto understanding what urban developers and city planners in Manchester, UK, seeand obscure about both Chinatown and the population of Chinese background.As a reflection of a specific historical effort to regenerate the city centre,Chinatown brought Chinese business people and city developers together in aproject that situated the neighbourhood and its population within a timelessrepresentation of China. This achronic essentialism does not reflects the multipleidentities of the migrants who built it, the multiple national backgrounds of thebusinesses that now thrive in this neighbourhood or the life trajectories ofChinese background who live, work or socialise in many other neighbourhoodsin Manchester. At the same time, the categorical achronicity in which Chinatownpersists situates people of Chinese background within a binary of difference,unable to be encompassed by the homogeneity imagined within concepts of‘nation’ time.

4. Re-engagement with the notion of the social within multiscalar power

Rather than exploring sociabilities within diversities, contributors to this specialissue raise the broader question of the nature of the social as it is constituted

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within the processes of making and remaking cities. Seeing Places allowsresearchers and various publics to see and study the ways in which social lifecoheres in a world that by definition has been and continues to be diverse andmobile. The challenge is twofold: first, to work with a concept of the social that isabout the simultaneity of unities and diversities, relationalities and inequalities;and second, to do justice to the complexities of urban sociabilities in ways thatillustrate how local actors respond to, reconstitute and participate in the broaderstructural processes of urban, national and global restructurings. It is through thisre-envisioning of the social – the relationships between urban sociabilities andlarger structural transformations, with their heightened and contested inequalitiesand differentiations – that new approaches to questions of diversity and socialcohesion can be found.

Some scholars have initiated this query by examining the outcomes ofdisplacements structured by ‘accumulation through dispossession’ (Harvey2004). Such displacements engender multiple forms of social relationships,vulnerabilities and precarities. Using the concept of ‘diasporic space’, Brah(1996, 181) has underlined the contingencies of space and their relationship tomultiple displacements, emplacements and emergent socialities. She stressed thatdiasporic space is a conceptual category that ‘is ‘inhabited’ not only by thosewho have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are con-structed and represented as ‘native’ to the nation-state (Anthias 2012; Valluvan2015). Displacements, in whatever form they take, may facilitate connections toother vulnerable people, or rage against them. The question still thereforeremains: what conditions and places engender sociabilities productive of domainsof mutual understanding and sensibilities? And if and when such commonalitiesare forged, what understandings, aspirations and politics emerge?

In deploying terms such as ‘convivialities’ (Gilroy 2004) and cosmopolitan-ism, researchers have noted the simultaneity of continuing ethnic, religious orclass difference and the forging of domains of mutuality (Back 1996; Keith 2005;Amin 2010). To identify the significance of simultaneous difference and com-monality, some researchers use a range of modifiers of the term ‘cosmopolitan-ism’, including diasporic (Sinatti 2006; Glick Schiller 2015), rooted (Appiah2006) and subaltern (Featherstone 2013.)

This concern is underlined by Frykman and Glick Schiller and Çağlar in theircontributions to this volume. Glick Schiller and Çağlar distinguish betweensocialities – a term that encompasses networks of all social relations – fromsociabilities. ‘Sociabilities can be defined as social relations that provide plea-sure, satisfaction and meaning by giving actors a sense of being human. Suchinteractions can be fleeting or persist and develop over time’ (this issue).Building from Glick Schiller (2015), Frykman suggests a ‘cosmopolitan lens’as a way of seeing emplaced sociabilities. Frykman argues that such a lens bringsinto focus contested trajectories of connection and differential power and helps toavoid the reifying effect of collectivities as analytical units. Moreover, a cosmo-politan lens allows researchers to examine ‘the dialectics between the material

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place that facilitates interactions . . . and the social space that is created in thecourse of those interactions, which may contain local, transnational and globalconnections simultaneously’ (this volume).

For Jensen, interactions between neighbours are informed by the relationaldilemmas of sharing space in spheres of interaction configured as civil or public,covering more or less institutionalised practices of consociation, commonality,trust and reciprocity as well as the need for social distance to safeguard personalprivacy. Jensen’s ethnography of neighbouring is not about cultural contact butabout the social ties that people form through living together, disregardingthrough their actions what discourses of national difference would be definedas group or community boundaries.

The ‘sociabilities of emplacement’ described by both Jensen and GlickSchiller and Çağlar in this volume, although constituting what social capitalresearchers describe as weak ties, prove to be significant for the everyday livesof people of both migrant and non-migrant backgrounds. Jensen’s contribution isparticularly thought-provoking from both a methodological and an empiricalpoint of view because the sociabilities that become visible through participantobservation would remain unmarked and unvoiced in the type of survey researchand public opinion polls, cited by Putnam, that are so often used in public debatesabout diversity and social cohesion.

5. Conclusion

As Henri Lefebvre has noted, the ‘right to the city cannot be conceived of as asimple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulatedas a transformed and renewed right to urban life’ (Lefebvre 1996, 158).Lefebvre’s essay, which can be read as much as a call for political action as adescription, highlights class, urban restructuring, political economy, change andstruggles over the content of city spaces. These elements, which are central tounderstanding both urban life (past and present) and the emplacement of thoseseen as foreign, are central to discussions of the restructuring of urban spaces(Harvey 2012). Urban spaces are products of human creativity and encounters,open and embedded in scalar relations linking interactions of next door neigh-bours to transnational networks of migrants and to religious, corporate andfinancial actors. In point of fact, the salience, significance and nature of urbanneighbourhoods are matters of empirical investigation and are shaped by differ-ences among cities. Sites of sociability, whether in a neighbourhood, a city centreor distributed across a city, give us insights into the patterned variations withinwhich people who are seen as culturally different build affective social relationsthat not only allow them to settle in a city but also contribute to the city’s socialfabric and to broader processes of city-making.

Urban places are structured by both local and transnational inequalities,including differential access to political and economic power, even as they arereconstituted by multiple actors, including those seeking to forge sociabilities that

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express their aspirations for social justice. In offering a vision of place and timeas urban processes, this special issue provides a perspective on social cohesionand diversity that looks beyond debates over multiculturalism and integration. Itdoes not deny ethnicity as a facet of urban social relations but rather situates itwithin a larger matrix of situated, practiced, changing attributed and valuedidentities among people of migrant background – identities that they may andmay not share with their next door neighbour. By highlighting differing andhistorically changing urban sociabilities to which people constructed by nationalnarratives as foreigners contribute, Seeing Place and Power contributes to boththe theorisation and the methodological pathways that will provide alternativeways of envisioning place-making and urban cosmopolitanism.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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NINA GLICK SCHILLER is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology atUniversity of Manchester and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for SocialAnthropology.ADDRESS: Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle (Saale), GermanyEmail: schiller@eth.mpg.de

GARBI SCHMIDT is Professor of Intercultural Studies at the University of Roskilde,Denmark.ADDRESS: Department of Culture and Identity, University of Roskilde, Universitetsvej 1,post box 260, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark.Email: garbi@ruc.dk.

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