2024/12/16 by Sverre Bjerkeset · 7 citations
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Architecture #Corporate governance #Documentation #Economics #Economy #Engineering #Ethnography #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #Everyday life #Geography #Law #Management #Place Attachment and Urban Studies #Political science #Public relations #Public space #Reading (process) #Sociology #Space (punctuation) #Urban Design and Spatial Analysis #Urban studies #Urbanism #Urbanity
paper · doi:10.1177/00420980241295974
published in Urban Studies 62(8), 1601-1629 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2024/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Chance interaction among diverse strangers is a much-celebrated feature of urbanity. The rise in privately owned and managed public spaces, tending to displace people, activities and exchanges that may threaten business interests, has thus raised broad concerns. However, how such ‘new’, high-profile public spaces of the neoliberal or entrepreneurial city differ from ‘traditional’, everyday ones in terms of spontaneous encounters, is not well covered in the ever-growing public space research. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, Norway, this article explores the occurrence of peaceful chance interactions among strangers in ‘new’ public space. In the two examined urban squares, representing ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ public space, strangers interact on a regularised versus an episodic basis, reflecting major differences in ‘contact-supporting circumstances’. A close reading of the pertinent scholarly literature indicates that these findings have a broader significance. The article’s key contribution is the detailed documentation and conceptualisation of basic circumstances that distinguish a ‘new’ from an ordinary, everyday public space with regards to chance interactions. Herein, the study points to an important shift in urban governance and planning since the 1980s. A market-led notion of attractiveness in the physical and social environment takes centre stage in prestigious urban developments, at the expense of the disordered exchanges of everyday life.