Identities

Global Studies in Culture and Power

ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

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: urban
sociabilities 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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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2016

Vol. 23, No. 1, 116, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2015.1016524

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

By focusing on the question of ways of seeing (Berger 1972) the city and its
sociabilities, this special issue raises questions about what is left unseen or
unrepresented in current political and academic discourses about diversity, difference and urban places. Building on Bergers and Walter Benjamins (1968)
critical aesthetics and their contention that what we see is a reflection of what we
think we know within particular historical circumstances, this special issue
queries the epistemological frameworks with which many scholars and policymakers approach the urban-based sociabilities of people whom they speak about
as foreign, diverse, and requiring integration.
The issue focuses on how urban neighbourhoods and cities are conceptualised
and experienced by offering alternative forms of sighting in the sense of both
how we see and how we understand a particular place. Alternative ways of
envisioning urban life proposed here build on work being done in several
different fields, including geography (Massey 2005), urban studies (Knkel and
Mayer 2011) and cosmopolitan studies (Binnie et al. 2006). The goal is to think
again about urban sociabilities, which recently have been approached through the
perspectives of diversity, superdiversity and inter-ethnic relations.

2015 Taylor & Francis

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N. Glick Schiller and G. Schmidt

An increasing numbers of scholars have turned to research on urban neighbourhood diversities, acknowledging a wider range of similarities and differences between and within groups than conceptual predecessors such as ethnicity
and 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 neighbourhoods
has emerged (Wessendorf 2013). The new literature constitutes a critique of the
contention made by prominent social scientists and political leaders that
migrants cultural and religious diversity poses a threat to the social cohesion
and welfare of host nation states. This anti-immigrant narrative, which construes ethnic and religious diversity as a threat to social order, has for a long time
been legitimated by the popularisation of research apparently finding that residents 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 clearly
defined concepts (Faist 2009; Farrell and Lee 2011; Olwig 2013). What has
been less commonly noted is that even scholars seeking to combat fears of
diversity portray difference as a central aspect of everyday life. Through concepts
of super-diversity (Vertovec 2007), localised forms of diversity (Berg and
Sigona 2013, 348), living with difference (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014) and
everyday multiculturalism (Wise and Velayutham 2009) continue to scholars
emphasise the primary role of categories of diversity in structuring social relationships, a perspective that this special issue scrutinises and in many cases
contests. 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, religious
or other forms of boundaries of difference.
By focusing primarily on social relations that are of importance because they
bridge difference, scholars of urban convivialities reinforce narratives that place
the threat to social cohesion within the presence of diversity. When researchers
speak of inter-ethnic relations, interculturality or contact situations, even if their
concern is the sociability of everyday urban life, they reinforce ethno-religious
boundaries as a determinant of social interaction, as well as the idea that there
exists an urban and national mainstream culture that is both homogeneous and
not marked by histories of mobility.
In contrast, this special issue does not replace the ethnic lens (Glick Schiller,
aglar, and Guldbrandsen 2006) that predominates in studies of migration and
border studies with a broadened definition of diversity. Instead, the focus on
contemporary diversity and superdiversity as an aspect of contemporary urban
life is scrutinised in terms of the aspects of city-making, both past and present
that this focus leaves unexplored. In addition to historicising when and where city
residents experience diversity as normal or problematic (Schmidt, this volume),
Seeing Place and Power pays attention to developing ways of perceiving social
relationships 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 of

how residents forge cohesive social relations around commonalities rather than
difference (Glick Schiller and alar, Frykman, Jensen). By focusing on urban
sociabilities beyond the ethnic lens, Elena Barabantseva is able to note that
Chinese organisations in Manchester, UK, which expanded beyond Chinatown,
began to provide services on the basis of the needs and interests of neighbourhood residents, rather than on categories of difference.
In short, Seeing Place and Power takes steps towards viewing urban social
cohesion in a way that sets aside the diversity debates. Cohesion emerges not as
the outcome of bridging difference but as a constant part of the dialectic between
order and disorder, as well as creativity and conflict, across the spaces and places
that 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 of
cities, but at the same time, they were perplexed about questions of difference,
seeing migration and cultural difference as problematic. In contrast, more recent
urbanists such as Lefebvre (1996, [1974] 1991) have argued for the normality
and political potential of the urban as poly-central and as conflictual in class
terms. As exemplified by the articles in this special issue, messiness, polycentrality and thrown-togetherness (Massey 2005) are aspects of urban social
life, but not ones that constitute a counter to modes of social cohesion based on
an array of forms of relationality (see Schmidt, this issue). The analysis moves
away from a concept of mixity (Grillo 2005, 37) because the socialities that
each author describes are not built around the otherness of another but around
some domain of common interest, aspiration and place that are part of citymaking. Building on theories of relationality and methodologies that trace social
connections, the contributors to this special issue see urban social life not as the
integration of the other, but as the ongoing production of daily sociabilities that,
while constituted by people of diverse backgrounds, cannot be explicated in
terms of difference (Anthias 2012). Contributors focus on the ways past and
present constructions of categories of difference, such as migrants, strangers,
foreigners and otherness, have obscured the daily social engagements that link as
well as divide those categorised as native and those seen as diverse.
When read together, the articles in this special issue offer a set of alternative
forms of sighting by examining the sociabilities that are formed and enacted in
cities in terms of 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, which are formulated by actors within different relative scales of
power; (3) an analysis of how different temporalities make visible or invisible
the presence, agency and interconnection of the various actors engaged in making
a city and its places; and (4) a re-engagement with the notion of the social, so
that diversity, variation, mobility and conflict are part of all urban social life and
not exclusively an attribute of those categorised as the other. In so doing, the
articles build on the analytical framework developed by Glick Schiller and alar

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N. Glick Schiller and G. Schmidt

(2011a, forthcoming) and contribute to an emerging relational sociology. They

move beyond the concepts of banal sociability (Schultz and Breiger 2010, 618),
convivial culture (Gilroy 2004) or everyday life (de Certeau 1988) to address
the specificities of agency and structure within time and place.
Methodologically, contributors reflexively deploy ethnography and historical
analysis to highlight who constitutes the city and the everyday sociabilities of
city-making in a range of urban settings. Deploying a critical reading of much of
the scholarship of immigrant neighbourhoods and communities and building on
studies of the globe-spanning neoliberal restructuring of urban space (Smith
2002; Brenner and Theodore 2002), several contributors (Barabantseva,
Frykmann, Glick Schiller and alar, Sandberg) make it clear that ordinary
sociabilities and the city-making to which they contribute are continually being
refigured by multiscalar networks and structures of unequal power. Through the
course of these reconfigurations, urban spaces are constantly remade and reimagined as places, seen through the unmarked diversities of the dominant and
visualised diversities of those who are less powerful.
In providing methodologies and historical and ethnographic data about the
paradoxical ways in which the residents of a city and its districts respond and
contribute to the conditions of urban development and regeneration as well as
differing in the ways in which they are represented in such processes this
special issue also contributes to the literature on the cultural production of the
city and of city-makers (King 1996). A sizeable multidisciplinary body of
literature has been concerned with the city as text (Duncan 1990) or the multiple metaphors through which cities can be seen (Lowe 1999). When read
together, the articles in this issue illustrate the ongoing relationships and contradictions that emerge from the restructuring of urban economies and modes of
governance as they intersect with changing representations of a city and its
various neighbourhoods. They also draw attention to the ways in which and
the places through which the residents of a city relate to each other and
understand and culturally construct the nature of their sociabilities, identities
and connections to localities.
1. Place-making within trajectories of differential power
A multiscalar analysis of differential power begins with the assumption that all
places are constituted through the intersections of, and contestations between,
institutions and actors situated within different scales of economic, political and
cultural power, including the global, regional, nation state, subnational, urban and
local. Critical geographers of the neo-liberal transformations of contemporary
urban life have approached place and city-making as social processes of interconnection within hierarchical structures of power (Brenner and Theodore 2002;
Massey 2005; Harvey 2006). They note that in the past few decades, cities have
been constructed within processes of the global accumulation and destruction of
capital, 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 were
advised by regeneration experts to develop local economies based on hi-tech,
creative knowledge industries and financial services. In response, city leaderships and urban developers have competed globally for flows of capital, corporate 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 and
the restructuring of specific places, this literature explores how the privatisation
of services and public places, the reduction in public services, the withdrawal of
the central state from funding city-based services and programs and the rebuilding of city centres and neighbourhoods have served to revalue land and increase
disparities of wealth and power in specific places (Brenner and Theodore 2002;
Harvey 2006).
Within this understanding of urban restructuring, urbanists have examined the
dynamics of inequalities, solidarities and contestations in specific various urban
places (Susser 2014; Knkel and Mayer 2011; Bodnr 2001). With some exceptions (Glick Schiller and alar 2011b; Schmoll and Semi 2013, Cadge et al.
2010), those engaged in either describing or critiquing urban regeneration processes and their outcomes around the globe have said little about migration and
migrants, despite the fact that cities have always been constituted through
translocal and transnational processes in which migration plays a pivotal role
(Sassen 2008). At the same time, research on urban regeneration and transnational migration does not draw on the insights of borderland researchers who
speak about the dynamics of unequal power and the multivalent identities that are
emerging within border regions (Jensen and Lfving 2008). Only a few scholars
have highlighted the way in which urban places are made and transformed by the
people who migrate, settle and form domains of commonality with longer term
residents 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 impoverished
neighbourhoods where poor migrants may initially cluster or neighbourhoods or
social housing characterised as multiethnic. It is these urban places that have
become the focus of studies of diversity and interethnic relations. The articles in
this special issue argue for a need to address more specifically the nature of
place-making beyond the assumptions that migrants social lives are confined
within ethnically defined neighbourhoods and that a diversity of backgrounds
constrains urban social life and development. Left unexamined are other kinds of
sociabilities enacted within these migrant-dense neighbourhoods and within other
urban places, including the plazas, factories and institutional settings to which
mobile people from various class backgrounds and statuses contribute their
sociabilities. Yet these unexplored social processes are part of the social life of
urban places as they are remade within multiscalar networks of power.
Scholars who have been most aware of the relationship between migrants and
urban revitalisation have primarily stressed the role of migrants in providing low-

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N. Glick Schiller and G. Schmidt

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 of
tourists and tourist industries in transforming urban localities, have only recently
begun to be acknowledged as an aspect of mobile peoples relationships to cities,
urban generation and place-making (Brettell 2011; Goode 2011). Another body
of research about mobile people and urban life has focused on the roles played by
entrepreneurs of migrant background. However, most researchers have seen
migrant business peoples relationships to cities through an ethnic lens, relegating
migrant entrepreneurs to the domain of ethnic businesses and seeing them as
contributing to ethnic enclavement (Kitching, Smallbone, and Athayde 2009).
Only a few scholars (Pessar 1995; Pcoud 2000; Rath and Kloosterman 2000;
Schmoll and Semi 2013, 385) have noted the role of immigrant business people
in transforming the organisation and landscape of a city and linked their success
to the differential and changing opportunity structures of cities. As Binnie et al.
(2006) have noted, researchers who describe city branding and marketing have
tended to approach the topic of urban diversity through an assessment of whether
migrants contribute ethnic colour to a type of cosmopolitan urbanism that is
attractive to tourists and the creative classes.
In Seeing Place and Power, contributors bring together the dynamics of the
multiscalar trajectories of unequal power within city-making processes and
insights emerging from recent scholarly descriptions of neoliberal urban regeneration. Collectively, the articles address the restructuring of place, borderlands
and place-based identities by critically scrutinising the relevance of native/foreign
binaries, as well as by offering innovative perspectives that approach the diverse
nature of place-making processes. As Glick Schiller and alar, Frykman and
Sandberg 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 empowered
actor within various and diverse forms of place-making. To speak of the city as
an entry point is to recognise that a city is a product of both (1) the ways in which
its residents actively construct its institutions, neighbourhoods, political economy
and daily life; and (2) the citys positioning in larger global networks, within
which it is physically, economically and culturally restructured and marketed.
This approach entails a dynamic view of space showing how it is socially made
into identified places.
In her article, Maja Frykman examines the relationship between the efforts of
city leaderships to position Malm, a former industrial city and port in southern
Sweden, as an international centre of knowledge, cosmopolitan culture and
openness. Frykman shows how these efforts rebuild and reposition the city and
its districts, not through the lens of ethnicity but through the perspective of a
neighbourhood, creating a sense of commonalities. Mllevngen, a neighbourhood with a large concentration of both internal and international migrants, as
well as young people, responds to the municipalitys regeneration efforts through
political struggle.

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Marie Sandberg weaves together a description of the dialectic between urban

rebranding, the regeneration of specific urban places and the recent literature on
borders and borderlands. She does this by tracking the simultaneity of emerging
sociabilities of an urban place to which those who cross borders contribute and
the persistence of hierarchies of national difference, despite narratives and practices of urban cosmopolitanism. Sandberg calls our attention to urban leaderships
on the GermanPolish border who respond to globe circulating narratives about
urban regeneration by targeting the young as threatening their project and
requiring integration, while the young themselves constitute places and relationalities from different readings of restructured places. Both sets of actors are
engaged in place-making activities that come to life within interrelated locally
situated processes.
Urban restructuring also figures within Glick Schiller and alars insights
into the places and dynamics within which migrants contribute to the social life
of a city. Drawing on her ethnography of Manchester, New Hampshire, USA,
Glick Schiller and alar track the intertwining of the continuing disempowerment of the city and the emergence of sociabilities based on domains of commonality that develop between newly arrived migrants and local people. These
sociabilities were not configured by neighbourhood differences but forged
through co-residence, common workplaces or institutional sites.
The impact of different trajectories of unequal power is visible across the
articles in this special issue. Elena Barabantseva, for example, emphasises the
ways in which differential trajectories of mobility and power can project an
essentialised and homogenous image of a neighbourhood, despite the fact that
the 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 silences
about who makes and belongs in a city and its urban spaces as these are
formulated by actors within these different relative scales of power. By scrutinising and highlighting narrative silences in and across time and space, researchers
are better able to see who has made and continues to constitute cities and their
urban spaces, including which local actors are presented as important within
powerful 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 and
the ways in which categories of difference and concepts of diversity exclude
people from consideration as city-makers and agents of restructuring and rearticulating a city.
In thinking about what public narratives direct us to see about places and their
residents, it is useful to discuss together the two articles about Copenhagen. They
remind us that, despite intensifying national anti-immigrant narratives which in
both Denmark and other nation states are being accompanied by calls for the

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N. Glick Schiller and G. Schmidt

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. She
outlines the official discourse about a poor multiethnic neighbourhood in
Copenhagen, the discourse about ethnic and religious difference produced by
residents of that neighbourhood when surveyed or interviewed in order to underscore that daily sociabilities of residents of a housing estate in Copenhagen are
not reflected in any of these conversations. Those in the housing estate encountered city narratives that spoke of their neighbourhood as a place of crime,
violence and the need for integration. Jensen demonstrates that, when interviewed
or surveyed, residents reflect these narratives and have no conceptual space or
narrative in which to talk about their daily relations of neighbourly trust, which
constituted a form of lived social cohesion. The residents tended to reproduce
vernacular discourses on integration that appeared self-contradictory and confusing. Yet, their performance of daily social relationships stood opposed to making
the integration of difference a political concern and one that may have harmful
effects on neighbourhood relations. Schmidt shows that local urban narratives of
difference are not new by examining past and contemporary discourses about
who lives in Nrrebro. Currently, narratives about Nrrebro highlight crime and
religious diversity as differences that are problematic for integration and social
cohesion, while remaining silent about local sociabilities.
In her article, Barabantseva explores tensions and competing narratives over
the nature of Manchesters Chinatown and the roles that people of Chinese
background have and continue to play in the regeneration of the city. For
Chinese merchants, a narrative of Chinese difference may continue to help
them market to broader populations and form a basis for the revitalisation of
their neighbourhood. However, the narrative of difference masks and impedes the
city-making activities of multiple actors and conceals the links between contemporary cultural and economic developments in China and Chinese-originated
organisations that have become parts of Manchesters 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 as
contributing to Manchesters sociability and social cohesion because these narratives cannot encompass their simultaneous difference and sameness.
As Maja Frykman demonstrates for Malm, the city leaderships regeneration
narrative approaches migrants as providing the city with ethnic culture and a
multicultural ambience. This diversity discourse renders invisible the activism
taking place in Mllevngen, in which thousands of people have come together in
struggles for social justice, aspirations for humanity as a locally situated cosmopolitanism. These aspirations, which specifically counter city developers efforts
to gentrify the neighbourhood, have been made public through past festivals and
current net-based activism (see Salzbrunn 2011 for a parallel struggle in Paris).
Organisations and activists in Mllevngen are producing a narrative that

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specifically counters multiculturalism without denying the multiple heritages of

the neighbourhoods residents.
As Glick Schiller and alar note in their article in this issue, city narratives
that brand a city as migrant-friendly may set the stage for relationalities that bring
newcomers and long-term residents together to build sociabilities. However, city
narratives do not constitute social support. Instead, in restructuring resource poor
cities and their various urban space natives and migrants may come together on
the basis of their mutual experience of displacement. In various spaces of these
cities they may forge natives and migrants come together to forge domains of
commonality that are not seen or celebrated in the citys narrative.
Through an examination of the narrative constructed by the twin cities of
Grlitz (Germany) and Zgorzelec (Poland) in the period immediately preceding
the expansion of the EU to include Poland, Marie Sandberg examines the
tensions between the two cities joint narrative of openness and differentiations
in built space that reflected the differential global positioning of German and
Poland. While the twin cities offered social programmes to integrate their
alienated young people better, the narratives of these programmes failed to
acknowledge the barriers that the young, especially young Poles, faced in finding
ways of fulfilling their aspirations and desires for respect, even as they jointly
used public spaces in Grlitz.
3. Emplacing in time
The contributors to this special issue re-envision city-making and the spatial
dimensions of sociabilities varying notions of time. These various notions of
time include (1) historical time, (2) categorical time and (3) nation time. Often
narratives of the city or national narratives treat some populations as capable of
historical change while defining others as living outside of time. This difference
is often racialised or ethnicised, so migrants are not only cast as culturally
different but unchanging, bringing with them the stasis of tradition and custom.
They exist separated into timelessness, an achronicity that situates them outside
the historical and contemporary development of the city (alar 2013). By
situating migrants and the neighbourhoods in which they are said to congregate
as unchanging and outside the contemporary development of the city, city leaders
and developers justify policies of urban displacement and gentrification.
Yet co-existing with this situating of migrants as fixed within a timeless
tradition and incapable of becoming modern subjects, nation state-building narratives also generate a concept of what Bhabha (1990) called nation time. This
concept of time projects a static imaginary of unchanging homogenous national
space that must be kept apart from the diversity of those from elsewhere. It is by
conjuring up nation time that many contemporary discussions of diversity in
todays cities can be conducted completely without or with only a superficial
consideration of history. Inadequate ways of envisioning the past not only creates
particular ways of seeing the present but also shapes the particular optic with which

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N. Glick Schiller and G. Schmidt

we remember or forget the past (Connerton 2009), including the contribution that
migrants have made to national and urban contexts throughout history. Urban, labour
and migrant history, as well as contemporary migration and urban studies, often
stand as different disciplines that on their own inadequately speak of the historical
role of migrants as city-makers and the transnationality of cities (Glick Schiller 2014;
Feldman-Bianco 2011; Schmidt 2012, 2015). Taking the historical context of the
contribution of migrants seriously implies the development of sensitivities to changing power structures and perceptions of categories of difference.
Both Sandberg and Schmidt explore the intersection of historical change and
urban places. Sandberg investigates how local youth map urban space in the
borderland of the twin cities within the knowledge that borders are continuously
made and unmade, done and undone, bridged and re-instantiated. In her
approach to Nrrebro, Schmidt uses both historical and ethnographic data to
demonstrate that ethnic and religious diversity has for more than a century been
vital to this neighbourhood. However, these forms of diversity have been only
some of several variables from which residents created their loyalties, activism
and relationships and built their identities and their neighbourhood.
The spectre of nation time haunts Jensens description of the contradiction
between what residents in the Green Park neighbourhood of Copenhagen say
about relations between ethnic Danes and people of migrant background and
how they actually socialise. The dominance of the national narrative, with its
insistence on the unchanging nature of national culture, leaves no way for
residents to express the changing ways in which they live their lives, or the
forms of daily sociabilities that emerge from their neighbouring.
Barabantsevas analysis of how we see place invokes all three concepts of
time (historical, categorical, nation time). These concepts of time proves central
to understanding what urban developers and city planners in Manchester, UK, see
and 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 a
project that situated the neighbourhood and its population within a timeless
representation of China. This achronic essentialism does not reflects the multiple
identities of the migrants who built it, the multiple national backgrounds of the
businesses that now thrive in this neighbourhood or the life trajectories of
Chinese background who live, work or socialise in many other neighbourhoods
in Manchester. At the same time, the categorical achronicity in which Chinatown
persists 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 special
issue raise the broader question of the nature of the social as it is constituted

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11

within the processes of making and remaking cities. Seeing Places allows
researchers and various publics to see and study the ways in which social life
coheres in a world that by definition has been and continues to be diverse and
mobile. The challenge is twofold: first, to work with a concept of the social that is
about the simultaneity of unities and diversities, relationalities and inequalities;
and second, to do justice to the complexities of urban sociabilities in ways that
illustrate how local actors respond to, reconstitute and participate in the broader
structural processes of urban, national and global restructurings. It is through this
re-envisioning of the social the relationships between urban sociabilities and
larger structural transformations, with their heightened and contested inequalities
and differentiations that new approaches to questions of diversity and social
cohesion can be found.
Some scholars have initiated this query by examining the outcomes of
displacements structured by accumulation through dispossession (Harvey
2004). 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 to
multiple displacements, emplacements and emergent socialities. She stressed that
diasporic space is a conceptual category that is inhabited not only by those
who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as native to the nation-state (Anthias 2012; Valluvan
2015). Displacements, in whatever form they take, may facilitate connections to
other vulnerable people, or rage against them. The question still therefore
remains: what conditions and places engender sociabilities productive of domains
of mutual understanding and sensibilities? And if and when such commonalities
are forged, what understandings, aspirations and politics emerge?
In deploying terms such as convivialities (Gilroy 2004) and cosmopolitanism, researchers have noted the simultaneity of continuing ethnic, religious or
class difference and the forging of domains of mutuality (Back 1996; Keith 2005;
Amin 2010). To identify the significance of simultaneous difference and commonality, some researchers use a range of modifiers of the term cosmopolitanism, including diasporic (Sinatti 2006; Glick Schiller 2015), rooted (Appiah
2006) and subaltern (Featherstone 2013.)
This concern is underlined by Frykman and Glick Schiller and alar in their
contributions to this volume. Glick Schiller and alar distinguish between
socialities a term that encompasses networks of all social relations from
sociabilities. Sociabilities can be defined as social relations that provide pleasure, satisfaction and meaning by giving actors a sense of being human. Such
interactions 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 brings
into focus contested trajectories of connection and differential power and helps to
avoid the reifying effect of collectivities as analytical units. Moreover, a cosmopolitan lens allows researchers to examine the dialectics between the material

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N. Glick Schiller and G. Schmidt

place that facilitates interactions . . . and the social space that is created in the
course of those interactions, which may contain local, transnational and global
connections simultaneously (this volume).
For Jensen, interactions between neighbours are informed by the relational
dilemmas 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 personal
privacy. Jensens ethnography of neighbouring is not about cultural contact but
about the social ties that people form through living together, disregarding
through their actions what discourses of national difference would be defined
as group or community boundaries.
The sociabilities of emplacement described by both Jensen and Glick
Schiller and alar in this volume, although constituting what social capital
researchers describe as weak ties, prove to be significant for the everyday lives
of people of both migrant and non-migrant backgrounds. Jensens contribution is
particularly thought-provoking from both a methodological and an empirical
point of view because the sociabilities that become visible through participant
observation would remain unmarked and unvoiced in the type of survey research
and public opinion polls, cited by Putnam, that are so often used in public debates
about diversity and social cohesion.
5. Conclusion
As Henri Lefebvre has noted, the right to the city cannot be conceived of as a
simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated
as a transformed and renewed right to urban life (Lefebvre 1996, 158).
Lefebvres essay, which can be read as much as a call for political action as a
description, highlights class, urban restructuring, political economy, change and
struggles over the content of city spaces. These elements, which are central to
understanding both urban life (past and present) and the emplacement of those
seen 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 neighbours to transnational networks of migrants and to religious, corporate and
financial actors. In point of fact, the salience, significance and nature of urban
neighbourhoods are matters of empirical investigation and are shaped by differences among cities. Sites of sociability, whether in a neighbourhood, a city centre
or distributed across a city, give us insights into the patterned variations within
which people who are seen as culturally different build affective social relations
that not only allow them to settle in a city but also contribute to the citys social
fabric 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 are
reconstituted 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 time
as urban processes, this special issue provides a perspective on social cohesion
and diversity that looks beyond debates over multiculturalism and integration. It
does not deny ethnicity as a facet of urban social relations but rather situates it
within a larger matrix of situated, practiced, changing attributed and valued
identities among people of migrant background identities that they may and
may not share with their next door neighbour. By highlighting differing and
historically changing urban sociabilities to which people constructed by national
narratives as foreigners contribute, Seeing Place and Power contributes to both
the theorisation and the methodological pathways that will provide alternative
ways of envisioning place-making and urban cosmopolitanism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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NINA GLICK SCHILLER is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at
University of Manchester and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology.
ADDRESS: Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany
Email: 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.