City dwellers deploy avoidance devices to carve privacy from public space

Evidence

We have been looking at a variety of devices-home territories, urban villages, traveling packs, and body management-which city dwellers use to avoid the world of strangers, to create, as it were, larger or smaller pieces of private or semiprivate space out of the public spaces of their urban environment. It is time now to turn to a contrasting aspect of city life and city behavior-that having to do with adventure. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 923

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

Related

• Urban avoidance and urban adventuring are contrasting behavioral poles of city life (similarity 0.94)
• Urbanites symbolically transform public space into private space to reduce stranger contact (similarity 0.84)
• Modern cities specialize public space and mask citizens’ heterogeneity (similarity 0.84)
• Individual city dwellers blend avoidance with adventuring across time (similarity 0.82)
• Cities mitigate total anonymity through categorical identification of strangers (similarity 0.81)
• Dispersed-village dwellers know streets only as auto corridors to private spaces (similarity 0.80)
• Avoidance devices are combined fluidly and are not tied to fixed social categories (similarity 0.80)
• City dwellers transform public spaces into private home territories to manage urban complexity (similarity 0.80)
• Urban life fundamentally means coping with strangers and anonymity (similarity 0.79)
• The skill urbanites develop for public navigation is deployed defensively to avoid others (similarity 0.79)
• Cities spatially segregate the morally excluded beyond mere containment. (similarity 0.78)
• Avoiding fearfully-labeled city areas costs urbanites movement and home feeling (similarity 0.78)
• Urban avoidance demands sophisticated social skills, an irony of city life (similarity 0.78)
• Preindustrial cities pushed ordinary residents’ social life into public streets (similarity 0.78)