City dwellers transform public spaces into private home territories to manage urban complexity

Evidence

The alteration is never complete, of course, as long as the setting continues to be legally defined as a place open to the public. Nevertheless, the extent to which small public spaces can come to be viewed as home territories, as well as the degree to which those who hold this view can come to behave as if it were true, is one of the more remarkable chapters in the story of the city dweller’s struggle to reduce the complexity of the world in which he lives. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 710

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s cross-read of Simmel’s blasé attitude as cognitive defense: privatizing public space is another layer of the same complexity-reduction strategy.