Entering public space always means entering the world of strangers

Evidence

I have said that the city’s public space is the locus of the world of strangers. This remains true whether a given portion of public space is at a given time either actually or potentially populated by persons who are personally unknown to one another. If I walk outside the door of my house and stand on the sidewalk, I may see no one except two or three friends and neighbors. Nonetheless, I have still entered the world of strangers. At any moment someone I do not know may appear. If I live on a heavily trafficked street, the likelihood of that occurring is much greater than if I reside in an isolated cui de sac. But in either case, having crossed the common sense threshold from private to public space, I have entered the world of strangers, and in it I must somehow make my way. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 122

Categorization

• XREF: The potentiality — anyone unknown may appear at any moment — is the structural condition that pressures the blasé attitude in Simmel’s essay and motivates Lofland’s later categories of strangers.