Growing familiarity transforms urban public space into semiprivate home territory

Evidence

As the knowledge one has about any particular public space increases in detail, completeness, and certainty, a peculiar alteration begins to take place in the character of the space itself. As the individual increases his knowledge, he transforms what were initially strangers into personally-known others. As he does this, he increases his ability to use the setting for his own private purposes. The more knowledge he possesses, the less the setting is an alien place full of strangers, the more it begins to seem like home. And when his knowledge approaches maximum, in detail, completeness, and certainty, the setting ceases to be, for him, for all practical purposes, an urban public locale at all. It becomes, in effect, semiprivate space; it becomes a home territory. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 709

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly parallels how the flâneur’s repeated wandering turns city streets from anonymity into a personalized stage — connects to Simmel’s blasé attitude and the reader’s cross-read on Julius’s wandering.
• DEFINE: Establishes the home territory concept as the endpoint of spatial knowledge accumulation.

Related

• Private knowledge can convert public space into semiprivate territory (similarity 0.89)
• City dwellers transform public spaces into private home territories to manage urban complexity (similarity 0.84)
• Better housing and dedicated home recreation spaces pulled urban sociability indoors (similarity 0.80)
• Urbanites symbolically transform public space into private space to reduce stranger contact (similarity 0.80)
• City life depends on categorizing strangers rather than knowing them personally (similarity 0.79)
• City size creates a peculiar condition of mutual personal anonymity (similarity 0.78)