Routine risk-taking makes the city feel less risky
Evidence
In doing so, however, one increases one’s vulnerability to disorganization in the face of change. Or, one can take risks, rushing headlong into new places, new people, and new situations, thereby increasing one’s self-knowledge and one’s skills and, in the long run, finding the city not to be risky at all (see Chapter Eight). — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 639
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly supports the flâneur reading: the observer who takes urban risks accumulates self-knowledge, whereas the one who sticks to safe places grows more fragile — echoing Simmel’s overload and Lofland’s stranger-typing.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘the city is only risky if you avoid the risk’ — how exposure-to-strangeness, not avoidance, is what produces urban self-possession.
Related
- Urban competence develops only through exposure to risky new places (similarity 0.88)
- Playing it safe in the city increases vulnerability to later disorganization (similarity 0.86)
- The hardest part of urban adventuring is the initial step into public space (similarity 0.81)
- Utopian urban plans fail without social psychological realism about people (similarity 0.79)
- Urban spatial literacy varies enormously across individual mental locational maps (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Reflexive trust can absorb more uncertainty with less risk
#corroborates(0.82) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 258