San Francisco’s famed civility rests on spatial segregation between groups

Evidence

In their analysis of San Francisco’s world-famous tolerance for deviance-its “culture of civility”-Howard S. Becker and Irving Louis Horowitz (1970) suggest that this tolerance is largely due to a willingness among various groups to “accommodate” to the desires of each other. In essence, although they do not say so explicitly, this means spatial segregation. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1138

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reverses the received picture of tolerant cities; connects to the reader’s flâneur project on how civil inattention in public space hides structural sorting.
• SEED: Angle: ‘tolerance’ as a spatial-avoidance bargain—civility as the etiquette of not sharing space, not a value of encountering difference.