Urban history shifts identity-reading from appearance cues to location cues

Evidence

The trend of urban history, I am suggesting, is away from appearential ordering and toward spatial ordering. The preindustrial city, characterized by mixed public space use and overt heterogeneity of populace, is the site of the dominance of appearential ordering. The modern city, with its specialized space use and masked heterogeneity of populace, is the site of the dominance of spatial ordering. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 144

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s cross-reading: specialized space-use cities make strangers legible by where they are, not how they look—relevant to the anonymity mechanism Simmel describes.