Urban life requires identity visibility, not just shared humanity

Evidence

If I am correct in this assertion, it follows that the situation of contemporary life-an urban situation-necessitates some continuing arrangement for making identities visible. It necessitates, that is, some continued denial of the great humanistic urge to obliterate “categorization.” Humans, if they are to live in the world of strangers (and given the present population of the earth, there would appear to be no other choice) need to know a great deal more than the simple fact of common humanity about the people who surround them. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1031

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: This claim — that categorization of others is a necessity, not a moral failing — deserves chasing in conversation with the reader’s own ethical concerns about detaching observation.

Related

• Urban life requires categorizing strangers despite humanistic resistance (similarity 0.95)
• Pure anonymity is intolerable, so urban dwellers must know their strangers (similarity 0.86)
• City life depends on categorizing strangers rather than knowing them personally (similarity 0.86)
• City life depends on dependable clues linking appearances to identities (similarity 0.85)
• Urban life produced a human type who knows others primarily by category (similarity 0.85)
• Cities mitigate total anonymity through categorical identification of strangers (similarity 0.85)
• City order makes strangers identifiable enough to be tolerated (similarity 0.84)
• Urban life fundamentally means coping with strangers and anonymity (similarity 0.83)
• Urban life is possible because strangers remain categorically identifiable (similarity 0.83)
• Urban dwellers evolve from fearing strangers to managing them easily (similarity 0.82)
• Urban spatial ordering only enables stranger identification, never guarantees it (similarity 0.82)
• Cities spatially segregate the morally excluded beyond mere containment. (similarity 0.82)
• Urban history shifts identity-reading from appearance cues to location cues (similarity 0.81)
• City size creates a peculiar condition of mutual personal anonymity (similarity 0.80)
• Urbanites symbolically transform public space into private space to reduce stranger contact (similarity 0.80)