Urbanites symbolically transform public space into private space to reduce stranger contact

Evidence

Chapters Six and Seven, in contrast, explore some of the devices that city dwellers utilize to reduce the complexity of their environment and thereby reduce, to a greater or lesser degree, for a greater or lesser period of time, their need for urban learning. Our concern in these chapters will be with “avoiding” the city, in the sense of avoiding the occasions for, or the risks inherent in, stranger contact. We shall be watching urbanites as they literally or symbolically transform the city’s public space-the locus of the world of strangers-into private or semiprivate space. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 533

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s framing: civil inattention and how dwellers manage anonymity without interpersonal trust—the symbolic privatization of public space parallels the blasé attitude. — connects to: Psychic well-being fundamentally depends on the existence of public space — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1503