We are protected against both of these typical dangers of the city by antipathy, which is the preparatory phase of concrete antagonism and which engenders the distances and aversions without which we could not lead the urban life at all. The extent and combination of antipathy, the rhythm of its appearance and disappearance, the forms in which it is satisfied, all these, along with the more literally unifying elements, produce the metropolitan form of life in its irresolvable totality; and what at first glance appears in it as dissociation, actually is one of its elementary forms of association.

DEFINE: Simmel reframes antipathy and distance — usually seen as disconnection — as a constitutive, protecting force that makes city life livable at all.

XREF: Inverts standard readings of urban sociality as connecting rather than distancing; resonates with the idea that boundaries and reserve enable coexistence.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 285