The city may be harsh, but it is exciting. It may be cruel, but it is tolerant. It may be indifferent, but it is a blessed indifference. In sum, I share the Aristotelian judgment of the urban world: "Men come together in cities in order to live. They remain together in order to live the good life."

This is a book, then, about that very peculiar social situation. … The fact that the social situation of city living is "peculiar" may not, in an age of worldwide urbanization, be evident. Chapter One attempts to make it so.

SEED: The idea that urban life is historically anomalous rather than natural could seed an essay challenging assumptions about city living.

In Part 1, we shall explore just what is going on in this public space. We shall discover that "what is going on" has undergone a historical change, and that this change is intimately linked to the matter of what clues are most reliable in the crucial task of identifying strangers. Chapter Two focuses on the preindustrial city. It argues that in this city, public spaces contained such a conglomeration of persons and activities that locational clues were of little value. Appearances, however, were fairly reliably hooked to identity. Chapter Four focuses on the modern city. It argues that in the modern city, the opposite is true. Here, public spaces "specialize" in certain persons and activities, while appearances can be highly deceiving. Each type of city, that is, has its characteristic type of order, which allows its citizens to make relatively accurate identifications of one another. The preindustrial city is characterized by the dominance of appearential ordering; the modern city, by the dominance of spatial ordering.

DEFINE: Introduces the key distinction between appearential and spatial ordering across historical city types. XREF: Connects to Goffman-era social ordering and urban sociology debates about how strangers are read in public.

SEED: A historical shift in how urban strangers are identified—appearance to spatial location—could anchor an essay on how identity signaling has changed with cities.

For throughout a major part of human history (and prehistory), in most times and most places, men and women have lived out their lives not in great cities or urban sprawls, but in small and isolated worlds-in bands or tribes or villages or towns. However varied the human condition in these little worlds-and it varied enormously-they shared one crucial characteristic: the absence of anonymity. Their peoples were born and reared, they reached adulthood and married, propagated, grew old and died, surrounded always and almost exclusively by persons who knew them and who were known to them.

Andaman Isles ... "the natives had not the faintest knowledge of even the neighbouring coast of Burmah, much less the world at large .... The few voyagers who from time to time ventured near their shores were regarded as deceased ancestors who, by some dispensation, had been permitted to revisit the earth .... In confirmation of this may be cited the name by which the natives of India are to this day called, viz. chawgala (literally, departed spirits)."

XREF: Connects to isolation/contact anthropology — how small societies interpret outsiders. Resonates with first-contact narratives in exploration literature.

XREF: Connects to classic anthropological literature on first-contact perception of outsiders as supernatural beings, echoed in other colonial-era accounts of isolated groups.

Even among peoples with greater knowledge of the world and all its diversities, the lurking suspicion that the stranger might be other than human died hard. " 'Beggars and strangers,' says Homer, 'come from Zeus'" (Haarhoff, 1948:1). Or, in the New Testament version: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" (Hebrews 13 :2).

At every moment of the life of a member of an Australian tribe his dealings with other individuals are regulated by the relationship in which he stands to them .... Thus in any part of the continent when a stranger comes to camp the first thing to be done, before he can be admitted within the camp, is to determine his relationship to every man and woman in it, i.e., to determine what is the proper term of relationship for him to apply to each of them .... … Social relations of any type [could not be] established with strangers unless these could demonstrate that they were connected by kinship ties with someone within the horde. A stranger from an unknown tribe, unless he came accredited as a sacred messenger, would most probably be promptly speared.

DEFINE: Clarifies that tribal kinship classification was not merely genealogical labeling but a comprehensive regulatory system structuring every social interaction.

As you approach a cross-roads store, every idler pricks up to instant attention. Your presence is detected from every neighboring cabin and cornfield. Long John quits his plowing, Red John drops his axe, Sick John ... pops out of bed and Lyin' John ... grabs his hat with "I jes' got ter know who that feller is!" Then all Johns descend their several paths, to congregate at the store and estimate the stranger as though he were so many board-feet of lumber in the tree or so many pounds of beef on the hoof.

Among many peoples, a stranger-however human-was believed to be possessed of special powers. Sometimes these powers were thought to be malevolent, sometimes benevolent, sometimes both; whatever the case, extraordinary ceremonies, often involving long periods of time, were called for (Van Gennep, 1960:26-35; Frazer,

XREF: Connects to Turner's ritual theory and Van Gennep's liminality framework — the stranger as liminal figure.

Exactly when and where and how the first cities arose remains a matter of conjecture. Received scholarly wisdom has it that the emergence of cities-of relatively large human settlements in which residents did not provide their own food-was dependent upon certain developments in technology, especially the invention of writing and the plow. 7 The first cities are usually said to have appeared between 4,000 and 3,000 B.c., or perhaps somewhat later-the estimates vary according to how the archeological evidence is read, how the investigator defines a city, and so on-and they are usually placed in Mesopotamia. 8 A few scholars have lately challenged this conventional truth, arguing that recent archeological work in Turkey-at the mound known as Catal Hiiyiik-indicates that cities may have existed as long ago as 7,000 B.c. or earlier (Mellaart, 1964). And, basing her thesis on the Catal Hiiyiik findings, Jane Jacobs (1969) has argued that rather than the agricultural revolution's making possible the emergence of cities, cities made possible the agricultural revolution.

XREF: Challenges the conventional textbook timeline linking writing, plow, and Mesopotamian city origins; connects to scholarship on early agricultural development.

XREF: Challenges the standard narrative that agriculture enabled urban settlement — connects to debates about urban origins and the direction of causality in early civilization. SEED: Could seed an essay about how foundational assumptions about history get overturned by archaeological evidence.

(1) First, and probably most obvious, there would appear to be a sheer biophysical/imitation on the capacity of human beings to recognize, either by name or by face (i.e., to have personal knowledge of), an infinite number of their fellowmen. I know of no research which tells us the maximum numbers that can be known; human beings probably vary in their individual capacities in this regard.lO My own guess -and it is only a guess-is that the maximum number might be three or four thousand, perhaps slightly more.

QUESTION: The author himself flags this as a guess and notes no research establishes the true maximum. Worth chasing whether any subsequent science has tested this number.

XREF: This connects to the concept of Dunbar's number and social network size limits in anthropology and psychology.

(2) As the population of a settlement increases, occupational differentiation becomes more complex, and with this differentiation, structural limitations to knowing begin to appear. Some part of the population becomes involved in relatively restrictive life rounds such that their opportunities for encountering other residents of the settlement are reduced. The warehouse clerk, for example, has less chance to meet his fellow citizens than does the street merchant. The housewife knows fewer people than does her shop-owning husband. In addition, these spatial restrictions on the intersection of life rounds are reinforced and compounded by status distinctions which make portions of the population "off limits" to other portions.

XREF: Connects to ideas about urban anonymity and the breakdown of traditional community ties in sociology and urban studies.

XREF: Echoes Durkheim's division of labor and Tonnies' Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction in sociology.

A settlement which reached a population of 8,000 or more was likely to dominate a large hinterland, precluding the growth of similar-size settlements nearby. It thus had no competition in attracting immigrants and visitors, and temporal limitations to knowing could play their part. London, in the twelfth century, for example, had an estimated population of between 20,000 and 35,000 (Comhaire and Cahnman, 1962), by today's jaundiced standards a mere village-hardly worth going out of one's way to see. But to a visitor of the period, it appeared quite a metropolis indeed and well worth the time and trouble it took to get there (Holmes, 1966).

XREF: Relates to central place theory and urban hierarchy geography concepts.

XREF: Connects to historical urban geography and central place theory; the 8,000-threshold idea parallels settlement hierarchy research.

But even if only the most conservative estimates are taken seriously, most of the cities of history stand out quite clearly as large settlements, exceeding by some thousands my arbitrary figure of 10,000.

Language is freedom also because it makes possible a consciousness of self among individual members of the species: a consciousness, that is, of one's separation from the physical and biological environment.

DEFINE: Defines how language creates self-awareness through a sense of separation from the physical world.

To avoid such errors, the individual needs (1) the rules for "coding" or defining, (2) accompanying behavioral repertoires which are appropriate to the coded object or situation, and (3) enough information about the object or situation to be able to activate the coding rules. 15 While the rules and repertoires are usually provided by the culture of his group, obtaining sufficient information is up to the individual himself.

To know another personally is not to eliminate knowing him categorically. Personal knowing supplements categoric knowing; it adds temporal events, nuances of meaning, relational depth to the stark outline of the other's roles and statuses. It adds adjectives and adverbs and qualifying phrases, as it were, to the simple sentence that is categoric knowing. In some instances, to carry the analogy further, the noun and the verb themselves lack meaning without their modifiers and qualifiers. That is-and the importance of this point will become clear soon-complex categoric knowing is frequently dependent upon personal knowing, categorical placement being dependent upon biographical information.

Out of this vast reservoir of personally-unknown others, the average human being in his lifetime encounters-actually shares immediate time and space with-only a minuscule proportion. These are the persons of whom we can possess simple categoric knowledge. And these are the persons who are meant when I speak of strangers. … In this more restricted sense, then, a stranger is anyone personally unknown to the actor of reference, but visually available to him.

DEFINE: Schutz defines 'stranger' in a restricted, technical sense as someone personally unknown but visually available, narrowing the everyday meaning for analytical purposes.

DEFINE: Goffman restricts the sociological sense of 'stranger' to persons visually available but personally unknown, excluding the vast reservoir of people one never encounters.

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.

DEFINE: Introduces the distinction between appearential ordering (mixed public space, visible heterogeneity) and spatial ordering (specialized space, masked heterogeneity) as a framework for understanding urban transformation.

DEFINE: Defines the distinction between appearential ordering (preindustrial, mixed uses) and spatial ordering (modern, specialized uses).

The urbanite may frequently rely upon appearance rather than reputation: status may be temporarily appropriated by the "correct" display and manipulation of symbols, while in the small town it is more permanently manifested by the direct enactment of rights and duties. The bestowal of status in the city is often an inference from symbolism to social position; in the small town the bestowal of status proceeds from the evaluation of rights and duties appropriate to social position, and the relevant symbolism is basically symptomatic.

XREF: Connects to concepts of status signaling in sociology (Goffman's presentation of self) and contemporary thinking about personal branding and social capital in urban settings.

City living is possible only because a city is not, in fact, a totally anonymous sort of place. While personal knowledge of the vast majority of others with whom the urbanite shares time and space is impossible, categoric knowledge is well within his grasp. The multitudes of strangers forming the urbanite's public milieu may not be personally knowable, but they are most certainly categorically identifiable, and as such, capable of being acted toward. That is, one can live as a stranger in the midst of strangers only because important elements of "strangeness" have been removed.

In utilizing one term to cover all cities prior to the onset of industrialization (and many cities or sections of cities untouched by industrialization even today), I am following Gideon Sjoberg. In The Preindustrial City ( 1960), Sjoberg argues that despite their many differences, these historical and contemporary urban settlements were and are sufficiently similar in important respects to justify considering them as representative of a single constructed type. Type formulations, since they seek unity in diversity, always obscure variation. And it is certainly true that preindustrial cities, as historical entities, varied enormously. They varied, among other ways, in size, function, societal type in which they were embedded (Lenski, 1970), and relationship to their surrounding societies (see, for example, Pirenne, 1925). In the face of all this diversity, it is perhaps not surprising that Sjoberg's unitary concept has been subject to criticism (see, for example, Cox, 1969; Pahl, 1970). Although in adopting Sjoberg's usage, I am open to the same sort of criticism, I feel justified in doing so. Granted that for some purposes a more complex typology of cities would be more appropriate, with regard to the two characteristics in which I am interested-mixed public space use and overt heterogeneity of populace-all the cities of which I have any knowledge show a remarkable similarity.

XREF: Connects to Sjoberg's The Preindustrial City and the debate about typologies versus unitary concepts of preindustrial urbanism, relevant to urban sociology literature.

The initial shock of this strange place having begun to wear off, you begin to note things that at first did not attract your attention. The sheer filth of the streets appalls you. Everywhere there seems to be refuse, garbage, human and animal excrement. And then you note for the first time the large numbers of animals in the streets-pigs eating the garbage, insects attracted to the excrement, dogs tearing at bones.

XREF: Echoes known descriptions of 19th-century urban squalor (London, Paris) and the scavenger ecology of pre-sanitation cities.

XREF: Connects to urban sanitation history and the rise of public hygiene movements in the Victorian era.

You can't get away from the beggars and vendors. They accost you wherever you go. You can't escape the crippled limbs, the scarred faces, the running sores. Your person seems never safe from the constant assaults of the pickpockets. Everything seems jumbled together. Rich and poor, health and disease, young and old, house and business, public and private. All seems disorder. All seems chaos. Dizzy, frightened, confused, you step back into the time machine and are returned again to what now seems the orderliness and cleanliness of your own crowded, carcongested, smog-ridden, crime-obsessed modern city.

The above portrait particularly emphasized one characteristic of the preindustrial city: the multiplicity of uses to which public space was put. It is this characteristic which imparts to the modern eye, confronting the city through the works of historians and archeologists, an overwhelming impression of disorder. Some critics, disenchanted with what they consider the sterility of the modern city, have even suggested that our contemporary metropolises could well benefit from the importation of a little of this historical "disorder" (see, for example, Sennett, 1970). I do not share in this judgment of the preindustrial city as disordered. It may appear so to us, but only because the principle of its ordering, only because the dominant type of order, differs from that to which we are accustomed. Nevertheless, there is no question but that in contrast to the modern city, the public spaces of historic urban settlements were sites of an incredible mixture of activities and persons.

XREF: Connects to critiques of modernist urban planning and the sterile-city debate, echoing figures like Richard Sennett and Jane Jacobs.

In the preindustrial city, many human activities that we moderns think of as more appropriately housed in private or semiprivate space often occurred in public. Educating the young was one such activity. In ancient Rome, for example, primary school was typically conducted on the street, "under the awning outside some shop and invaded by all the noises of the street from which only a screen or tent cloth separated it" (Carcopino, 1940:105). Or, in twelfth century Paris, where older students from all over Europe came to study with individual scholars, much of the instruction was of a highly public character.

One batch of condemned slaves [arrested in connection with an alleged anti-White plot], although they were given an opportunity to save themselves by confessing, steadfastly maintained their innocence until they were brought to the stake. At this point their resolution gave way and they admitted their guilt. But the crowd that had turned out to watch the execution was too large and its demands for vengeance too strong to permit the Negroes to escape by a last-minute confession: the sentence of the court was duly carried out and the Negroes were chained and burned at the stake.

DEFINE: Confession here is demonstrated to be strategically useless — crowd vengeance overrode even legal pardons-by-confession, showing how extrajudicial mob sentiment governed slave executions.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of spectacle punishment and mob justice in colonial societies. FICTION: The scene of the condemned having resolution give way at the stake, only to be denied reprieve by the mob, is potent dramatic material.

Given the lack or minimal use of the printed word and given the generally low levels of literacy among the populace, the public space of the preindustrial city understandably enough was further enlivened by the distribution and collection of news. Town criers relayed elite pronouncements to the citizenry, warned of fires or other dangers, and spread news of interesting, if mundane, events: … The town crier [in medieval Prato] ... hurried from one street corner to the next, to spread the day's news: births and weddings, and deaths, bankruptcies and emancipations, lists of lost property and lost cattle, even applications for wet nurses-while more important official news was imparted by three trumpeters on horseback, dressed in the colours of the commune, who blew a treble blast on their trumpets before announcing the sentences of the courts of law-banishments and fines, and sometimes executions.

XREF: Connects to the broader sociology of pre-modern communication and oral culture versus the printed word.

Activities which, in the modern city, tend to be relegated to specialized public locations, were, in the preindustrial city, piled upon one another, as it were. Buying and selling, for example, often took place in the street itself, for the wandering vendors were everywhere.

XREF: Connects to Jane Jacobs's urbanism arguments about mixed-use streets versus modern zoning's specialization of commercial space.

XREF: Connects to city-design literature like Jane Jacobs's observations about mixed-use streets and the vitality of unzoned urban space.

As soon as they spied a group of people anywhere whose curiosity at least they might pique, they would mingle with them and unblushingly unroll their manuscript-in the forum, under a portico, or among the crowd at the baths. The recitatio had invaded even the crossroads. Examining the contemporary literature, we soon get the impression that everyone was reading something, no matter what, aloud in public all the time, morning and evening, winter and summer.

XREF: Connects to modern open-mic readings, slam poetry, and performance-based literary culture.

In twelfth century London, they were referred to as the ribauz and they spent their time always on the edge of a crowd. They begged and plundered at the slightest provocation. They hung around outside the door of the banquet hall when a large feast was held. The king of England had three hundred bailiffs whose duty it was-though not all at one time-to keep these people back as food was moved from the kitchens to the hall, and to see that guests were not disturbed. Frequently in twelfth-century romances a beautiful damsel is threatened with the awful fate of being turned over to the ribauz. Nothing more horrible can be imagined.

DEFINE: Explains the historical term 'ribauz' — a social class of medieval beggars/plunderers who hovered at crowd edges. FICTION: The ribauz as a threatened fate for a damsel in twelfth-century romances is a vivid, reusable storytelling detail.

Given the economic plight of persons such as the ribauz, it is not surprising that begging should also be a constant feature of public space activity. As we shall see later, beggars were an interesting (and not always pitiable) addition to the hodgepodge of persons crowding the streets of historic cities.

Residences in the preindustrial city were likely to be rather cramped, unpleasant places by modern standards. The elites, of course, were rather differently housed and they often had access to private courtyards. But for the vast majority of the urban populace-adult and child-"going out" was probably preferable to "staying in." As a consequence, a great deal of socializing and playing appears to have occurred in public space.

Walking was undoubtedly the most constant of activities. Only the rich could afford litters or horses and although many working people had access to carts, in the narrow streets and alleys they were probably more of an impediment than a convenience. No telephones, telegraphs, or regular postal services sped messages across space. If one had anything to say to anyone, one went to see him. Securing water and food (no refrigeration), getting rid of garbage and wastes, inviting a friend to dinner, all such myriad activities in which humans engage, all required walking. It is true, of course, that distances were probably not great. Preindustrial cities, lacking efficient transportation means, were compact (and thus densely populated) places.

XREF: Connects to how infrastructure constraints shape daily movement and urban density — parallels modern walkability debates and the pre-car city.

Just how these persons survived at all is not clear. Sometimes, as Holmes reported above, they begged, sometimes they stole, but much of their time appeared to have been spent hanging about waiting to involve themselves in whatever was happening. Surely their numbers provided much of the manpower for the preindustrial city's many riots. In Rome, under Tiberius, for example, "the mob came to blows over the comparative merits of rival actors and the riot became so serious that several soldiers, a centurion and a tribune were left dead on the streets."

XREF: Connects to discussion of preindustrial urban poverty and how idle populations become political combustibles — echoes themes in other urban history sources.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of preindustrial urban poverty and the social origins of crowd violence.

Yet even if the reader imagines all these sorts of persons jumbled together, he will still have an incomplete sense of the extent of the mix of persons in the preindustrial city's public space. The maimed, the lame, the feeble-minded, the blind, the scarred, and the diseased were also present to a degree incomprehensible to a modern Westerner. … Given the state of medical knowledge, given the generally unsanitary conditions of urban settlements, given the prevalence of mutilation as a punishment for even minor infractions, given the lack of hospitals and other welfare institutions, and given the rough character of much everyday sport, we should perhaps not be surprised at such widespread suffering, so visibly displayed.

QUESTION: What were the actual prevalence rates of disability and visible impairment in preindustrial cities? Modern demographers could quantify this against an imagined baseline.

The fourteen districts of the urbs did not offer that sharp contrast between working-class and wealthy districts which may be seen in modern capitals, and there was the same kind of accidental egalitarianism in the Rome of the Caesars as there was later in the Rome of the Popes, with wretched apartOJent houses and magnificent palaces built next door to each other, and millionaires and men of modest means living on different floors under the same roof.

XREF: Connects to urban studies and historical geography on how modern zoning and class segregation contrasts with pre-industrial cities.

XREF: Connects to urban sociology and gentrification debates about whether class segregation is a modern phenomenon driven by transportation and zoning.

Thus, as a consequence of all this "jumbling," the historic city dweller had only to step outside the door of his house or apartment or shack to encounter persons representing a broad range of classes, occupations, and ages.

In the cities were the slaves and the freemen, women of "respectability" and their more adventurous sisters. In the cities (as we shall later see), the con man and the specialized thief came to maturity.

Heterogeneity, per se, would appear to characterize city dwellers in all times and places. What is particularly interesting and peculiar about the heterogeneity of the preindustrial city's populace is its overtness. Socially defined differences among persons were emphasized in costuming, in body markings, and in language.

Costuming. Elizabethan theater depended heavily on costuming to indicate the status or rank, occupation, and nationality of the characters being portrayed (Byrne, 1961 :264-66). In this, it merely reflected "real-life" practices. To a degree unknown to moderns, the resident of the preindustrial city literally "donned" his identity.

XREF: Connects to historical dress codes and sumptuary laws, plus theater studies on how costume functioned as a sign system before modern fashion. SEED: Could seed an essay on how clothing moved from announcing fixed identity to expressing personal taste — the shift from preindustrial 'dressing by rank' to modern self-construction.

A recent study of Rowanduz, a town of northern Iraq, suggests that the ordinary unveiled peasant woman who neglected to put on a face veil when entering the community was placed by the local citizenry in the same category as the prostitute.

DEFINE: Clarifies the social weight of the face veil as a marker distinguishing respectable women from prostitutes in this community.

QUESTION: What are the full findings of this study, and what does this reveal about the social function of veiling as a marker of respectability?

Urban elites everywhere struggled to differentiate themselves from their "inferiors" not only by the design of their dress, but by the materials as well. … In Elizabethan England, "commoners were prohibited by law from wearing clothing fashioned from gold or silver cloth, velvet, furs and other 'luxury' materials" (Sjoberg, 1960:127). Hair length also indicated status. Among the Franks, only the elites had long hair. Males of lesser rank "wore theirs more or less short, according to the degree of freedom which they possessed, and the serfs had their heads completely shaved."

XREF: Connects to sumptuary laws and how status markers recur across societies — relevant to any study of fashion, class, or social stratification.

Punishment practices in many historic cities and in the broader societies of which they were a part, often made it difficult for a convicted criminal to escape his past. … In tenth and eleventh century Constantinople, "serious crimes were punished by the loss of sight or of the right arm, lesser offences by the loss of an ear or by branding" … Moral differences were more reliably expressed by branding, especially where certain brands were reserved for certain offenses … With the appropriate symbol burned onto his forehead, the "culprit" was forever proclaimed as such to all who saw him.

XREF: Connects to broader themes of identity being inscribed on the body, relevant to the reader's wider reading on moral identity and public shame.

Speech ... is a highly sensitive status indicator .... Upperand lowerclass persons employ quite divergent linguistic patterns, as do sub-groups within classes: ruralites vs. urbanites, men vs. women, old people vs. young people, and occupational groups, too. … The preindustrial city dweller had merely to open his or her mouth to be placed immediately into the relevant socially defined categories.

DEFINE: Establishes speech as a sociolinguistic 'status indicator' that classifies speakers by class, geography, gender, age, and occupation.

XREF: Connects to sociolinguistic concepts like Labov's variation studies and status markers in language.

The order which is found in human life may be created in a variety of ways. It may emerge through a series of mutual agreements and understandings. It may be imposed on the majority by a small group with a corner on power. It may simply develop without special intent on anyone's part. Or it may arise out of some combination of agreement, coercion, and "accident." However it is created, once in operation, order functions to make life relatively predictable and thus, in some senses, bearable. Just how the appearential order of the preindustrial city came to be, just how the socially defined identities of the urban populace came to be so overtly expressed, is lost in history. But once this order emerged, it served to make predictable, and thus bearable, the world of strangers that is the city.

It is true that compared with the modern city dweller's, the historic urbanite's reliance on spatial clues was limited. The integration of persons and activities in his city's public space made the determination of "who" on the basis of "where" a rather risky business. Nonetheless, it is also true that some spatial segregation of persons and activities did occur in the preindustrial city. … To the degree that this was the case, location could combine with appearance to provide information about the strange other.

XREF: Connects to the broader discussion of how strangers were identified and read in historical urban settings, and how spatial cues complemented appearance as social information.

A Jewish community in an European town during the Middle Ages resembled a colony on an island or on a distant coast. Isolated from the rest of the population, it generally occupied a -district or street which was separated from the town or borough. The Jews, like a troop of lepers, were thrust away and huddled together into the most uncomfortable and most unhealthy quarter of the city, as miserable as it was disgusting. There, in ill-constructed houses, this poor and numerous population was amassed; in some cases high walls enclosed the small and dark narrow streets of the quarter occupied by this branded race, which prevented its extension, though, at the same time it often protected the inhabitants from the fury of the populace.

XREF: Connects to broader history of Jewish diaspora, segregation policies, and the origins of the term 'ghetto' in Venice.

DEFINE: Describes the physical form of the medieval Jewish ghetto: a walled, segregated district in the worst quarter of the city.

In some cities, visiting foreigners might be required to lodge in quarters specifically reserved for persons of their type. Thus, in tenth and eleventh century Constantinople, Christian pilgrims stayed at the Hospice of Samson, while Russian merchants were shuttled out to "specially reserved houses in the suburb of Saint Mamas" (Runciman, … 1952:62). In Canton, China, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, foreign merchants were barred from the city but were given permission to stay in "reservations" across the river and were allowed to conduct their business through specially designated mediators (Comhaire and Cahnman, 1962: 115). This Cantonese arrangement seems extreme and untypical. More commonly in preindustrial cities, tourists, pilgrims, and businessmen were expected only to sleep in the visitors' quarters. During the day, they presumably were free to roam the city.

The difficulty of so tightly connecting identity to appearance, as was the case in the preindustrial city, is that an individual can rather easily alter the one by altering the other. When identities can be donned, they can also be appropriated. And the appropriation of identities would appear to have been one of the favorite pastimes in the historic urban settlement.

As suggested above, the exact origin of the appearential order of the preindustrial city is lost in history. But while that is true, there is certainly no mystery regarding who struggled to maintain it, or at least that aspect of it relating to status. The elites waged a continual, and in the long run, losing battle to differentiate themselves from the "common herd." The fact that they could not even rely on tradition but had to have recourse to the repeated enactment of laws, suggests just how much of a battle it was. Wherever economic conditions allowed great wealth to concentrate in hands other than those of the nobility, the battle intensified.

QUESTION: Why did the appearance of the preindustrial city matter so much to elites that they enacted repeated laws to preserve it? Worth tracing how legal sumptuary/status regulation evolved.

This battle to keep identities "properly" expressed was, as I have said, eventually lost. The appearential ordering of the preindustrial city did not survive the chaos and confusion of early industrialization. To watch the breakdown of one sort of order and the emergence of another, we turn now to the crucible of this change: the early industrial city. … The goal of this brief chapter is as follows: to touch here and there on just a part of "what was happening" in the early industrial city so as to suggest, tentatively, some of the factors that may help to account for the great urban transformation-the transformation from the dominance of appearential ordering to the dominance of spatial ordering, from a world in which stranger identities were signaled most reliably . by appearance to a world in which they are signaled most reliably by location.

DEFINE: Defines the book's central distinction between appearential and spatial ordering of urban strangers. QUESTION: What specific industrialization pressures eroded appearance-based identification while making location more reliable?

QUESTION: What specific urban factors drove this shift from reading identities by how people looked to reading them by where people were situated?

While no process of change can be precisely dated, let us, for simplicity, "bound" this transformation within the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This is also the period we conventionally think of as the era of revolutions-industrial, technological, and urban (as well as political). And it seems hardly a coincidence that changes in the ordering of urban public space should coincide with other convulsive historical changes. Indeed, they seem each to be elements of a sweeping alteration in the human condition and, as such, interrelated and intertwined in a complex chain of mutual cause and effect.

SEED: Could be an essay angle: how physical infrastructure change reflects and drives larger societal upheavals — cities as material record of revolution.

XREF: Connects to broader historical arguments about modernization and the spatial transformation of cities across industrial-era studies.

Before we begin to unravel the small part of this complex chain that is of concern here, two comments are in order. First, in attempting to account for the change to the dominance of spatial ordering in the public space of the modern city, it is important to bear in mind that the key word is dominance. As we have seen, some elements of the spatial order already existed in the preindustrial city (just as, as we shall see, some elements of the appearential order remain in the modern city). The latent possibilities for its emergence, that is, were histori-

DEFINE: Clarifies that 'dominance' in spatial ordering means one ordering is prominent, not exclusive — older elements persist.

As we saw in the last chapter, the maintenance of appearential ordering, or at least those aspects of it relating to the visibility of status, was largely in the interest of the aristocratic elites. They were its watchdogs, its righteous guardians. We saw also that this guardianship had, for centuries, been no easy job. The assault had not come from the masses. They were much too poor to even consider aping the dress of their "betters." No, the assault had come from that minority in the old feudal orders who had been able to accumulate great wealth: the merchant bourgeois. This is not to suggest that this group was ideologically opposed to the visible display of status distinctions. Exactly the opposite. Where they were in control, as in Colonial America, they took great pains to institute costuming regulations quite similar to those extant in Europe. What this group wanted, rather, was merely to display an elite status which they felt, by right of wealth, they deserved.

XREF: Connects to Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption and status competition — the wealthy merchant class, not the poor, drives challenges to dress hierarchies.

But industrialization involved more than transfer; it also involved, to a degree, distribution. The preindustrial city had been largely divided between the very rich (aristocratic elites and bourgeois merchants) and the very poor. In the early industrial city, despite the continuation of grinding poverty among the majority of the population, the petit bourgeois, the notso-wealthy middle class, had begun seriously to emerge. These shopkeepers and tradesmen and clerks and their families shared in the riches that industrialization was making possible. As their numbers increased, they also began to collect a share of the power that industrialization had torn from the landed aristocracy. They too were concerned with status and, helped along by technological innovations (discussed below), they saw less and less reason for expressing their "proper place" through dress. With this group, we see the beginning on a massive scale of what is by now a common characteristic of modern life: the appropriation by one group of the dress style of another.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of dress as status marker and social appropriation that runs through this source and related work on fashion and class.

XREF: Connects to status-signaling and cultural appropriation literature; also fashion history narratives about class emulation.

Take London, for example. In 1800, it had an estimated population of 800,000. Sixty years later, well within the lifetime of a single individual, it had grown to almost 3 million. And during the succeeding forty years, it grew to 4.5 million (Fulford, 1952). New York City in the 1840s (remember, industrialization came later to the United States than it did to England) contained 400,000 souls (Toll, 1969). By the turn of the century, again a leap of merely sixty years, it had 3.5 million (Fulford, 1952). In cities where the initial population base was smaller, growth may have, from a phenomenological perspective, had an even greater impact. In 1780, the population of Manchester was a mere 25,000. Within forty years it had doubled, and then doubled again; that is, by 1820 it had reached 100,000 (Comhaire and Cahnman, 1962). Boston's population in 1830 is estimated slightly in excess of 60,000. Thirty-five years later, and prior to the annexation of surrounding communities, it had reached almost 200,000 (Lane, 1967).

XREF: Connects to historical urbanization studies and the phenomenology of rapid environmental change.

For the fact is that these cities were certainly not growing because of a tremendous upsurge in the fertility of urban women. (Cities have never grown to any appreciable degree through an excess of births over deaths. Their birth rates are always too low, and in preindustrial and early industrial cities their death rates were always too high. See Peterson, 1961:Part II; Freedman [ed.], 1964.) No, these cities were growing because they were receiving massive influxes of rural populations.

XREF: Connects to modern urbanization debates about rural-to-urban migration and megacity growth.

DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism of urban growth in preindustrial cities — distinguishing rural in-migration from natural population increase as the true driver.

The third thing that was happening in the early industrial city involved technological advances in the manufacrure of cloth, and eventually, the mass production of clothing (Smelser, 1959; Lenski, 1970:313-315). I suspect that these advances dealt the most crucial blow to the dominance of the appearential order for they eventually made available to a broad spectrum of persons quite inexpensive clothing that copied in design, if not in quality, the fashions of the elites. Without the availability of such clothing, the masked heterogeneity of the modern city (to be discussed in Chapter Four) might never have been achieved.

XREF: Connects to Erving Goffman's work on presentation of self and the sociology of fashion and status display.

XREF: Connects to Thorstein Veblen's conspicuous consumption and the sociology of fashion as class signaling.

Between 1867 and 1873, Boston hungrily gobbled up Roxbury, Dorchester, Brighton, Charlestown, and West Roxbury -thereby, like some science fiction monster, growing larger in a very short time and with very little effort (Lane, 1967).

The same innovations probably also contributed greatly to the enclosing of much commercial activity. Inventions like the telegraph and the telephone made physical presence unnecessary for communication and thereby reduced the need to be out and about. Innovations in printing (combined with increasing literacy) strengthened reliance on newspapers as another medium of communication, and at least some huckstering activity moved out of the public space and into newspaper pages. Ironically, greater advances in technology, the radio, and television, would place the urban citizen far more at the mercy of the sellers than were his preindustrial counterparts. The latter, at least, could escape the "hard sell" by going home.

XREF: Connects to Laterza's broader argument about the privatization/enclosure of commercial activity and the changing nature of public space.

In addition to jeers and insults, embarrassments and shocks, and dangers to self and property, it seems likely that the petit bourgeois were also subject to another less threatening, but perhaps no less irritating, form of harassment: they were constantly accosted on the streets by the unemployed, begging, offering services, or asking for jobs. … He adds that he soon found himself becoming irritated by all this "assault" on his self and wanted nothing so much as the right to be left alone (personal communication). The proud but defenseless middle class of an earlier period must have felt much the same way.

XREF: Connects to contemporary dynamics of street solicitation and urban begging, and how discomfort with being accosted shapes attitudes toward the poor.

XREF: Relates to contemporary urban dynamics of panhandling and street encounters by residents.

Even in the preindustrial city, the bourgeois merchants and businessmen had never been very happy about having to rub shoulders with "the common herd." Because they did so, the elites relegated them to an outcaste status-a status from which great wealth alone could not free them. … The wealthy merchant who acquires prestige and entree into the upper class seeks to insulate himself from the common man. One method is delegating all negotiation in the market place to brokers and middlemen. In this fashion the upper-class merchant is spared from direct contacts with the lower class and outcastes.

XREF: Mirrors Weberian status-group theory and contemporary patterns where elites insulate themselves through intermediaries.

The rising industrial elites of the early industrial city might very well have perpetuated this pattern. They were quite capable of commanding the necessary wealth and power to keep themselves apart. But the growing petit bourgeois could not. Not only could they not afford a phalanx of servants to protect them in their necessary travels about the city; they were doubly hampered by having no traditional or legal supports for the deference they undoubtedly felt they deserved. And even if they had, they were confronted by an enormous population of rural immigrant floaters who had little knowledge of, or respect for, city ways.

XREF: Relates to broader themes of Victorian-era class segregation and the role of social deference in urban life.

In the preindustrial city the problem of identifying strangers was largely solved by an ordering of the populace such that appearances provided fairly accurate clues to identities. In the confusion and chaos of the early industrial city, however, that solution became increasingly untenable. Appearential clues might still be used, of course, but their reliability could not be counted upon.

XREF: Connects to themes about urban anonymity, surveillance, and how social trust mechanisms break down with modernization.

So, too, soliciting by prostitutes in many cities is tolerated only so long as it can be contained. Having set aside certain public areas for certain activities, city fathers and populace alike look askance at any spill-over.

DEFINE: Illustrates the principle of spatial containment as a mechanism of social tolerance.

One of the characteristics of an industrially developed and technologically advanced society is that it tends to keep a rather large proportion of its population tied up in organizationally controlled work and play. The old floating populations, so characteristic of preindustrial and early industrial cities, are, in the modern city, largely eliminated. When enough people are pulled into schools and jobs, and when their few free hours are devoted to home and family or organized recreation, then very little time and very few people are left for hanging about.

The declaration of emergency left little doubt what the City Council thought it was: "[We] have observed an extraordinary influx of undesirable and unsanitary visitors to the city, sometimes known as 'hippies,' and find that unless proper regulations are adopted immediately, the use and enjoyment of public property will be jeopardized, if not entirely eliminated." … The public parks and beaches are, in many cases, rendered unfit for normal public use by the unregulated and uncontrolled conduct of the new transients," the declaration said.

Begging is another activity that in most modern cities has been declared illegal. But like hanging about, its reduction (and in some cities, complete disappearance) has probably been the consequence of extralegal forces. The distribution of affluence made possible by industrialization, the development of a welfare state to care for the remaining indigent, and the efforts of the humanitarian, labor, and reform movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were undoubtedly major factors in its demise.

XREF: Connects to conversations about public space regulation and the limits of legal prohibition in shaping social behavior.

QUESTION: The author suggests legality had little to do with begging's decline. Worth questioning whether crackdowns and policing played a larger role in some cities than credited here.

Finally, some note should be made of the reduced necessity for walking in the modern city. This particular activity remains legal, but the extent to which it is approved is questionable. Like other historic necessities (for example, cooking over fire), it has, in the modern world, become largely a recreational activity, indulged in by masochistic cultists. Those people who still indulge in it for a living, such as mail carriers, beat-policemen and night watchmen, are frequently punished with low status, poor pay and the continual threat of attack by unfriendly dogs and people. Who or what are killing walking is a complex matter. The mass-produced automobile is usually assigned the major responsibility, but it is surely being aided and abetted by the areal expansion of the city (making possible wider, straighter streets, and itself engendered by the railroad and trolley), the telegraph, the telephone, and the establishment of relatively reliable government postal systems.

SEED: Walking has shifted from necessity to recreation — a compelling essay angle on how ordinary activities become 'masochistic cults' when they lose utility. XREF: Echoes contemporary debates about walkable cities, Jane Jacobs' critique of autocentric planning, and modern discourse on 15-minute neighborhoods. QUESTION: What other historical necessities have become recreational — and what does their status say about cultural values?

The high-class retail business for which Fifth Avenue is so well known is the most sensitive and delicate organism imaginable, depending, first, on the exclusiveness of the neighborhood; second, on its nearness to the homes of the rich and the large hotels; and, third, on its lack of congestion, especially on sidewalks, so that the customers may not be crowded or jammed in a hurlyburly crowd on their way to and from the different shops. . . . The loft buildings have already invaded the side streets with their hordes of factory employees. If an adequate move were made restricting the occupancy of the buildings so that no manufacturing could be done either on Fifth Avenue or from Madison Avenue over to Sixth Avenue, the matter would be solved. The employees from these loft buildings cannot be controlled. They spend their time-lunch hour and before business-on the avenue, congregating in crowds that are doing more than any other thing to destroy the exclusiveness and desirability of Fifth Avenue.

DEFINE: Articulates the defining conditions of a high-class retail district: exclusive neighborhood, nearness to wealthy homes and hotels, and lack of sidewalk congestion.

XREF: Connects to histories of zoning, urban retail geography, and class-based anxieties over urban public space in early 20th-century New York.

Given the eloquence of the Association's plea, it is not surprising that the desired building-occupancy restrictions became law, thus protecting the inalienable right of the well-to-do to spend their money with- . out having to rub shoulders with the "dangerous classes."

XREF: Connects to redlining and zoning law history; echoes of Richard Rothstein's 'The Color of Law' and the economic segregation roots of American housing policy. QUESTION: Which city and association is this referring to? The context suggests a specific historical case worth identifying for citation.

QUESTION: How directly did the Association's rhetoric map onto the actual statute's provisions, and how openly was class bias acknowledged at the time?

The entire situation was made even more chaotic by the fact that, simultaneously, forces were also operating in the other direction. That is, a good many persons were far less "straight" than they appeared. Dress regulations could be and were enforced in both school and work settings (although they were constantly being challenged in the courts), such that many persons who might wish to express a more "hip" identity were prevented from doing so-at least for part of the day. In addition, many of the politically-oriented young-radical, liberal, and moderate-knowing that their usual appearance was offensive to the people they wished to influence, adopted what were thought to be more uncommittal styles.

XREF: Connects to methodological questions about studying cultural history through material practice versus formal records.

Visible deformities as appearential clues often appear to have a rather different effect. As a number of sociologists have pointed out, some persons in America appear to feel that a handicap renders its bearer totally incompetent. … As such, they feel no hesitation in approaching total strangers to offer unneeded help or to express unwanted curiosity. … This willingness on the part of "normals" to intrude themselves into the affairs of the "stigmatized" (unless the latter is viewed as threatening, a condition we shall consider in a later chapter) most certainly adds to the burden of an already burdensome life

Note that the objection is not to "hippies" per se. They were considered a tourist attraction during the late 1960s when they remained in their out-of-the-way Haight-Ashbury district. The objection is to "hippies" in Union Square, located in the middle of the city's commercial and hotel area.

XREF: Connects to spatial politics and how counterculture is tolerated only when contained, echoing patterns of gentrification and social control.

In a fascinating paper, "On the Demand for Order in Civil Society" (1967), Allan Silver has pointed out that the modern police organization goes back only to the middle of the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, police functions were generally handled by "ordinary, respectable citizens," or, for purposes of internal peace-keeping, by the military. With increasing concentration of large populations in small areas, neither proved very efficient. But with the creation of the police, it became possible to exercise potentially violent supervision over the population by bureaucratic means widely diffused throughout civil society in small and discretionary operations that [were] capable of rapid concentration. … And were it not for the police, the effects of many of the other instruments of spatial order maintenance would be largely vitiated.

DEFINE: Establishes that the police as a bureaucratic, distributed peace-keeping institution is historically recent, not ancient.

And a city's populace does more than simply "buy" bourgeois-produced order. Through their beliefs and understandings and through their actions, however unwitting, they reinforce and sustain it.

XREF: Connects to Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony — how dominant social orders persist through consent rather than coercion.

XREF: Connects to Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony — order maintained not by force but by the everyday consent and participation of the governed.

How does the city dweller know what the information he gathers as he moves through urban public space means? How does he learn to connect certain appearances, locations, or behavior with certain categories of being? The answer is both simple and profound. Like all humans, he is taught. From the moment of birth, he is bombarded with instructions. Breasts mean food. Little girls wear dresses. Big people are adults. Black people are poor (or happy or revolutionaries, or whatever). White people are rich (or dishonest or bosses, or whatever). Nice people don't go there. Nice girls don't do that. Only the best people come to this place.

XREF: Connects to sociological theories of learned perception and cultural conditioning of how people read urban environments.

DEFINE: Defines how city dwellers learn to interpret urban space: through social instruction rather than innate perception.

Restricted coding schemes such as this one are available to only a few people, not only because their usefulness to a wider populace is limited, but also because they are created and perpetuated by word of mouth among networks of persons who know one another personally. Unless learned by someone who has a reason and the means to publicize them more widely (as in this case), they remain the exclusive property of whatever little world gave them birth.

DEFINE: Explains how restricted coding schemes (private/secret languages) are perpetuated and why they stay limited to small groups — via personal transmission networks rather than wider publication.

In the communication of spatial meanings, word-of-mouth instruction, at least in the modern city and at least for some people, appears to play a crucial part. My informants, for example, reported again and again that much of their understanding of the city depended on being told about this or that location or type of location by this or that family member, friend, or acquaintance. As noted in Chapter Four, these same people exhibited a startlingly underdeveloped vocabulary for describing how people looked, but a well-developed vocabulary for describing locations and whom one might expect to find in them.

Second, many behavioral meanings tend also to be culture-specific. They do not travel well and are probably the source of most of the culture-shock that urbanites experience in their interaction -even with city dwellers-in countries other than their own.

XREF: Relates to the reader's likely interest in urban design or intercultural understanding — connects to ideas about proxemics, personal space, and nonverbal communication norms.

In Latin America the interaction distance is much less than it is in the United States. Indeed, people cannot talk comfortably with one another unless they are very close to the distance that evokes either sexual or hostile feelings in the North American. The result is that when they move close, we withdraw and back away. As a consequence, they think we are distant or cold, withdrawn and unfriendly. We, on the other hand, are constantly accusing them of breathing down our necks, crowding us, and spraying our faces.

XREF: Connects to Edward T. Hall's proxemics framework; this appears to be from a related source on cross-cultural communication.

XREF: Relates to intercultural communication theories and proxemics, Edward T. Hall's work.

Third, while there is some explicit teaching of the meaning of behavior to adults (see the next section), much teaching of behavioral meanings occurs outside the awareness of both teacher and student, primarily in the course of childhood socialization. This is particularly the case with "body language" -those nonverbal gestures and movements which humans use to help them communicate with one another. One is often able to read such "language" quite accurately (theatrical productions depend on this ability as do many humans seeking privacy in public, as we shall see in Chapter Seven), but one is frequently not aware how one learned to do so; often not aware how one did so; and sometimes not aware that one did so.

But how does the individual learn to gauge his own abilities without risk? And how does he even develop them without going to new places where he may feel uncomfortable? The answer seems to be that he does not, and this is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of city living.

QUESTION: What does the author propose as a solution or implication of this irony? It suggests cities may shield people from the risk-taking needed for self-development.

In doing so, however, one increases one's vulnerability to disorganization in the face of change. Or, one can take risks, rushing headlong into new places, new people, and new situations, thereby increasing one's self-knowledge and one's skills and, in the long run, finding the city not to be risky at all (see Chapter Eight).

XREF: This parallels the false-scarcity/status-seeking framing from her opening — the safe self-image pursued through conformity trades long-term adaptability for short-term comfort.

In the relative social stability of the preindustrial city, individuals learned about the manners appropriate to their category vis-a-vis other categories simply as a matter of course. Many of these were traditionally prescribed, and deviation (especially on the part of lower-status persons) was likely to be swiftly sanctioned (Sjoberg, 1960:125-26). In Tibetan cities in the past, as an example, "whenever the high political leaders mount or dismount from their horses, '. . . riders are to climb down and salute. Pedestrians should stand aside with their hats in their hands and their tongues hanging out' "

DEFINE: Clarifies how social etiquette functioned in preindustrial urban contexts, where manners were category-prescribed rather than learned casually.

In the fourteenth century, literate Frenchwomen of the emerging urban-based bourgeois might learn what behavior was appropriate for them by reading the Menagier de Paris' instructions to his young wife … When you go to town or to church go suitably accompanied by honourable women according to your estate, and flee suspicious company

QUESTION: Did bourgeois women's conduct literature differ meaningfully from aristocratic or courtly counterparts of the same era?

XREF: Connects to conduct books and courtesy literature tradition that persists through the early modern period, like Castiglione's Courtier.

When you go to town or to church go suitably accompanied by honourable women according to your estate, and flee suspicious company, never allowing any ill famed women to be seen in your presence. And as you go bear your head upright and your eyelids low and without fluttering, and look straight in front of you and about four rods ahead, without looking round at any man or woman to the right or to the left, nor looking up, nor glancing from place to place, nor stopping to speak to anyone on the road.

DEFINE: This is a historical source describing proper conduct for women in public, emphasizing modesty and restricted gaze.

XREF: This connects to broader medieval conduct literature and the disciplined female gaze, resonant with similar prescriptions found in courtesy books and Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry.

It is such a· hodgepodge of persons, worlds, and life-styles that no one's childhood socialization could possibly be adequate to every situation. Nevertheless, as we have seen, this built-in infirmity may largely be neutralized by the simple expedient of avoiding those places for which one is unprepared. And should there be some perceived change in the overall city situation, the modern urbanite can be pretty sure that there will be plenty of people around telling him what to do now.

In neither the preindustrial nor the modern city, then, is the matter of how to act terribly problematic for great numbers of persons. … Rather it is the early industrial city, with the appearential order breaking down and the spatial order only beginning to emerge; it is the early industrial city, with its massive hordes of rural peasants becoming urbanites overnight; it is the early industrial city that is the setting for the massive and explicit teaching of city ways.

XREF: Connects to discussions of urbanization and social disorientation, e.g., Simmel's work on the metropolis and the sociology of cities as places of learning.

DEFINE: Defines the concept of 'city ways' as an explicit, taught skill set that becomes necessary when spatial order hasn't yet replaced the breakdown of apparential order.

In the United States, at least, a good deal of the public teaching was done by those self-appointed experts on "how to act": the authors of etiquette books. A casual purview of such books from 1881 to 1962 reveals both a concentration on explicit instructions for public behavior during the period when the early industrial city in the United States was at its most confusing, and a gradually decreasing concern with these matters as the modern city came into its own.

XREF: Ties to sociological work on social norms and the rise of urban anonymity, similar to Erving Goffman's studies of public behavior.

XREF: Connects to sociological accounts of urban anonymity and the breakdown of small-community behavior norms in industrializing cities.

By the 1940s, the etiquette books were suggesting little more than that the individual in a public setting should make himself as inconspicuous as possible: … Do nothing in company that calls attention to the body or its functions. … Inconspicuousness is the keynote to well-bred behavior in public. … Go your way quietly, taking your place in the crowd unobtrusively, attracting no attention to yourself. … Conduct yourself quietly and unobtrusively. Do not attract attention to yourself and a companion by talking loudly, laughing uproariously, whistling, singing or humming.

Wherever one has established a patron relationship, one can, to a limited degree, find relief from the challenging anonymity of much urban public space. This is not to say that a good deal of urban know-how isn't needed to acquire familiar information in the first place. It most certainly is. But having become a patron, one can begin to relax a bit, to feel at ease, to find pleasure in the development of one's space-bound friendships-and perhaps, in memory at least, to surround the patronized premises with an aura of romance

The patron, however, has more to gain than simply a reduction in anonymity and an increase in short-term pleasure. By reason of having established semipersonal relationships with the setting's employees, the patron is in a position to gain acquiescence, even assistance, in utilizing the setting for purposes other than those for which it is overtly intended. He may, for example, be able to take a respite from his busy rounds on the comfortable bar stool of his favorite bar without being required to buy a drink. He may use the corner newsstand as a shelter from a sudden downpour.

Despite the cozy relationship which the patron may establish with a familiarly known locale, he cannot truly be said to have created a home territory. That distinction belongs to the resident, who, by dint of not only using the locale regularly but using it on most occasions for long periods of time, acquires for himself an intimate knowledge of all there is to know and a set of privileges that goes with such mastery.

DEFINE: Distinguishes 'home territory' from mere frequent patronage — residency confers intimate knowledge and privileges that patronage cannot.

DEFINE: Distinguishes home territory from mere familiarity: mastery and privileges earned through extended, regular use define true residence.

Becoming a resident is a time-consuming process. It requires that the individual hang about some public space for long and regular periods. Dropping in now and then may do for the customer, stopping by briefly three times a week may do for the patron, but becoming and remaining a resident is almost a full-time job. In fact, for some people, it is a full-time job and they constitute one type of resident: the public space employee. The other type of resident achieves his status avocationally rather than vocationally; these are the colonizers. As might be expected, given the long hours required, colonizers tend primarily to be drawn from the ranks of our old acquaintances: the organizationally unaffiliated floaters.

DEFINE: Distinguishes residents from customers and patrons by time investment, and introduces the subcategories of public space employees and colonizers. XREF: Connects to Oldenburg's 'third place' concept and sociology of urban public life.

Whether one, two, or all three of these characteristics are exhibited to a greater or lesser degree, depends on a number of additional factors. These include such matters as whether the resident is an employee or a colonizer; whether he becomes a resident entirely on his own, or as part of a group; and whether the exhibition of the characteristic depends upon the support or tacit approval of others-residents, patrons, customers, or first-timers.

DEFINE: Clarifies that the three resident characteristics discussed earlier are not fixed but modulated by circumstantial factors.

In contrast, colonizers are, almost by definition, devoting the major portion of their time to the pursuit of private purposes. They have no other reason for hanging around. In contemporary American cities, for example, it is not unusual for bus depots to be heavily populated by aged pensioners who have no intention of taking a bus. Instead, the depot is used as a home-away-from-home; its colonizers arriving early in the morning, coming and going throughout the day and leaving only at night.

Some old people come and go [from the New York Port Authority bus terminal near Times Square] like characters in a dream, having fixed roles to play. Two are known as "the lovers." They come in separately, meet, sit and hold hands a while, then leave.

FICTION: The image of people who meet, hold hands, then leave is a resonant narrative scene — could inspire a story about strangers whose only connection is a scheduled moment of intimacy in a public space.

In each of these instances, the individual, lacking the tacit approval of those in charge, was required to act in such a way as to suggest that his use of the setting was a legitimate one-he was required to act, in effect, as if he were in a public place.

DEFINE: This illustrates how individuals without tacit approval must 'perform' legitimacy, an informal rule distinguishing public from private/semi-private settings.

In contrast, colonizers blessed with approval need be prepared for no such performances. They are free, rather, to behave (at least within limits) as if they were in the privacy of their own homes. … No one watching could possibly assume their presence was in any way related to the hurry-up business of travel. They make no bones about the fact that they know one another, often hailing each other by first name across the room. When a pensioner sits down to take a nap, he does so purposefully, settling himself as comfortably as possible, making no attempt to suggest that the resulting nap is accidental. Their dress is casual, often sloppy, usually wrinkled, although most generally clean. A few do affect a suit and tie, sometimes even a hat, but the various items of apparel seldom match, and no one would be likely to take them for traveling businessmen.

XREF: Connects to sociological concepts of territories and comfort zones — how people stake claims to public space through behavioral markers.

Residents may help to make such assumptions tenable relative to all sorts of public space. The resident is, after all, on home ground and the integrity of a human's home is rarely violated with impunity. … You can take a midnight stroll through Bhendi Bazaar [in Bombay] without any fear. Sidewalk dwellers sleeping on their rickety rope cots will guarantee your safety from hoodlums.

XREF: Ties to Jane Jacobs' 'eyes on the street' concept and broken-windows theories of neighborhood safety.

XREF: Connects to Jane Jacobs' 'eyes on the street' theory of informal social control and safety through occupation.

This paradox is even more apparent relative to residents, particularly resident colonizers. On the one hand, the establishment of home territories contributes greatly to the spatial segregation of persons. This bar is taken over by homosexuals, that cafeteria by elderly ladies, this hot dog stand by motorcycle buffs, that section of the park by mothers with small children, and so forth. Through the unplanned, uncoordinated actions of all these individuals and groups, the pervasive ethic of the modern city that there is a place for everyone (and everything) and that everyone (and everything) should be in its place is strengthened.

In the contemporary United States, those which do the best imitations appear to be ethnic neighborhoods. Initially established to provide mutual assistance and support among immigrants who knew neither the language nor the ways of their adopted land, these little enclaves have survived the assaults of the years. Despite mobility, despite the move to the suburbs, despite urban renewal, despite invasion by other groups, here and there they can still be found, weakened, bleeding, perhaps dying, and yet, still intact. To the degree that they are successful in maintaining both their existence and their integrity, village neighborhoods make it possible for at least some of their inhabitants not only to avoid the world of strangers, but to avoid even learning how to operate in a world of strangers. For these protected few (most usually, women and those able to work and live within the boundaries), to know another is still to know him personally.

The function of the kindred can be understood only when it is realized that long standing residence is the usual thing. Fifty-three percent of the people in the general sample were born in Bethnal Green, and over half those not born locally had lived in the borough for more than fifteen years. Most people have therefore had time to get to know plenty of other local inhabitants. They share the same background. The people they see when they go out for a walk are people they played with as children.

XREF: Connects to the kindred concept being explained; most locals were born there, so childhood acquaintances become lifelong neighbors.

XREF: Connects to the broader study of community cohesion and how residential stability breeds kinship-like bonds.

As the above passage suggests, in any particular public space when a group is sufficiently large, there is created for the individuals who make it up an area of private space. That is, a sufficiently large group provides for its members a kind of mobile "home territory" which they may move about with them from setting to setting. This is possible because a group is (by definition) made up of persons who know one another well and who identify with one another and who thus reciprocally ensure mutual protection and self-confirmation.

DEFINE: Defines how a sufficiently large group functions as a portable 'home territory' through mutual recognition and protection.

DEFINE: Defines how a large, well-acquainted group functions as a portable 'home territory' in public spaces via mutual protection and self-confirmation.

For example, if the others in the setting form a group larger than the one of which the individual is a member, his own group may have little success in shielding him. Thus, I once observed a group of seven military prisoners, handcuffed together in subgroups of two or three, enter an airport terminal, suffering from acute embarrassment and humiliation. Heads were lowered, eyes were averted from others in the setting, faces were pale and strained, despite an obvious attempt to act unconcerned. When their three military guards ordered them to sit, all adjusted their postures so as to blot out any view of the handcuffs from all but the nearest or most attentive observers. While the size of the prisoner group was fairly large, the fact that they were quite obviously prisoners pushed all others in the setting into a group of nonprisoners.

DEFINE: Illustrates how group alignment in a setting depends on whether one's group outnumbers or is outnumbered by others present.

What constitutes "sufficiently large," however, will vary depending upon a number of other factors such as the size of other groups also present, the dimensions of the space itself, or the amount of leeway allowed by the setting in what is considered acceptable behavior. … Finally, the range of behavior thought to be permissible in the setting may also affect how large a group is required to create a sense of being in home territory. Only a very large group, for example, would risk loud talk and laughter in a church, while a much smaller group would feel quite free to exhibit similar behavior on a city bus.

Members of groups, in fact, tend to exhibit behavior similar to that of residents. They use public space with abandon, in such a way that, for example, a group of adolescents can choose to play running games in an air terminal. They feel free to indulge in backstage behavior, calling each other by name, yelling at one another across the expanse of the setting, using obscene language and laughing loudly at private jokes. And they express proprietary attitudes. If their numbers are plentiful enough, they may even force others to depart, as when the overflow from a convention invades a city's nightspots.

Yet city dwellers often have occasion to venture out alone (or, with one or two others, but we shall concentrate mainly on the loner) into the world of strangers-into the public space of the urban settlement. Surely, if there is any urbanite who cannot "avoid" the city, who is incapable of privatizing its public space, it is this lone individual. But no, even in this situation, there are things that can be done. (In fact, most of the instructing in "how to act" in the city, discussed in Chapter Five, is precisely instructing in how to act under these circumstances.) The lone individual cannot transform the character of public space. He can, however, transform the character of his social psychological relationship to that space. By utilizing body management-by controlling gestures, facial expressions, movements, and so on-the individual can create around himself a symbolic shield of privacy. He can, that is, move through public space in such a way as to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, while simultaneously communicating to anyone who might happen to look that he is definitely not open to interaction.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of a 'symbolic shield of privacy' — body management strategies that deter interaction in public space.

Americans seem to feel constrained to take readings as quickly as possible and to do so in such a way as to suggest that they are not doing so. One might think that under the barrage of masses of new stimuli, the most sensible procedure would be to pause for a few moments just inside the setting in order to most adequately and efficiently assess the physical layout. But such frank, unabashed assessments are rarely observed. To prolong the period in which one is in view of all those already settled within the setting is to prolong the period of disadvantage. The approach sequence is difficult enough (since during it the individual is "in the spotlight," as it were) even at its briefest; to prolong it is to prolong a period where the slightest error is visible to the largest number.

Persons who avoid taking a reading at all may be said to have reached a position whenever they come to a halt, or, in the case of those backing in, whenever they turn around. They are by this time far enough into the setting so that they may simply stop and stand without being conspicuous. The spotlight is off once the approach has been completed, although the length of the approach area will vary from setting to setting.

DEFINE: Explains the technical term 'reading' in Erving Goffman's spatial-behavior framework, where reaching a position ends the socially conspicuous approach phase.

As the reader has probably already noted, to utilize body management as a device for avoiding the city, the urbanite is required to call upon a considerable amount of city know-how. He must not only understand the meanings of various body movements, positions, and so forth; he must have the skills to apply this understanding to his own behavior. That all this skill should be put to such a negative use is perhaps one of the great ironies of city life.

SEED: Angle: the ironic inversion where urban competence is spent on withdrawal rather than engagement — a piece on how city skills serve avoidance.

Note that this absorption with props functions to keep the eyes occupied so that one does not have to be concerned with eye contact (a type of contact which body-management users take great pains to avoid). And the busyness suggests to those about that here is a person who has many important things to do and is therefore not a person with whom one should attempt any interaction.

DEFINE: Explains the function of prop absorption for body-management users as social signaling.

The Investigator. Less confining in body movement than either of the previous styles, the Investigator stance nevertheless protects those who utilize it from eye contact and undesired interaction. Investigators (primarily mature-late thirties or older-males) are quite as absorbed and thus unapproachable as Nesters. But unlike Nesters, the objects of their absorption are not personal props but the various facilities of the setting itself.

XREF: Connects to the Nester stance described earlier in the same taxonomy of unapproachable public behaviors.

XREF: Connects to the earlier Nester stance described in this same taxonomy of body language.

Keep oneself apart. A void seating oneself in such a way as to suggest to a strange other that one wishes to interact. In making one's decision, bear in mind that the distance which signals a desire for interaction will vary according to such simultaneously operating factors as the following. (1) How much seating there is to choose from: If a lunch counter is crowded, one may sit anywhere. If it has only one customer, do not sit next to that person but choose a seat some distance away. (2) One's own sex and the sex of the person one will sit next to: It appears to be the case that whenever the age and sex of two strangers are such that one might appear sexually attractive to the other, the distance required to ensure that no interaction signal is given is greater than if no sexual attraction potential obtains. (3) Whether the person one will sit next to is alone or with others: If the person is part of a group, one may sit closer than if the person is alone. However, if the area is generally empty, sitting close to the group may still be interpreted as "homing in." Factor number (1) must be kept in mind at all times. (4) The use to which the particular public space is put: In a highly task-oriented setting like a library, one may sit closer to another with impunity than in the more sociable atmosphere of a bar. (5) The physical arrangement of the setting and the potential this holds for eye contact: Some settings are arranged so that to sit in a given spot is to be placed in the position of having to look at the person seated opposite. Unless one has some personal prop such as a book or magazine which can be used to cut off the line of vision, such positions should be avoided. The following example suggests the interrelation between one's seating decision and the potential for eye contact:

XREF: Connects to proxemics research by Edward T. Hall on interpersonal spatial zones.

XREF: Connects to proxemics work by Edward T. Hall on personal space and how cultural and situational factors govern physical distance in social interaction.

I just swing my purse and walk and have a good time. I don't really feel like a lot of people really feel, strange and encumbered, because it's such a big place. I really like it .... It's so intriguing, there's always something around the corner that you find and I like to experience it, a lot of times by myself. You also have the possibility of encounters with different people when you're alone. I was thinking when I'm in public places by myself, I'm always apprehensive at the stan of it and then once I become involved in it and I can interact with people, immediately it's smoothed over; just to meet someone, make a contact, establish some kind of play between you, then I'm fine; but it's always the initial step of stepping into it that is always difficult when you go into a strange place.

QUESTION: Does this anxiety-about-familiarity dynamic describe a general social psychological pattern worth researching further?

The dominating trait of the urbane hero is his coolness. No matter where he goes in the city (and he goes everywhere), no matter whom he encounters (and he encounters everyone), he is always unft.ustered, at ease, and in command. He is never thrown by diversity, whether it be diversity in the way people look or diversity in the way they behave.

A secondary trait is tolerance. He not only is not thrown by diversity, he relishes it, finding in his city's wide array of life-styles, a source of genuine personal pleasure. While he is "justly angered" with cruelty, the exploitive use of power, and unfair physical violence, he looks with amusement and a certain fondness on the minor vices, his own or those of his fellow urbanites. He couples and tempers this tolerance, however, with toughness. He understands and is willing to accept that life, particularly urban life, is struggle, is conflict, is sometimes pain.

Passing is the most encompassing of the identity games. Not only the strangers one encounters in public are deceived but one's friends and acquaintances, as well. It is also the most risky. There is always the chance that friends and acquaintances will spot inconsistencies and guess the "truth" or that someone who "knew one when" will show up and "blow one's cover." … Because this is such a familiar phenomenon, I shall not consider it further, except to point out that it is a game far more easily played in public space amidst strangers than in private space amidst friends. As with all sorts of deception, the less information available to others, the greater the chance for success.

Its most skilled players were to be found among the various beggars of the preindustrial city. Masters of the appearential order, these ingenious individuals "practiced to deceive" in any way that seemed likely to increase their take. And the ways that seemed most likely primarily involved some manipulation of identity. Many of the beggars of the preindustrial city were, of course, exactly what they appeared. But the "others" were something else again. There were those, for example, who stood around crying a good deal, pretending to be "helpless orphans." There were those who "passed themselves off as merchants ruined by war, by fire or by having been robbed on the highway."

XREF: Connects to Erving Goffman's work on the presentation of self and impression management in everyday life.

An early seventeenth century writer describes a not uncommon scene in French cities of the time: … "Rogues ... and others, who have all day been cripples, maimed, dropsical, and beset with every sort of bodily ailment, come home at night, carrying under their arms a sirloin of beef, a joint of veal, or a leg of mutton, not forgetting to hang a bottle of wine to their belt, and, on entering the court, they throw aside their crutches, resume their healthy and lusty appearance, and, in imitation of the ancient Bacchanalian revelries, dance all kinds of dances with their trophies in their hands, whilst the host is preparing their suppers. Can there be a greater miracle than is to be seen in this court, where the maimed walk upright?"

QUESTION: How widespread was this practice of feigning disability in early modern Europe, and how did authorities respond?

Passing and performing are both rather serious identity games. They encompass major portions of the individual's life round and the stakes involved are frequently rather high. The consequences of losing these games, (that is, being "unmasked") include such unpleasant experiences as imprisonment, job loss, physical and mental abuse, status reduction, and so forth. Fortunately for those urbanites with a bent for adventure but a distaste for catastrophe, there is another option. Pretending is a game that may be played only sporadically and then only for short periods of time. The most serious consequence of failure is mild embarrassment, and that is unlikely to be of long duration.

DEFINE: Distinguishes 'pretending' from 'passing' and 'performing' as identity games with lower stakes and intermittent commitment.

XREF: As opposed to the high stakes of passing and performing, which can involve imprisonment or job loss — a notable contrast with usual framing of identity games as serious.

Sometimes the game is played in a more subtle, a more inward manner. I refer here to the expression of identity that accompanies being present in the appropriate location and I or dressing for the pan. Here the individual makes no verbal claim to the identity in question. Nor does he receive any verbal ratification for it. Instead, his knowledge of urban meanings allows him to assume that if he appears in a cenain place and/ or in a certain way, those about him will make the appropriate "identification" and this "assumed" ratification is sufficient. The shy young man, ill at ease and unsuccessful with women, can, at least for a moment, "be" the swinger of his secret dreams by the simple expedient of standing about in a body bar "looking cool."

XREF: Connects to Goffman's dramaturgical sociology — the presentation of self backstage, where identity claims are made implicitly rather than through verbal assertion.

I want here to consider only two kinds of interactional games, although presumably there are many more. We shall look first at haggling, then at hustling.

In the haggling process the seller sizes up the customer by his dress and mannerisms to determine whether the latter has any notion of the "real value" of the article in question and what he is probably able to pay. The seller then states a price considerably higher than what he expects to receive. The buyer in turn offers an amount considerably less than he expects to pay. Gradually each party raises or lowers the figure, as the case may be, until a meeting point is reached.

With the general rationalization of business in the modern city, haggling, in its pure form, has largely disappeared. Many contemporary urbanites, even those with great knowledge of, and skills in, city ways, cannot play this game-as any number of tourists have discovered to their sorrow.

SEED: Could explore how the decline of haggling reflects broader loss of spontaneous social negotiation skills in city life.

Hustling on the other hand, is alive and well. The goals of hustling are many and varied; its essence, however, is to get the other to do what one wants him to do without his being aware of just what that is.

DEFINE: Defines hustling by its essence: getting another to act as one wishes without their awareness.

One of Bertha's favorite strategies [to gain access to potential converts for the millenarian sect of which she was a member] was to patronize coffee shops and snack bars and to feign the appearance of the single girl lingering long over her coffee. By unabashedly making eye contact and acknowledging smiles, she invited men to initiate access to her. She recognized the sexual assumptions of these contacts and consciously sought to exploit them [for her religious group]. She would explain the male's conduct to him in veiled religious terms, noting that many people were seeking for something today. The play between her and her erstwhile partner typically culminated in an invitation to dinner.

XREF: Connects to research on recruitment manipulation tactics in high-control religious groups and the modern 'flirty fishing' practice of the Children of God sect.

QUESTION: How common was this recruiting tactic in millenarian sects, and was Bertha's method documented elsewhere?

The risk of making such an opening is not really great. At most the other may simply ignore one, or tell one to “buzz off.” But these are unpleasant and embarrassing experiences and presumably ones the individual would wish to avoid. (Note that those individuals who wish to engage in unconventional gaming must make the same initial decision. After the opening, however, these persons are involved in more complex interaction calling for much greater skill than is he who only wants to engage in some conventional talk.)

Desirability. In determining desirability, the individual is “identifying” the other and calculating whether this person, as identified, is someone he or she really wants to talk with. The calculation, like the identification, is based on the information received from the intersection of cues relative to the other's location, appearance, 11 and behavior, but is then coupled with the individual's own mood and purposes. Thus, for example, young unattached male informants invariably report that the people they are most likely to talk to in public are young attractive females. Skid row bums, persons obviously drunk, and persons acting “oddly” are frequently listed as persons one prefers not to talk to, although this latter is not an invariable rule. One young man who was enrolled in a social psychology class, reported that he enjoyed talking to people everyone else was avoiding so as to “experiment with what would happen.”

XREF: Relates to Goffman's dramaturgical sociology and stranger-interaction microsociology — the initial assessment phase of encountering others.

In addition, whenever the everyday routine is disrupted, whenever conditions are collectively defined as extraordinary, almost all stranger interaction is expected and legitimized. An electrical blackout may be one such “disruption”: … It seemed to me that the blackout quite literally transformed the people of New York. Ordinarily smug and comfortable in the high hives of the city where they live and work, they are largely strangers to one another when the lights are on. In the darkness they emerged not as shadows, but far warmer and more substantial than usual. Stripped of the anonymity that goes with full illumination, they became humans conscious of and concerned about the other humans around them. (L. Wainwright, “A Dark Night to Remember,” Life, November 23, 1965:35)

XREF: Connects to the broader literature on extraordinary-togetherness and disaster sociology — how breakdowns of routine surface latent generosity. QUESTION: Does this observed warmth generalize beyond romanticized 1965 reporting, or does it discount real examples of panic and looting during blackouts?

A determination that any given encounter would not be legitimate does not necessarily lead to a negative decision. If it did, strangers would rarely talk to one another. Such a determination is simply thrown into the hopper and weighed against desirability and appropriateness.

A young woman is seated in the very last seat of a bus; the seat extends the entire width of the bus. She has been on the bus since it started out from the depot and took the seat she now occupies at the time she boarded. After the bus has been traveling for some five minutes, it stops at an intersection and a working class middle-aged male comes aboard. After paying the driver, he moves toward the rear, and as he is about to reach the back seat, he looks at the woman seated there and says, “This is my favorite place. Will I be in the way?” The woman smiles and replies that of course he will not. He seats himself on the same seat but somewhat to the left of her, next to the window. During the next twenty or thirty minutes they engage in on again, off again conversation. … The important thing to note here is that despite the not infrequent concern of females with keeping themselves aloof from surrounding males, this young woman was quite willing to engage the older man in conversation. With the words, “This is my favorite place,” he made it very clear that he was the host and she the visitor.

DEFINE: Introduces the notion of 'host/visitor' framing in shared physical space, where claiming a spot grants conversational license.

In assessing the appropriateness of initiating an encounter, the individual must consider not only his own relationship to the locale in question but such other matters as the openness to interaction being signaled by the other. Thus, for example, one woman reported that she hated to eat alone and enjoyed talking to strangers in restaurants. However, if the person whose table she joined (in a cafeteria, where lone persons must often sit with strangers) never looked at her when she sat down, remaining engrossed in his or her food or book or whatever, her response was to say nothing, granting him his "right" to be left alone.

DEFINE: Illuminates the subtle cues that govern whether approaching a stranger is appropriate, using restaurant-seating as a concrete example.

Even in situations of fully legitimized encounters, body language may suggest that interaction is inappropriate, as with a store clerk who reported that she could tell just by the way persons handled themselves whether or not they wanted to be waited on.

In the winter of 1962-3, Elmer and Alfred attempted access in libraries and museums. Elmer liked to station himself near the psychology section of a library, observe in what books people were browsing, and wander about the reading rooms noting what books were being read. Upon finding a person involved in a book imagined to be "cosmic" in concern (books on psychology, religion or world affairs), he would stay close by the person, waiting for an occurrence that could bring about a conversation. Elmer did much looking but he rarely found an opportunity to talk and often complained about the difficulties of striking up a conversation with strangers. Access was equally difficult in museums.

XREF: Relates to research on social access and participant observation methods.

There is a marvelous paradox in all this. As we have seen in this and the preceding three chapters, city dwellers work very hard at acquiring urban know-how so that they may either avoid the city altogether or adventure in it with a minimum of risk. And yet, here are these two improbable adventurers, hicks and eccentrics, illiterate in, or inattentive to, city ways. And what is their reward? Sometimes, at least, friendliness, protection, normalization. The most inept participants in the world of strangers are, on occasion, its most pampered citizens.

SEED: An article angle: unexpected rewards of vulnerability and incompetence in unfamiliar settings — why being a novice can elicit generosity from strangers.

I am not suggesting that some alternative, some more humane alternative, to either the appearential or spatial order cannot be found. I am suggesting, however, that utopian plans for the heavenly city must, if they are to be viable, contain within them a heavy dose of social psychological realism about the very unheavenly creatures who will be its inhabitants.

QUESTION: What specific psychological traits would a realistic utopia have to accommodate? This hints at a deeper tension between ideal systems and human imperfection worth exploring.

SEED: An essay contrasting grand utopian designs with the psychological constraints of actual human nature could explore how ideals fail without accounting for self-interest, fear, and cognitive limits.

To say that a people are not equipped to deal with strangers routinely is not to say that they are not equipped to deal with them at all or are equipped to do so only with great difficulty. As long as strangers appear infrequently, there is no need for routine handling and thus, the lack of a capacity for it poses no difficulty. One might even argue that killing the stranger, for example, not an uncommon response in times past, was a rather efficient method of "dealing with" unwanted visitors. It is only when strangers appear routinely among a people unarmed with routine handling procedures that we can begin to talk meaningfully about "difficulties."

DEFINE: Defines when the absence of a capacity to handle strangers becomes a genuine problem — only under conditions of routine, frequent encounters.

Until very recently, this new social situation was one which only a minuscule proportion of the earth's population ever had to face. Massive urbanization is a very new phenomenon. Even in the great city-building civilizations of the Mediterranean area, most people went about· their business encased in the kinds of little personal worlds described above.

QUESTION: What specific timelines or thresholds mark the shift to mass urbanization, and how quickly did it accelerate?

In a personal communication, Gerald Suttles has suggested that the "average individual" might well be able to recognize as many as several thousand persons. However, social groupings must be engineered such that "the least clever at recognition can also negotiate in a known social world." Consequently, the actual size of extant personal worlds may be poor indicators of the human capacity for personal knowing.

XREF: Relates to Dunbar's number and social brain hypothesis research on the cognitive limits of social group size.

XREF: Connects to Dunbar's number and social brain hypothesis literature on group size limits.

Social life in the large city as compared to the towns shows a great preponderance of occasions to see rather than hear people. Before the appearance of omnibuses, railroads, and street cars in the nineteenth century, men were not in a situation where for periods of minutes or hours they could or must look at each other without talking to one another. Modern social life increases in ever growing degree the role of mere visual impression which always characterizes the preponderant part of all sense relationships between man and man and must place social attitudes and feelings upon an entirely changed basis.

XREF: Connects to contemporary studies of urban anonymity, surveillance, and eye contact in public transit. Resonates with Goffman's work on civil inattention and modern discussions of strangers sharing subway cars.

XREF: Connects to Simmel's broader analysis of metropolitan life and the blasé attitude, and to contemporary debates about how smartphones and public transit shape face-to-face social dynamics.

From the point of view of the elites, the most distasteful aspect of this appropriation has probably always been that he who takes on the dress may also, in the anonymous city, decide to take on the "rights." … A very impudent young fellow, a journeyman cabinet maker, upon the presumption of a ruffled shirt, and a gold button and loop to his hat, took the liberty of accosting two ladies of fashion in the Park last Tuesday evening, and was not a little vehement in his declaration of a prodigous passion to one of them, who he earnestly begged to favour him with an assignation.

XREF: Class-based anxiety over impersonation of rank via clothing — echoes the fop of Restoration drama and later 19th-century worries about 'passing'.

XREF: Connects to themes of clothing as social performance and status signaling in urban anonymity.

As van den Berghe (1970) has noted, some form of distance is a "functional prerequisite in any social situation involving authority, hierarchy or stratification." Where distance is not maintained socially, through etiquette or sumptory laws, for example, it can be maintained spatially, through segregation.

XREF: Connects to ideas about social hierarchy, ritual, and Goffman's work on face and social interaction. Also ties into urban segregation literature.

QUESTION: What does this imply about egalitarian or peer relationships that downplay distance? Is distance always present in authority regardless of formality?

From another point of view, however, one might argue that it matters a great deal; that, in fact, the urbanite loses much by avoiding areas incorrectly defined as dangerous. Freedom of movement is lost. The area in which one may pursue urban adventures (see Chapter Eight) is constricted. The sense of being "at home" in all parts of the city is forgone.

XREF: Connects to urban sociology, fear-of-crime literature, and the broader debate on crime perception versus reality. QUESTION: What evidence shows these areas are incorrectly defined as dangerous, and how does misperception form?

XREF: Connects to urban sociology and Jane Jacobs-style arguments about cities, fear, and the value of everyday street life.

In the contemporary United States, franchising greatly lessens the risk of generalizing from one experienced location to others "of its type." Having ever been to a Howard Johnson's, Holiday Inn, or McDonald's, for example, the individual can know with great certainty just what to expect in another one.

XREF: Connects to the broader context about the confidence/venture heuristics discussed in this work — the idea that franchising reduces the need for first-hand venture since prior experience generalizes reliably.

The fact that the spatial order makes the learning of locational meanings possible, does not, of course, guarantee how or if they will be learned. The size, shape, and number of the "locational maps" that city dwellers carry about in their heads obviously vary enormously from individual to individual. At one extreme is the individual for whom "the city" consists of a few well-understood streets-the surrounding area a large blank space on his single map. At the other extreme is the individual who carries in his head extremely detailed maps of locational meanings for many cities.

XREF: Connects to cognitive mapping work by Kevin Lynch and urban planning theory on how individuals internalize spatial layouts.

The most effective method for minimizing stranger contact would, of course, be to remain at home. But this option is not available to many persons, and by those to whom it is available (for example, young mothers), it is not usually seen as particularly desirable.

If a setting is particularly crowded or noisy, for example, the individual may have more leeway in expressiveness than if the setting is quiet and contains only a few inhabitants. A fit of coughing is enough to attract attention in a library reading room; it is likely to go totally unnoticed at a football game when the crowd is screaming. So, too, the expected activities of a setting will alter the ambience of any particular act. Thus, accidentally catching another customer's eye in a drug store is less fraught with meaning than the same occurrence in a pick-up bar

XREF: Connects to Goffman's dramaturgical framing and situational logic, where setting context shapes permissible behavior.

XREF: Connects to Goffman's dramaturgical sociology and situational framing theories about how context shapes behavior and meaning.

The eye cannot take unless at the same time it gives. The eye of the person discloses his own soul when he seeks to uncover that of another. What occurs in this direct mutual glance represents the most perfect reciprocity in the entire field of human relationships.

DEFINE: Framing the mutual glance as the highest form of reciprocity, defining the exchange between eyes as simultaneously giving and taking.

Sherlock Holmes was once called upon to locate a well-to-do English businessman who had mysteriously disappeared. In doing so, he also discovered the nature of the gentleman's business: begging. Having once tried it for a short period in order to collect material for a story, he had found it so rewarding that he was evermore loath to set his hand to more demanding and less lucrative occupations.

QUESTION: Was this a real phenomenon in Victorian England, or is it Doyle's comic exaggeration for the story?