Urban Trust. The Metropolis and Our Public Life

Why is it important to rub shoulders with people whom we may never get to know? Why is wasting time in the presence of urban strangers good for our world, and for us, citizens in this world? What is the value of sites where we interact face-to-face with other citizens and with state agents on the level of ‘the street’? Urban Trust is a book for anyone interested in the social importance of being with other people whom we do not know in urban sites and institutions. Its argument is that cohesive, just and democratic cities require thrown-togetherness: settings for unplanned, casual and often seemingly superficial fluid encounters between citizens and between citizens and state agents on the street-level. Such cities also require institutions that we share with others outside our inner circle. People find, of course, peace of mind in efficient organization of daily routines by ordering groceries online or zooming into school’s parental meeting. They may enjoy cuddling up on the sofa with their beloved. But insulating practices shield established resource-rich urban citizens in inwardly oriented circles. Such shielding reduces the everyday relevance of ‘the others’ to the questions whether the rented car, the ordered dinner or the delivery of a new dress arrives as quickly as the app has promised. This book discusses three consequences. First, we fail to mutually engage in practices of caring and trusting with humans who are geographically close but socially distant. Second, it affects the qualities of encounters on the street level, in citizen-state relations. It is here that we hear stories of an ‘uncaring’ state, and trust is not a given. It is here, too, that attempts to impose control where public space is thought to lack civic morality fail to produce democratic, just and cohesive cities. Experiences that people make in their cities, this book shows, contribute to a retreat in inwardly oriented circles, while other parts of the city become defined as unsafe. Third, the retreat from public space of citizen-citizen relations across categories of race, class, gender and sexuality in an increasingly unequal socio-economic structure opens space for brutalization, which may further strengthen such retreat. Combining stories from over twenty years of empirical studies in Europe and the USA with more general ideas or ‘theory’, the book shows that we need the thrown-togetherness in urban sites and institutions to socialize by experiences towards a civic morality. The book invites us to take a second look what we are doing to our metropolitan public life in times of digitalization of our communication, community and social control.