ABSTRACT
My ultimate goal has been to use this concept for understanding and characterising the city as a space for encounter, social mix and the unexpected; as an outcome of middle-class first and capitalist spatialisations later; or as a product of technologies meant to overcome the cyclic rural rhythm, which develop agency of their own. All three understandings involve a principle of absence, understood as space unclaimed, available for appropriation. Social mix can take place only between spaces laid out for class, age, gender or race: in the thickness of socio-spatial boundaries. The spaces of the middle classes also wedge into the interstices between the ruling and popular classes (Fraser 1990, p. 61; Lefebvre 2000, p. 74), the private being its main structuring tool in fluid and contested spaces between the domestic and the streets (cf. Sennett 1973; Staeheli and Mitchell 2008). Finally, the city is the materialisation of the otherwise-transient speech and action, which prompt social change from the gaps between synchronic and diachronic timeframes (Arendt 1958, 1963).
