ABSTRACT
The city is often portrayed as a beacon of refuge from the conditions of servitude, and thus a social space that represents freedom and cosmopolitanism – the birthplace of both positive freedoms and the practices of political autonomy, as well as the development of cultures of hospitality (Berman, 1982; Derrida, 2000). The city, however, because it brings strangers together, can produce or illicit different imaginings and emotional economies, for example those of anxiety and fear brought about by the proximity of others. This fear and anxiety occur not simply because of difference, but also out of the sense of ‘brushing past’, of having contact with that which is unfamiliar, strange and thus viewed as potentially dangerous. This chapter explores this constellation of fear and the social forces,
assumptions and images that construct it.1 The chapter’s underlying presupposition is that there are many locations for fear that run parallel to one another in modernity, one of which will be discussed here – the social imaginary of the city. The aim of the chapter is to walk, not simply on ‘the wild side’, but also on the negative one, that is, to explore even momentarily an aspect that is available to all of us in a context that may prompt, promote and even foster this particular dimension of the human soul. This is not an attempt, as Judith Shklar would say, of putting cruelty first, but at least of acknowledging it, how it might be mobilised out of an economy of affects, of acknowledging a complexity of the human condition (Shklar, 1984; Rundell, 2013a). The chapter begins by exploring two images and ideas of the city, around
which the social theoretical tradition has revolved, both of which are linked in some way to its idealisation in both positive and negative terms. One image, presented by Weber, constructs the city as a space for the circulation of freedoms, which can be monopolised or contested, that is a space for power, politics and economic exchange. Another image is portrayed, for example more negatively, by Simmel in his study of the metropolis. The metropolis opens up the problematic of fear and the city through the image of the stranger. The image of the stranger invariably accompanies the one of the alien, as someone who, while coming to live in the city appears always as the outsider, and thus is
always at hand as a subject of and for fear. This apparent coexistence between freedom and the known, and the alien and the unknown generates the apparent inner tension or unease of city life.2
