ABSTRACT
Few concepts in urban studies aspire to touch on urban condition quite like 'urbanity'. The concepts typically found in urban theory range from everyday notion of urbanity as 'urban civility' to the focus on objective relations between the configuration of urban space and use of public space, and to the spatial conditions of an apparent 'urban vitality'. Precisely for that, urbanity is a dialogical construction: it involves others; it can only fully emerge with the other. An attempt at understanding urbanity as a form of experience of the world around us involves approaching a particular form of the adherence of the fabric of space and time impregnating our perceptions and actions – 'a sense of how the urban is felt'. Despite descriptions of a regularity of the 'homogenous time' of modernity, philosophy – especially through the work of Henri Bergson – and works in cultural studies have gradually recognised that people's perceptions and experiences of the world involve distinct temporalities.
