ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters in this book. The book provides a much needed conceptual reflection, from different theoretical standpoints, of what an encounter is, and a thoughtful interrogation of what encounter might offer to discussions of urban politics and the promotion of a stronger urban commons. In dealing with the city, it also confronts the changing nature of encounters and the expanding ways in which researchers understand them. The book focuses on the importance of the non-human, in a variety of forms, to both the nature and politics of urban encounter. The challenge of understanding urban encounters - understanding both the city through encounters and the political potential of encounters - is then a challenge of listening to and addressing the city that is already there. Encounters with difference would occasionally serve to disrupt that sense of space, but more often than not they served to reinforce it.
