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Summoned by Iddo Tadory

• 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork living in Melrose-La Brea area of Hollywood

• Large Orthodox Jewish community

• A theory of religious “summoning”

  • “A membership category can be thought of as an ‘identification’, a specific category of personhood that is being evoked, constructed, and sustained in interaction” (9)

• Variability in summoning

  • as Jews (during anti-semitic interactions), as Orthodox (questions about kosher), sometimes as an Orthodox man/woman, etc.

• “What kind of person am I?

• What kind of Orthodox Jew?

summoning

• theory of identity formation

  • how the context/environment/neighbourhood we’re in brings forth certain parts of our identity and hides others

• seeing the self as dynamic

  • identity is not stable because of our surroundings

variations in how people in the environment summon their identity

• summoning happens in different ways and as a reaction to different stimuli

  • the identity summoned can be aligned or misaligned from the surroundings

• the environment gets peoples to reflect on what type of person they are

summoning the self

• Moral density of neighborhood life/built environment

  • Different places summon us into being different people

• “Self” as a dynamic, contingent accomplishment

small parts of one’s identity influences how…

they interact with others and behave in the environment (ex. street lights and the sabbath)

summoning

• Orthodox life in a non-Orthodox neighborhood

• Negotiating what it means to be Orthodox

• Minority in Melrose-La Brea

• “When Orthodox Jews went to synagogue or school, they inevitably encountered ‘profane’ secular institutions…”

street lights and the sabbath

• “…manipulating electric devices is considered a forbidden form of work…”

• Violate laws of Sabbath, take their chances and cross on red, wait for non-Jewish pedestrian to push the light for them

  • Not an individual endeavor

morally grey areas

• Not explicitly forbidden, but avoided as an act of summoning

• Seen as profane, zones to be avoided

• Individual strategies for navigating this space

  • ex. turning head away from hotdog cart to avoid smelling the fumes

flirting with danger

• Two Orthodox brothers at a bus stop

• Older brother poses with poster, while younger looks away

  • Different identities summoned

• Poster as a moral provocation

  • Flirted with or studiously ignored

summoning by people

• Sometimes summoned in friendly interactions (with other Jews, and non-Jews)

• Sometimes in anti-Semitic moment

observations at 30th street station

• 3 months of fieldwork observations

• Line formation during rush hour at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia

• Non-verbal social interaction

  • social organization

  • interact with each other without talking

line formation at 30th street station

• First few people set the line trajectory

• Irony is that lines are only used to get access to waiting platform

considerations of newcomers to the line

1. How far to stand from the person in front of them

2. What position to assume given the distance

3. Which direction to face

newcomers and lines

important for the structure/organization of waiting lines

3 rules of line formation

1. curvital conformity

2. contiguous conformity

3. successor nonvisibility

rule of curvital conformity

“This specifies that upon joining a line, one should assume a position consistent with, and extending, its geometry”

rule of contiguous conformity

• “…one should, upon joining a line, extrapolate a straight line through the last two people and then assume a position on that line”

• Lines frequently change course or curvature

rule of successor nonvisibility

“…one should stand outside the field of vision of one’s predecessor in line, which means standing behind him or her in an anatomical sense”

group disruption of lines

• Groups join, but members rarely line up behind each other

• “Muddies the line’s geometry”

• disrupts organization

• newcomers confused/struggle with finding an acceptable position in the line

parts of the built environment can alter organization of lines

• physical obstructions

  • need to curve around it

• objects ensuring the line is properly formed

  • ropes, numbers

Disneyfication according to Wynn

• cities becoming the same

  • having similar features

• denies the unexpectedness, whimsy, and pleasures of walking through a city

  • places in the city losing their character, uniqueness, and being replaced by chain corporations/uniform shops

• implies tourism

  • city is rebuilt more for tourism

example of disneyfication

times square in new york being transformed from dark and vice-filled to friendly

urban alchemy by Wynn

• understand how tour guides re-enchant the city

  • bring people to new places and tell stories for them to learn more about the place

    • the stories are not entirely truthful to make the city more fascinating/charming

“Disneyfication” of cities

“The endless string of Gaps, Starbucks, and Niketowns…denies urban walkers the chance to discover the ‘strange, the unexpected, the arousing’”

— Richard Sennett

the tour guide

• Guides offer an intensified “focused interaction”

• Urban alchemy

  • turn everyday sites into something precious and interesting

• “Re-enchant neighborhoods”

• “Magical urbanism”

• pushing back against disneyfication

urban alchemy

“…by using a mixture of falsity, myth, and curious revelations to uproot standard and banal visions of the city; aiming to incorporate serendipity into their practices; and attempting to transform their participants through the experience of the walking tour”

serendipity (spontaneity)

• “…the greater potential for the unexpected is one of the most unique and valued things about walking tourism, and is unlike the more scripted elements of a Disneyfied urban culture”

• new interactions in the city you don’t expect

transforming the visitor into a local and a local into a tourist

• “…they teach people to be more tolerant and aware of the multiplicity of lives, histories, and perspectives of a city’s dwellers…”

• Not just a passive subject

• Visitor made to feel like a local

tour guides as a case of something broader

• Analogical theorizing

  • identify a unique “case of” something more general in the social world (i.e. status anxiety, face saving, etc.)

    • Simmel, Goffman, Becker (many others)

• Identifying comparative cases enables seeing what is shared and what is distinctive about a social phenomenon

• Urban alchemy

  • tour guides, graffiti writers, horticulturalists, street musicians → all re-enchant the city

    • urban alchemy doesn’t just include tour guides, it includes everyone who re-enchants the city

Analogical theorizing

• identify a unique “case of” something more general in the social world (i.e. status anxiety, face saving, etc.)

  • Simmel, Goffman, Becker (many others)

• find general social processes that can be compared and contrasted in multiple settings

• finding cases within generic social processes

• goal is to find what is shared in cases within a social process and analyze how they differ from each other

limits of fieldwork and interviewing

• People don’t usually comment on what’s going on while acting in natural environments

• Sit-down interviews pluck people out of natural activities/environments

  • the space is a cue for information

    • taking one out of this space makes it difficult to identify/remember the information

• Important aspects of lived experience remain invisible (“spatial footing” of experience)

phenomenology

• Structures of lived experience

• Bracket pre-conceived ideas of the objective world → sense-making, consciousness, and individual experience

• “If we simply live immersed in the flow of duration, we encounter only undifferentiated experiences that melt into one another in a flowing continuum”

  • Meaning-making is always retrospective

  • Socially constructed in interaction

if we just live our lives, we don’t think of our experiences

• meaning making is from looking back and reflecting/reconstructing the experience

  • socially constructing the events post-hoc

phenomenology is how people personally experience the world

• the unique perceptions and interpretations

  • how objects fit into one’s world and how they are experienced

go-alongs

• intentionally aim at capturing the stream of perceptions, emotions, and interpretations that informant’s usually keep to themselves

  • capture the unique experiences and perceptions that people usually keep to themselves

what we can study with go-alongs

1. environmental perception

2. spatial practices

3. biographies

4. social architecture

5. social realms

environmental perception

• unique ways of making sense of the neighbourhood and what is in it

  • how aspects of the neighbourhood are interpreted

spatial practices

• mundane walks can be infused with personalized, idiosyncratic meanings

  • walking through certain places that have unique meanings depending on the person

  • people have their own unique ways of moving through the city

biographies

• Memories unlocked about places

  • people sharing memories or aspects of their life relative to a specific place

  • narrating what happened at that place

• “Go-alongs can unearth the personal, biographic experiences that underlie our subjects’ present engagements with their environments”

social architecture

• Uncover the “implicit web of social relationships” in an area

• Moving around in a place encourages people to talk about the other people

• learn about the relationships of people in the neighbourhood

  • positive and negative

social realms

• Friendly encounters during go-alongs help you see relationships that are “almost too trivial to be noticed…”

  • But these are important ties that are often not on the foreground of a person’s mind

• subtle relationships in a place a person doesn’t usually keep in mind, but is still important

The 100 percent location

• Time-lapse cameras reveal people gravitate to busy areas for conversation

• Jan Gehl’s study of pedestrians in Copenhagen

Whyte mapping conversations

• 133 conversations

• 57% concentrated in highest traffic locations

  • people stopping in the middle of the street to have conversations

• 50% of men talked > 5 minutes

• 45% of women talked > 5

Schmoozing (nothing talk)

• idle gossip, political opinions, sports talk

• “…groups do tend to form up along occupational lines…”

• groups are not random

  • self-segregating based on occupation/familiarity

• A functional way to people watch

structure of schmoozing

• ‘Straight man and principal’

  • 1 person talks (dominates), while the other listens, then swap roles

• Tacit cooperation

• But, some are failed conversations

  • when one person does not follow norms of conversation (ex. only person talking)

    • When gestures are important

gestures

• Reinforce speech and pauses in conversation

• Important when one person is not “playing the game”

  • indicate a person trying to get a word in

• Most are friendly, but touching is a measure of control

• “The one who does the touching is dominant…or seeking to be”

  • assert dominance or control

11 characteristics of pedestrians

1. People usually walk on the right

2. Pairs or groups of three

3. Pairs who walk uncertainly are most difficult to follow

4. Men walk somewhat faster than women

5. Younger people walk somewhat faster than older people

6. People in groups walk slower than people alone

7. People carrying bags or suitcases walk about as fast as anyone else

8. People who walk on a moderate upgrade walk about as fast as anyone else

9. Pedestrians usually take the shortest cut

10. Pedestrians form up in platoons at the lights

11. Pedestrians often function most efficiently at the peak of rush-hour flows

assertive walkers in New York

• signaling intentions very subtly

  • many nonverbal cues and gestures

  • using the body to communicate intention

• don’t wait for sidewalk signals or crossing light to appear

  • will jaywalk

  • taking ownership of the road

  • “resent constraints”

    • traffic signals in particular

the built environment of cities is not designed for pedestrians

• is designed for vehicles and automobiles

  • the people need to learn how to move in the city

qualitative research built on induction leaves the possibility of one’s initial ideas being wrong

• letting the data and observations dictating the ideas

  • basing the ideas on the data

• Whyte’s initial ideas being disproven by the observations

  • ex. people stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to talk

built environments used to fit the human scale - details and stores at eye level, roads built for walking

consider how the person moves, where they look to build the city to suit the human body

interactions don’t occur randomly

they are structured by the built environment and the built environment is influenced by politics, culture, era etc.

the landscape is always changing and people are improvising in social life

one person’s adjustment leads to another person’s adjustment leads to another and so on - a chain of interactions in social life

Jane Jacobs not trained as an ethnographer

is actually a journalist, lives in and writes about New York City

what Jacobs said about shopkeepers and street vendors

• important for the city street

  • eyes of the street and sidewalk guardians

• people expect the shopkeepers there and feel a sense of comfort with them there

  • keeps an eye out for danger and actually prevents that trouble from occurring with their presence

there is a sense of shared effort and collective activity

• the burden does not fall on a single individual

• relationships in the city built on trust

  • people helping each other

  • the relationships help the neighborhood thrive

relationships with eyes on the street/sidewalk guardians are important for neighbourhood safety

a richness in having relationships and interactions with the guardians of the street or just regular people

Jacobs emerged as a challenge to city planners/city developers

• advocated for a people-centered approach to understanding city life

• thought they overlooked how people live in neighbourhoods and what their relationships with each other were like

• thought it was important to look at the web of relationships in neighbourhoods and how they contributed to its nature

Jacobs’ books as a critique on current city planning and rebuilding

wants to introduce new principles of city rebuilding/building and planning

Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses

• in conflict with each other’s goals

  • one wants to (and did) create express ways through the city, the other wants to preserve the life in these neighbourhoods and people’s homes

Robert Moses

• created the expressway that cut through the South Bronx

  • displaced my residents and workers

  • wanted to make 3 more

• Jacobs advocating against the expressways

  • brought people and communities together to fight against the expressway

Jacobs looking at…

macro-level interactions and relationships of people in neighbourhoods

Jacobs advocating for a grounded theory of life

• building theories from the ground up

  • using observations to create theories

  • community ethnography is the closest to this method/theory

  • seeing and observing how people interact, who interacts with who

requirement of a successful city according to Jane Jacobs

people feeling safe and secure on the street among the strangers

the worst thing to do for street safety

• spread people out and create less dense city streets

  • deserted city streets are unsafe

  • well-used city streets are safe

need places that stay up late to bring people in and keep the streets busy

keeping streets busy with many stores and many late-closing stores helps people feel safe

people are attracted to people because…

the crowds might help people feel safe - connection to William Whyte

city planners have superficial ideas of what is seen as a good and bad neighbourhood

looking at neighbourhoods from the outside and aren’t going down to these places or talking to people from there - “bad” neighbourhoods have a rich life that is noticed when one directly interacts with elements of this neighbourhood

store keepers as sidewalk guardians

• make streets safer and help people spend more time on the street

  • can be seen as a third place or triangulation to encourage social interaction (connection to Lyn Lofland)

    • creates a more vibrant environment in the neighbourhood

quantitative measures don’t explain what happens on the ground in the neighbourhoods

need ethnography on the ground to figure out what the actual interactions, relationships, behaviours are

a grounded theory of city life

• Community ethnography is the closest methodological comparison

  • Allows you to see web of social relations within a place

• Critical of orthodox theories of city planning

  • Ebenezer Howard (1898)

    • self-sufficient towns aka the “Garden City” as an alternative to the evils of the city

    Le Corbusier (1920s)

    • Radiant City, a vertical city of skyscrapers, with 1,200 inhabitants to an acre, leaving more space outside, also great arterial roads

• Proposes observing how neighborhoods work

• “…ordinary scenes and events” in a place

the case of the north end of boston

• Seen as ‘slum’ by developers and city officials

  • But, Jacobs and others (Gans) observed the vibrant community life in place

    • how the “bad neighbourhood” as described by city officials actually created a vibrant environment for the neighbourhood to thrive

benefits of “eyes on the streets”

• help make the streets safe for strangers and residents

  • attract crowds (ex. stores, street vendors)

  • watch out for and prevent trouble

  • handles strangers

how to create eyes on the street

• Stores, public places used throughout the day and night

  • These give people reasons for going there

• Storekeepers are great “sidewalk guardians” and become “eyes on the street”

eyes on the street

• Core concept in Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk

• Mostly unhoused Black book vendors play this role, even though they are seen by police and city officials as a social problem

sidewalk ballet

• Neighborhood as a ‘collective act’

• Jacobs draws from her own embedded-ness to show the social relations

• Scenes from a vibrant neighborhood, with multiple people coming and going

• Storeowners setting up shop

what happens when a city lacks a vibrant street life

people tend to isolate themselves

public sidewalk life as an antidote to segregation

“…overcoming residential discrimination comes hard where people have no means of keeping a civilized public life on basically dignified public footing…” (72)

trust on city streets

“The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop…” (56)

eyes on the street

• people who have view the streets at all times and tell the public about what they see

  • a natural and passive type of surveillance

• doesn't really happen by accident

  • need storefronts, open windows, public characters, residential areas, older buildings (know your neighbours to build trust, older buildings usually lower to help people see the street), parks, bars and clubs that open late to ensure the eyes stay, restaurants, convenience stores

sidewalk ballet

• daily rhythm of people in spaces

• how people interact with each other on the street

• activity on the street creates eyes on the street

• interplay between people

• ballet of a good sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place (requires a level of improvisation, some randomness)

  • might be routine, but some randomness

• sidewalk ballet not limited to outside (can include people in buildings)

  • might look out onto the street, might go out to the street at some point

• daily rhythm of social interaction between people in city spaces

features of walkable neighbourhoods

• A term to measure how much the land and built environment encourage walking (Leslie et al.)

• Recreation, work, access to services

• if you are able to access different services

a cultural metric

• Shapes property values

  • Used in real estate

• Metrics like walkscore.com

• Proximity to transit and car needs factored in

Builiung’s essay

• Argues that the concept neglects/erases the experiences of people with different disabilities

• Concept of ‘walkability’ is ableist

  • ignores disability and diversity of bodies

  • doesn’t consider people that have difficulties walking around the city

• Cultural reproduction of a planning concept/ideal that neglects what people with disabilities experience in ostensibly walkable place

Daughter’s story - from walker’s paradise to accessibility desert

• Uses a wheelchair, lives in a walkable ‘paradise’

  • But, faces issues getting into many of the amenities

• “Walk scores stop at the door offering no information about doorways conditions (i.e. thresholds), internal navigation of destinations, or infrastructure surface conditions (e.g. cracked or sloping sidewalks) (1427).

• What happens to walk score if you eliminate places that are inaccessible to wheelchair users?

• What happens if you take into consideration diversity?

• walkable places can feel like a disability desert for people who aren’t considered in the building of the city

last millimetre problems

Limitations or failures in design, legislative compliance that turn any neighbourhood into one that poses challenges to people with disabilities - limitations in infrastructure from disregarding certain groups of people

15-minute cities

• Planning concept from Carlos Moreno in which all basic essentials are 15-minutes by foot or bicycle

• Linked to healthy, sustainable, and inclusive living

• But focus tends to be on getting to places without thinking about experiences along the way

• a planning ideal where everything is densely gathered

  • all necessities are close together

at a glance for walkability in toronto’s high-rise neighbourhoods

• Walkability study of 8 Toronto high-rise neighbourhoods (7 in the suburbs, 1 in the core)

• Surveys, mapping exercises, focus group discussions (6 to 10 residents, semi-structured around everyday life and built environment)

• 2009 and 2010

• n=250 residents (Between 25 to 40 respondents recruited in each neighbourhood)

• quantitative and qualitative methods used together

global findings

• Many do not have cars and are dependent on walking and transit

• Hostile environments not designed for walking

• People see car ownership as a solution

• Different groups perceive walking conditions differently

• Variations in walking conditions

• Poorly maintained walking environment contributes to disenfranchisedment and resignation

• People enjoy walking

St. Jamestown

• 1960s (14 to 32 stories)

• One of Canada’s most densely populated neighbourhoods

• Envisioned as middle-class hub near downtown

• But poor planning → influx of recent immigrants

• Later construction of public housing

• no people driving

code of the street

• Culture within marginalized neighbourhoods

  • separation by race and class

  • don’t talk to others on the street, keep to oneself

• rule of law is replaced by ‘code of the street’, or informal set of rules around public behavior (especially violence)

• Readiness for violence, keeping to one’s self, distrust in police