Sophie Watson

City Publics : The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters

Some cities have grown into mega cities and some into uncontrolled sprawl; others have seen their centres decline with populations moving to the suburbs. In such times, questions of the public realm and public space in cities warrant even greater attention than previously received. Concerned with the borders and boundaries, constraints and limits on accepting, acknowledging and celebrating difference in public, Sophie Watson, through ethnographic studies, interrogates how difference is negotiated and performed. Focusing on spaces where to outside observers tension is relatively absent or invisible, Watson also reveals how the boundaries between the public and private are being negotiated and redrawn, and how public and private spaces are mutually constitutive. Through her investigation of the more ordinary and less dramatic forms of encounter and contestation in the city, Watson is able to conceive of an urban public realm and urban public space that is heterogeneous and potentially progressive. With numerous photographs and drawings City Publics not only throws new light on encounters with others in public space, but also destabilises dominant, sometimes simplistic, universalized accounts and helps us re-imagine urban public space as a site of potentiality, difference, and enchanted encounters.

A Politics of resentment: shopkeepers in a London neighbourhood

In this article we analyse the “talk” of shopkeepers in a multicultural London neighbourhood. These shopkeepers resent the loss of economic prosperity and sense of community that, in their nostalgic recollection, characterized their neighbourhood in an earlier era. They answer the classic question of politics, “who gets what and why” with “they get everything because we get nothing.” We identify this stance as a politics of resentment, one that engages with government and media narratives against asylum-seekers to construct a highly exclusionary notion of British identity. In these shopkeepers’ discourse being British means being Anglophone, Christian and white, with these signifiers being configured in different ways, depending on the social location of the speaker. They resent local and national government for what they perceive as the unfair distribution of resources, both to “asylum-seekers” below them and to corporate capital above them.

Symbolic Spaces of Difference: Contesting the Eruv in Barnet, London and Tenafly, New Jersey

In this paper I explore discourses and resistances mobilized around the construction of an Orthodox Jewish symbolic and material concrete space, the ‘eruv’, in two localities (one in the United Kingdom, one in the USA) where it has been at the center of heated debate and contestation. Conflicts around the reordering and redefining of this public space expose some of the limits of living with difference and normative versions of multiculturalism in the city. Through a detailed examination of two case studies in the United Kingdom and the United States I conclude that the multicultural city necessitates a recognition of symbolic as well as material spaces—and the interconnections between these—and that the notion of public space warrants interrogation as to how it is imagined, read, and experienced in multiple ways.

Brief Encounters of an Unpredictable Kind: Everyday Multiculturalism in Two London Street Markets

Across the world street markets represent a site of everyday sociality and public space where people from different cultures connect through casual encounters as both traders and shoppers. Given the significance of this public space in many global cities, surprisingly little is known about how these sites operate as sites to mediate intercultural and ethnic differences in a locality. In London, in particular, markets have changed dramatically in the ethnic composition of both traders and shoppers as global processes have given rise to large numbers of migrants living in inner-city areas. In many London markets today the diversity of products on sale can give the illusion of shopping at a market in India, Pakistan, Africa or Asia, with stalls selling fruit, vegetables and spices which two decades ago were rarely seen. These rapid changes in traditional working-class markets have occurred with differentiated effects (see Watson 2006b for a more detailed discussion). In some localities traders and shoppers have accommodated sociocultural shifts with minimal hostility and even enthusiasm. In others, nostalgia for an imagined homogenous community of traditional white working-class life has mobilised considerable hostility between the long-established local communities and the more recent arrivals. Such tensions have been further exacerbated in the context of the post-9/11 and 7/7 environment, where those perceived as Muslim are imagined as a potentially threatening presence.

Homelessness revisited: New reflections on old paradigms

Abstract This paper has two objectives. One is to explore the new terrain of homelessness from a gendered perspective in order to suggest ways in which the material experience of homelessness may have changed over the last fifteen years. The second objective is to look at the question through a different critical lens and explore what new theoretical paradigms have to offer to understanding homelessness, particularly the homelessness of women.

Lest power be forgotten: networks, division and difference in the city

Over the last decade we have seen a notable shift in the urban sociology literature from discourses of division to discourses of difference. This shift has opened up new ways of understanding the complexities of city life and the formation of heterogeneous subjectivities and identities in the spaces of the city. There has been, we argue, a worrying tendency in this process to lose an analysis of the workings of power. While early Marxist, feminist and race/ethnicity debates were firmly located within a framework which highlighted power, post–structuralist debates have operated with a more fluid notion of power, which at times has become so fluid as to evaporate into thin air. Our intention here is to re–emphasise the significance of power while holding on to the concept of difference. We do this by using the notion of power networks that operate at different temporal and spatial scales. These give the city contrasting spatialities and temporalities that overlap one another. The city is seen as a palimpsest of time–space networks that capture some of the ‘presence of difference’ as well as suggesting its absences. These time–space networks of power are considered in the material, perceived and imaginary realms in relation to bodies, interests and symbols.

Retext(ur)ing the city

It is now some time since we entered the age of multi-disciplinarity. Boundaries between disciplines have become more and more blurred as, for example, sociologists and geographers occupy increasingly similar terrains in a shared recognition that social and spatial relations are mutually constitutive. Such theoretical engagements are prevalent throughout the academy. Concurrently, and equally important, interdisciplinary studies such as cultural studies, women’s studies and urban studies have brought together different perspectives and modes of analysis to interrogate particular phenomena, issues and texts opening up new dialogues and theoretical paradigms. These tendencies within the academic world find their echo in Britain in the new Labour preoccupation with ‘joined up’ thinking where politicians and policy makers increasingly emphasize the importance of cross-departmental collaboration to address local and national policy issues. The city is one arena which has benefited from this multi-disciplinary or joined up thinking, though the connections are still sometimes tenuous—in particular, economists and cultural theorists meet uneasily across the fence, and, with notable exceptions (Thrift, 1995; Gibson-Graham, 1996; Sassen, 1998) the different paradigms only sporadically address each other. The Blackwell Companion (A Companion to the City, Bridge and Watson, 2000) was thus conceived as a project which would highlight different ways of thinking about the city and through a multi-disciplinary or dialogic approach to the city, would open up new ways for urban problems to be addressed more thoughtfully. It was also conceived as a collection which would challenge the dominance of the Western gaze, or Anglo-American/European production of theory that tends to speak a universality which is inappropriate to the complexity of urban spaces across the globe. Thus models of urban policy and planning developed in the West have been imported and imposed in sites where the local historical, socio-cultural and political context warrants an entirely different approach.

Performing religion: Migrants, the church and belonging in Marrickville, Sydney

This article seeks to extend debates on questions of religious practices in a multicultural society and to explore the response of traditional churches to challenges and to customary practices. In particular, it considers the different forms of belonging sought within particular (albeit heterogeneous) ethnic groups, or within the wider community of a multicultural church, and the role played by the church in ‘mixing-up people’ across and within their differences, forging new connections and communities, and reconfiguring traditional religious practices to accommodate migrant cultures. The article proposes the concept of ‘adaptive dexterity’ to indicate the openness of an institution – in this case the church – at any one historical moment to the sharing of space and diverse cultural practices. It concludes with some brief reflections on the relationship between the possibility of enacting different religious practices and the question of everyday multicultural citizenship.

Mundane objects in the city: Laundry practices and the making and remaking of public/private sociality and space in London and New York

The paper considers how shifting laundry practices and technologies associated with dirty washing have over time summoned different spaces, socialities and socio-spatial assemblages in the city, enrolling different actors and multiple publics and constituting different associations, networks and relations in its wake as it travels from the home and back again. It argues that rather than being an inert object of unpleasant matter, whose encounter with humans has been largely restricted to certain categories of person for its transformation to re-use, and thus passed unnoticed, the paper explores how laundry practices have figured in producing and reproducing gendered (and classed) relations of labour, and enacting multiple socio-spatial, and gendered, relations and assemblages in the city, which have largely gone unnoticed in accounts of everyday urban life.

Shifting religions and cultures in london's east end

ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which well-established “traditional” religious communities—particularly Christianity but, to a lesser extent, Islam and Judaism—attempt to construct and minister to religious communities in east London in an age of super-diversity, multiculturalism, and globalization, where religious attendance and affiliation is in no way determined and cannot be taken for granted. We focus particularly on the ways in which religious communities seek to form and stabilize attachments to their worshipers in the context of the significant demographic, economic, and social flux that characterizes east London. The construction of religious communities is an essentially active and ongoing process of work which involves particular sets of practices of worship, social and organizational elements, and attachments to the buildings themselves. Ultimately, the article concludes that the mechanisms devised to practice faith, spread the word, and form attachment between worshipers and their community extended far beyond matters of identity or even religious belief: those religious groups that were able to assemble durable communities did so by forming an assemblage that was at once liturgical, material, organizational, and social.