Introduction

In the first sentence of her book, The lonely city, British writer Olivia Laing (2016, p 3) asks the reader to imagine him- or herself standing at the window at night, when dark and illuminated windows compose the urban landscape. ‘Inside’, she writes, ‘strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.’

As Laing suggests, urban anonymity might not mean that neighbours are totally indifferent towards and ignorant of each other. The lonely urbanite, standing at the window, is observing others living their lives. The particular loneliness he or she feels comes from the paradoxical situation of being alone yet surrounded by thousands of people. But were urbanites ‘blasé’, as Georg Simmel argues (1903), would they be affected by the sight of other lives? In this chapter I seek to investigate the complex relation between interest and indifference between neighbours.

We might know people living alongside us as intimate friends or we might ignore their existence. Yet, as Olivia Laing suggests, neighbour relations often consist of both ‘separation and exposure’. What people learn from the exposure, and what remains hidden by the separation, is the focus of the first part of this chapter. More specifically, I look at the conditions under which urbanites learn about their neighbours, and the factors that contribute to maintaining their ‘strangeness’. Do urbanites categorise their neighbours according to how different or similar they are? Since cities’ populations are heterogeneous in many respects, probably more than ever before (Tasan-Kok et al, 2013), this raises the question of the extent to which categorical differences like ethnicity, race and socioeconomic position contribute to the ‘strangeness’ between neighbours.

The second part of the chapter focuses on the consequences of overhearing and witnessing parts of neighbours’ private lives, while often not knowing them personally. Do people tend to find a plausible explanation for the ‘strange’ behaviour of their neighbours in order to maintain a sense of normality and of intelligibility, as Harold Garfinkel ([1967] 1999), Erving Goffman (1971), Barbara Misztal (2001) and Talja Blokland (2017) argue? Or is it part of what makes city life ‘stimulating’?