Romit Chowdhury
The Crowd and Citylife: Materiality, Negotiation, and Inclusivity at Tokyo’s Train Stations
Chowdhury, Romit; McFarlane, Colin
Abstract
In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perception of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’ – materiality, negotiation, and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion, or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others.
Citation
Chowdhury, R., & McFarlane, C. (2022). The Crowd and Citylife: Materiality, Negotiation, and Inclusivity at Tokyo’s Train Stations. Urban Studies, 59(7), 1353-1371
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Mar 16, 2021 |
Online Publication Date | May 6, 2021 |
Publication Date | May 1, 2022 |
Deposit Date | Mar 18, 2021 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 18, 2021 |
Journal | Urban Studies |
Print ISSN | 0042-0980 |
Electronic ISSN | 1360-063X |
Publisher | SAGE Publications |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 59 |
Issue | 7 |
Pages | 1353-1371 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1250935 |
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Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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