Urban solidarities in late modern times: Interspaces for meaningful engagement in Los Angeles and Amsterdam

Abstract

Late modern urban spaces marked by heterogeneity, forced proximity, intersecting layers of difference and normalised structures of inequality and marginalisation, require rethinking the conditions for an urban ethics of solidarity. Such an ethics of solidarity needs to go beyond notions of large collective movements based on shared values or claims and beyond demarcated communities. We explore the role of personal connections centred on meaningful engagement across difference in creating reflexivity and addressing how structural inequalities affect lived experiences of marginalisation and harm. Using two empirical examples of intergroup and intragroup connectivity in contemporary late modern urban spaces (Los Angeles and Amsterdam), we show how the connections needed to address these problems can arise in interspaces for non-hierarchical engagement across difference. We argue that these interspaces, where people explore layered relations and differences, can become the basis of a new urban ethics of solidarity.

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