Being a Stranger in a City - Essay Example

114923 I AM DOING THIS ESSAY IN TERMS OF STRANGER. More than half the population of the world seems to be living in the cities. Cities are yardsticks of national growth and advancement of technology. Cities are the showcases to the world in terms of culture, modernity, and achievements. Unending masses are continuously shifting into the cities, especially in poor countries, looking for better wages and opportunities. Cities are a vibrant net of inter connections, economic, social, cultural, and political and it is interesting to note how the ideas, creativities, hobbies, and interests jostle with each other in the cities. It is also gratifying to study how the social connections are recognised, formulated, followed and regulated. Also it is acknowledged that every city has a character of its own and to understand a city, we have to understand its character and the contributing factors for that particular character. This is mainly trying to understand the cities, its mobility, movement and settlement and the connected tensions. It is interesting to analyse what exactly is a city. It is a beehive of transactions, a centre of old and new buildings and heritages, leading to nostalgia and modernity, a mobile point in geography where everything seems to be moving, changing and altering at a highly intense pace and nothing static anywhere. If a city has to be watched, it should be done by stepping back, removing self from the humming mainstream and watch it like a hawk in the sky and then the right perspective of the city emerges. The picture presented is stunning in its originality and every piece of it is melting only to solidify itself into another shape, colour and form. Hence, the watcher finds pre-diluted forms, diluting material, half diluted forms, fully diluted shapeless mass, half-formed pictures and then, totally altered new forms. It is a thriving enormous pulsating mass of various puzzles that are always on the move, anxious to attain the next form. For a stranger, city presents this confusing and puzzling picture. The seemingly unruly aggressiveness of the society and its presented disorder threatens him. Mostly it is an outside pose and need not be true. "Constructions of 'disorder' and 'order' are inextricably linked, and in any given urban context they frequently appear as 'idealized imageries'. However, it is only in the company of strangers in city spaces that they are symbiotically realized," (Pile et al, p.135). City cannot have one geography or one history because it is a synthesizer of multiple geographies and histories. It is a merger of various backgrounds and diverse activities. It is also a tantaliser with new possibilities and newer interactions. It is true that cities could be understood and characterised only through their historical, social and global context and not individually removed and isolated. City has to be filled with myriad flows and connections like people, ideas, cultures, rituals, principles, social priorities etc. and only then as a mixture of all these interconnections it could be analysed. Cities do not shake off their history easily. Even if they attain hitherto unrecognised proportions, its history can be recognised in every corner of the city. "There are strong echoes of the past which remain forceful in representations of urban disorder which are dominant today through, for example, notions of 'dangerous classes' such as 'out of place'" (Pile et al, 1999, p.88). A stranger coming into a certain city could be a city dweller, belonging to another city, or an individual based in a rural community and hence, his reactions would be different to the city life depending on his own background. He could either be comparing it with his earlier city favourably or negatively and this would prejudice his outlook and adjusting capabilities. If he is from a rural region, his reactions would be of wonder, loathing, contempt, surprise and amazement. He might even feel threatened by the all-consuming power of the city, because cities have their own unchallengeable power that could again be understood only from the city's relationship with the larger world. Major cities have shown a tendency of eventually resembling one another, especially after globalisation, as many of them are fitting into the same paradigm, although this is not a universal phenomenon. Also cities, like regions and countries, have shown another tendency of swinging from extreme to extreme with the national or cultural outlook. For example, Iranian cities had awfully traditional look in pre-Shah Pahlavi days, altered into cities with Western outlook during his rule, and when Ayatollah Khomeni returned from his self-imposed exile, immediately changed back into the medieval Islamic culture instantaneously. This also shows how much the cities depend on the larger map in their inherent thinking, external look and social connections. It is interesting to find out the reaction of the strangers to a vibrant city, its dynamism, movement and settlement. Equally interesting to see how the city receives strangers and how much accommodation and tolerance are shown towards strangers. Also the question remains: Does the city expect strangers to adjust or does it cooperate a tiny bit for strangers Here it depends on the stranger and the particular character city and the outlook, behaviour, expectations of both and cannot be generalized. The global interconnections and ideas can either keep the city unchanged externally, or alter it without recognition. Even if it remains unchanged at one look, it would be altering, evolving, and moving from within. This forms the core of city's dynamism. The magnitude and significance of this dynamism could be far reaching. Cities have a way of silently growing without any heed being given towards its growth. They do not declare their expansion. Even in Western world, people hardly noticed their cities attaining huge proportions. "Indeed, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century in western Europe that there was significant urban growth resulting from the expansion of the internal population as death rates began to decline and the worst excesses of urban overcrowding, poverty and unsanitary living conditions began to be ameliorated through public health interventions," (Allen, p.98). Twentieth century perhaps saw the greatest movement of finance, colonialization, ideas, aviation, wars, business rivalry, rivalry of imperialism, rise of communism and its fall, many ideologies, travelling, increasing urban domination and disappearance of community space and rural innocence through mass media and information explosion. Strangers from diverse backgrounds are thrown together in the cities and they are bound to make a life for themselves with inter connections between one another. Cities are usually made of strangers of different backgrounds and cultures. These strangers are expected to make a success of it and usually, caught in the swift current of the cities, they do. This leads to conflicts, real and potential both. "While cities embody the exciting prospect of intense social relations with individuals and groups from a wide range of backgrounds with different attitudes, beliefs and customs, they are also arenas of potential conflict," (Allen et al, 1999, p. 97). To any stranger it is not easy to get used to the rhythm and pattern of an unknown city. The bonds created by urban and rural people are different and cannot be compared. Rural people have close and meaningful bonds with one another, that would last throughout their lives and in most of the circumstances, even beyond that stretching to another generation while, urban bonds are shallow, mercurial, temporary and mainly to serve a certain purpose. Once that purpose is fulfilled, bond too is lost and even meeting that person becomes immaterial. Migration to urban areas immediately plunges the stranger into movement and urban diversity. A different way of life, full of timings and maintaining them, routine life without many ups and downs, considerably fewer human contacts greets the stranger. Sometimes, the stranger finds it difficult to adjust, due to the impersonal behaviour in the cities; mostly, he tries to adjust because the rural and semi rural folk usually burn their boats before they leave the rural surroundings. So adjusting to the new surroundings is imperative for them. Economic relations, accommodation, new cultures, discarding rural taboos, exposure to new pastures all play their own roles in the urbanisation. There are instances when a stranger totally fails to adjust his earlier, limited and rigid rural paradigm into the much broader, ever changing dynamics of the city on the move. People feel unsettled and uprooted in the impersonal surroundings, and long to return back to the familiarly secure rural life. There are also people who migrate to the city, try hard and adjust to the city life, as best as they could and make a living, but deep down in their hearts, still remain the same rural folk and live in nostalgia and hope of returning to the roots. Some of them successfully manage to return. This does not mean that city dwellers do not have any attachments for their cities. They do have surprisingly strong bonds and refuse to adjust themselves to any other cities. "An innumerable urban analysts have documented, urban dwellers develop a strong sense of place and attachment to their locality or community" (Allen, p.114). Another daunting experience to a stranger in the city is fear of prosecution. For a person who had lived an abandoned life in rural settings, it becomes increasingly difficult to adhere to the dos and don'ts of the city. Same experience strangers go through when they leave Eastern societies and go to Western societies, where they face hundreds of rules demanding immediate attention and this kills the free initiative of a person who is unused to such a situation. In spite of the Western opulence, there are many people who return happily back to their own countries, belong to this category. Cities also create dislike and prejudice and to an already prejudiced mind, the very movement of the city itself creates further bias. Cities are the result of centuries of movements and migrations for some particular reason. Cities usually transform from their rural settings because of some essential reason, which usually is a part of a much bigger picture of a region or a country, or even global. For the same reason, further migrations and movements and settlements take place perpetually in small or bigger scale according to the circumstances posed by the city. Cities thus remain tension ridden and could also be the cause of multiple number of conflicts. Another interesting study that cities offer is their role as a social leveller. Most of the prejudices, gender, social classes, religions, cultures, intermarriages, differences, education oriented stigmas and even the sexual orientations are levelled to a large extent in the cities, compared to the villages. Women over centuries had to face a lot of discrimination. "Feminist historians have documented in detail the lives and struggles of the early pioneers of women's education and employment, women involved in the suffrage movement, lesbians, and women who searched for new ways of independent living in cities," (Allen, p.106). Women seem to be freer in the cities educate themselves, work better and run a home too. Constraints imposed on humans seem to dilute in the cities. One cannot say that urban crowd is extremely welcoming for a newcomer. But it is not very discouraging either. At best, it ignores the new comer and gives him space to come out of his prejudices and form his own opinion of the city. Today's communities produce women who can go to space. Gay and lesbians can dwell in the cities without facing much of a bias. Access to public spaces are not limited or controlled and housing laws have created opportunity to all. Cities are trying to create space for diversity, social justice and health and politics has changed according to the needs of people. As a bigger number of people are city dwellers, their welfare is taken care of with increased ability. "All urban spaces reflect and affect social divisions and relations of power, and are constituted by a series of tensions between settlement and movements and between, on the one hand, the desire to exclude threatening or challenging 'others' and, on the other hand the opportunity to celebrate the diverse experiences, peoples, values and ways of life that constitute the contemporary city," (Allen, p. 133). Incompetence and laziness, though tolerated in the rural regions, hardly is tolerated in cities. People without income do not get supported by family members as easily as it happens in the villages and even in Eastern cities, this particular principle is increasingly gaining momentum. People without a proper work pattern are looked at suspiciously. "Women, children, young people and roaming crowds have long been defined as dangerous and in need of control. Anxieties about the free and public association of strangers remain strong in contemporary cities and are evident in the ways in which events such as political rallies and football matches and more aimless groups of young men on street corners are seen as frightening and are often subjected to surveillance and heavy police control," (Allen, pp. 109-10). In Nineteenth century, public world became more important for people than the private world. People started taking up work as labour force and working places gained more importance compared to the Victorian period when home was of great consequence. "New divisions between the public arena and private spaces, between the workplace and the home, created new opportunities for public association for some of the multitudes of strangers brought together in cities," (Allen et al, p.101). Unfortunately, even the cities had been unable to iron out all inequalities and social evils. The struggle goes on with every generation and things are improving till new needs crop up. It is a never-finishing battle, a friction between society, knowledge, circumstances, strangers, movements and settlements. "While the populations of the areas considered here experience largely similar problems of poverty, unemployment and marginalization, place and context matter and the experience as never quite the same. In many of the cities highlighted thus far there appears to be growing social inequality and social polarization," (Pile et al, p.80). BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Allen, John, Massey, Doreen and Pryke, Michael, (1999), ed., Understanding Cities, Unsettling Cities, movement/Settlement, Routledge, London. 2. Massey, Doreen, Allen, John and Pile, Steve (1999), ed., Understanding Cities, City Worlds, Routledge, London. 3. Pile, Steve, Brook, Christopher, and Mooney, Gerry (1999), ed., Unruly Cities Order/Disorder, Routledge, London. Read More