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The Crowd and Citylife: Materiality, Negotiation, and Inclusivity at Tokyo’s Train Stations

Chowdhury, Romit; McFarlane, Colin

The Crowd and Citylife: Materiality, Negotiation, and Inclusivity at Tokyo’s Train Stations Thumbnail


Authors

Romit Chowdhury



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 29, 2024
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

Files

Accepted Journal Article (351 Kb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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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