Short Abstract

Treating streets as thresholds rather than self-contained sites, this panel asks how fleeting encounters and ordinary details can illuminate the spatial and temporal scales through which urban worlds are lived, made and imagined.

Long Abstract

Streets offer urban ethnography a privileged vantage point: places where encounters, exchanges, mobilities and differences become publicly observable. Yet the fleeting scenes and ordinary details captured at street level raise a persistent problem: how can attention to “petits riens urbains” (Paquot, 2010) avoid impressionism, and what turns fragments into knowledge of a larger urban world?

This panel invites ethnographically grounded papers that treat the street as a threshold across scales, domains and temporalities. Looking outward – from street to city, nation and transnational circuits – and inward – towards houses, kinship, care, work and commerce – we ask how public encounters connect to relations hidden behind facades. Topics include street life and sociability; infrastructures, markets and mobilities; memory and the politics of urban space; and belonging, conflict or improvisation. Papers with a strong visual or sonic component, engaging the sensory dimension of the street, are equally welcome.

Following Agier (1996), we ask how intermediate concepts enable passage from microsocial observation to city-scale knowledge, alongside history, geography, sociology and political economy. Rather than asking whether the micro mirrors the macro, we examine how markets, mobilities, infrastructures and memories make and connect scales. The fragmentary becomes an analytical problem: street-level traces may disclose wider worlds but may equally mislead when detached from history and relations of power.

Dialoguing with “Life Imagined”, we ask how streets mediate between lived and imagined cities: sites where dominant visions materialise, alternative belongings are improvised, and futures are rehearsed.

Propose paper