Introduction: Urban friendship networks: Affective negotiations and potentialities of care

Introduction

The articles in this special issue take off from and build on recent discussions about urban sociabilities (Glick Schiller and Schmidt, 2016), multiculture and diversity (Vertovec, 2012) and conviviality and xenophobia (Amin, 2012, 2013). Within a global context of rising flows of people across nation-state boundaries, and political uncertainty in dealing with these populations particularly in Europe and the United States, these debates have taken on an increased significance in terms of how individuals and groups function when ‘thrown together’ in a city or metropolitan environment. In the scholarly literature indicated above, friendship as a form of social relation has been largely unexamined although alluded to by various authors, particularly as demonstrating possibilities for cooperation across difference. This special issue initiates a deeper and more sustained focus on friendship as a relational modality that characterises many urban interactions, and that also takes on particular forms within demographically diverse city spaces. The particular contribution of this special issue is in bringing together the literature from urban studies, research on diversity, understandings of social capital and networks and contemporary discussions of friendship. We suggest that a focus on friendships allows for an alternative mode of interrogating the social; one that does not privilege ethnicised social distinctions, groupings and categories, that allows for a more embodied and affective understanding of urban relations and that is useful in unpacking the embedded, often latent, meanings of everyday interactions and networks.

This introduction to the special issue consists of four main sections. Firstly, we draw from existing discussions of friendship to scope our own definition of friendship networks as ‘communities of convenience’. Secondly, we discuss the significance of friendship for understandings of the urban. The third section deals with how adopting a perspective that focuses on friendship allows for looking past ethnic categorisations in studies of urban sociality. And the fourth and final part extends that discussion to one on social networks and capital, arguing for the significance of more ethnographic and embodied analysis.

Defining friendship networks

While it is impossible here to give a comprehensive overview of the literature on friendship, we will sketch out some of the key ways in which discussions of friendships have influenced our own interpretations. We conceive of friendship as a mode of relationality that is infused with both practical and affective meaning for actors involved, and that characterises the networks that they build and are embedded within (Kathiravelu, 2013). In doing so we draw and build upon several longstanding influential strands of research, including the Manchester School of anthropology (see Werbner’s commentary in this issue for a geneaological account of the Manchester School’s contribution to work on friendship and urbanisation (Werbner, forthcoming)).

Much Anglophone social science research has perceived friendship as structurally insignificant in the study of the urban. It is seen as a social phenomenon that is situated within the realm of the intimate (Adams and Allan, 1998; Eve, 2002; Pahl, 2000), more relevant to understanding processes of individual identity formation and thus removed from workings of the larger urban public sphere. Alternatively, friendship has often been understood through an anthropological lens, seen within a continuum that also incorporates kin and family relations (Desai and Killick, 2010; Santos-Granero, 2007). In the social sciences, besides some notable exceptions (Bunnell and Kathiravelu, 2016; Bunnell et al., 2012; Cronin, 2014, 2015a, 2015b), research on friendship has been limited. Within the context of understanding friendship’s relevance in urban encounter, we suggest that a broader and more inclusive definition of friendship may be more appropriate, starting from informants’ characterisations, although these are often complex and layered. A more embracive conception of friendship also allows for the intricacies of the concept from non-Anglophone contexts to be explored. Here, we are interested in the performance, the doing of friendship and the experience of friendship (cf. Allen, 2004). And so we propose a notion of friendship that emerges from the (urban) encounter.

Beyond ideal types

Our conceptualisations of friendship go beyond idealised notions that are based on complete reciprocity, permanence and sentiment. Instead, the articles collectively demonstrate the complexity inherent in this mode of social relation. Moving away from utopian and idealistic conceptions of friendship, we conceptualise friendship as it actually exists – as not necessarily egalitarian or uncorrupted. Within the purposes of a discussion around interpersonal urban relations, friendship networks can then be seen as an expression of community, but also one that ebbs and flows depending on the context; a community of convenience (Kathiravelu, 2013). The understanding of friendship networks as ‘communities of convenience’ is a practical one, where the utility of the relationship is a significant component of the friendship. This instrumental aspect of friendship is typically foregrounded in contexts of economic hardship and resource scarcity, for example in poor Black neighbourhoods in the United States (Adams and Allan, 1998: 9), or in Soviet Russia, where well-placed friends were a means to get to items otherwise unavailable (Pahl, 2000). However, even in altruistic circumstances, friendships are not necessarily private, reciprocal, sentimental and permanent (Phillips and Evans, 2018).

In this vein, the articles by Landau, Harris, Amrith and Killias in particular highlight how friendships can be sources of mistrust, frustration and suspicion, particularly within a migrant context where the establishment of new networks and connections is vital for negotiating the city and getting access to resources. Friendship, then, is not always normatively positive or enduring, and friendship networks are far from static. They often fail to endure changes in socio-economic status (Amrith, 2018) or life stage, or migration away from the location where the bond was initially forged (Robertson, 2018).

Despite the formation of friendship networks always being embedded within a social context of intimacy and interdependence, the articles in this special issue also demonstrate how they are contextually specific and morph across the temporalities and circumstances of the actors involved. For example, the article by Harris (2018) deals with conflicts and ambivalences that may arise in the formation and growth of friendship, particularly amongst young people. She demonstrates how friendship is often the mechanism through which exclusion and hate is managed and negotiated. In contrast, Lobo (2018), Robertson (2018) and Malyutina (2018) emphasise the productivity of friendship within the urban, also for migrant newcomers and other marginalised populations such as asylum seekers or indigenous peoples. Friendship networks then do not have to imply strong ties, but can be loose and elastic ones, that come into play and stretch or tighten with changes in circumstances, mobility and geographical distance. Friendships range across levels of intimacy, from that of close dyadic relationships that involve parallel life experiences and shared geographies, to those that evolve within a short time-space, around a particular activity or area.

Friendship, for our contributors, is also not just a private relationship. Rather, it is seen to be a more fluid connection that moves between private and public spheres and spaces. Friendship itself as a social relation transcends these divisions, often enacted in public spaces, but not necessarily always intimate in the knowledge of the Other/friend. The networked nature of friendship then is also dependent on the spaces, structures and opportunities afforded by the urban zone(s) in which they are located. This fleeting or fragile temporality, as Richaud (2018) illustrates in her article, does not detract from the significance of friendship as a form of social support or pleasurable sociality. Of particular importance to Urban Studies audiences is that the spaces and infrastructures of the city shape the conditions of possibility for such interpersonal ties. This, in turn, connects to issues of urban policy that encourage the formation of often asymmetrical ties (Phillips and Evans, 2018) or the neglected ‘messiness’ of what are often perceived as peripheral urban spaces that allow for more egalitarian and unexpected encounter (Lobo, 2018).

The role of the urban – and especially of spaces of encounter in the city – in shaping and defining friendship networks is taken up in the following section. However, before we turn to that, it is appropriate in an introduction to a special issue of Urban Studies to specify what we see as the wider resonances of work on friendship for this transdisciplinary field. Above all, for us, this has to do with cities as sites of human encounter and social relations. At one level, specification of this point will be unremarkable to readers of Urban Studies, but it is significant in the scholarly context of recent efforts to decentre the city as a unit of analysis in urban studies. We recognise the importance of critiques of ‘methodological cityism’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015), and burgeoning interest in examining urbanisation in planetary terms – extending well beyond cities and other conventional territorialisations of the urban (e.g. Brenner, 2014). Yet social relations such as certain forms of friendship – based on public encounters between members of diverse and shifting populations living in relative proximity – are specific to cities and other relatively dense congeries of people. Of course, as is attested to by the articles in this special issue, there are all kinds of differences between specific cities and even between parts of the same city. Nonetheless, the social relations that are sustained in and through cities have no equivalent in dehumanised ‘operational landscapes’ of urbanisation (Brenner, 2014: 18).

Friendship in the urban

The city has been conceived of as a space of anonymity but also of familiar strangers and potential friends, simultaneously and alternately (Gans, 1962; Roberts, 1973; Simmel, 1961). As illustrated in Werbner’s (2017) commentary to this special issue, this ‘dialectical’ reading of the city has also shaped the work of Louis Wirth and the Chicago School of urban sociology. Taken together, these strands of early work that discussed city-based friendships – predominantly in North and Latin America – were not so much concerned with defining friendship as a unique type of social relation, but saw it as indicative of a mode of sociality that marked urban spaces, and were particularly relevant in demonstrating social networks that developed within (often newly immigrant) ethnic communities and classed neighbourhoods. Factors such as proximity and shared affinities were demonstrated as significant for friendship as a technology in the reproduction of community identity and status.

The scope of this work, while setting important precedents for the study of friend networks, needs to be updated in relation to the changing nature of urban zones. These are now centres of rapid diversification and demographic change, not only as a result of migration mobilities, but also because of increasing levels of intermarriage, ageing populations and growing socio-economic class divisions (Vertovec, 2012). Friendship has not been prominent in contemporary work in urban studies, especially in discussions of diverse and multicultural cities. In fact, much of the recent research on urban interactions and sociality in diverse and multicultural cities has been interested in the quotidian encounter – ranging from the fleeting non-verbal to more sustained engagements over longer periods of time. A significant proportion of this literature on the urban everyday encounter highlights the prejudices and disconnections of metropolitan life (see, for example, Valentine, 2010), particularly in relation to ethnically and culturally different Others. Urban space here is seen as anonymous, with some groups able to move more freely than others, but also as a ‘container’ or location, rather than as a social actor. In this research, friendship as a form of social relation, interaction, conflict and site of productive affinity has been largely unexamined. The nine articles in this special issue are all situated within diverse city spaces across the globe, and take that as a starting point to examine social relations through the lens of friendship. Although it may not have been the starting point of inquiry for many of the projects of our contributors, this mode of networked social relation emerged as significant through the course of their investigations. It is imperative to examine these social relations now, as shifting strands of heightened neoliberal globalisation are leading to new formations of cultural diversity, allegiance and solidarities. Friendship as a frame allows us to examine these ways of ordering social life as distinct from older conceptualisations of nation-state or ethnicity, although the salience of those categories must continue to be taken into account.

Much literature in urban studies is preoccupied with the transcendence and demarcation of boundaries between the private, public and parochial, not just in material but also symbolic and relational spaces (see for example Colomina, 1994; Fenton, 2005; Low, 2006a; Staeheli et al., 2009). Friendship exists across these various spheres; it is a private affiliation but typically seen as shaped by politics and structures that function outside of it. Here we further suggest that friendship should be seen simultaneously as a form of public membership. This is not only when it is enacted in public spaces, but also because of friendship’s implications for models of an inclusive civic citizenship and belonging. As the articles by Richaud (2018) and Lobo (2018) demonstrate, friendship networks regularly transcend the lines of race, class, gender or phenotype difference.

In the writings of Jacques Derrida (2006), for example, friendship is conceptualised in both private and public terms. The public nature of friendships is seen as expressive of the wider political sphere, indicative of a fraternal equality under the law, while it is in private that difference is seen to be negotiated between diverse Others. The friend, in the public model, is a fellow citizen in a democratic republic, while in private, friends are indicators and affirmation of who we are, or are not (Pahl, 2000). For early theorists such as Mills and Wollstonecraft, friendship is the way in which citizenship can be performed within a privatised home sphere (Fenton, 2005), where larger national solidarities become part of an intimate zone. Although these can be argued to be different modes of friendship, they are both built on a basis of trust, respect and reciprocity. In our consideration of friendship within the sphere of urban encounter, it is the bridging of public and private perspectives that makes friendship a useful tool in the study of the urban.

In making the seemingly private spaces of friendship visible, the articles in this special issue examine if such spaces merely reflect the boundaries and structures of public life in cities, or if they offer examples and possibilities of transcending those divisions, and building alternate solidarities. This does not always require access into everyday and intimate spaces of urban lives, as work by Pande (2012) on ‘balcony talk’ and illegal migrant collectives demonstrates. Often, fleeting friendships are enacted in the public and parochial spaces of cities like pubs (Malyutina, 2018), parks (Richaud, 2018) and schools (Harris, 2018). Despite the increased use of communicative tools such as email, text messaging and social networking technologies to maintain relationships, regular face-to-face contact is still seen as central in many urban residents’ relationships. Discussion of friendships in the context of neighbourly encounters on the street, for example, is indicative of this (Heil, 2012). The articles in this special issue show that this is applicable not just to working-class friendships but also to middle-class ones that are seen to be typically nurtured within the private spaces of the home, and based less on activities in urban public space.

Methodologically then, we can see that friendship infiltrates and is a part of the public life of cities that scholars already regularly examine. Despite friendships being considered methodologically difficult to research as they are often conceived as a private relation, extended ethnographic engagement in various urban spaces has been one of the most productive means through which our contributors have managed to access friendship networks.

Within the sociological literature on cities, the focus has largely been on an examination of social networks amongst urban populations (Ryan et al., 2008). This literature has focused on neighbourhood, workplace and ethnic networks to analyse social inclusion and access to resources (DeFina and Hannon, 2009; Warr, 2005). Although recent studies by Cronin (2014, 2015a, 2015b) and others have highlighted the significance of friendship relations, these do not explicitly link to the urban as a site for, or draw out the significance of the urban condition for, such relations. Anthropological studies of urban life have traditionally focused more on kinship relations (Santos-Granero, 2007), with friendship subsumed within categories of pseudo-kin that preclude possibilities for exploration of the particular complexities of this mode of social interaction (Desai and Killick, 2010). It is largely recent work by geographers (see, for example, Bunnell et al., 2012) that forms the starting point for examining urban friendship networks in a range of metropolitan spaces across the globe in this special issue.

We posit that friendship, in conjunction with examination of the contemporary city, offers innovative ways to understand the urban politics of co-existence. Following Amin’s (2012) work in Land of Strangers, this special issue conceives friendship networks as social ties that could make possible a functioning, yet convivial society of diverse strangers. Friendships, in this sense, are seen as tangible ways in which the larger ‘urban unconscious’ can be felt, linking the intimate sphere of private lives and relationships with a public urban commons. Following Simpson (2011), we suggest here that friendships can be indicative of the kind of ‘microsocial practices’ (Guattari, 2008) through which the potential for something different to emerge in everyday life appears – what Guattari terms a ‘process of heterogenesis’. Friendship, with its potential to transcend entrenched boundaries and discriminations, is a site and social encounter that makes possible the emergence of previously unconsidered possibilities (see also Ghorashi’s (2018) commentary in this issue). This, however, does not imply that all friendships possess this transgressive ability. Most friendship-based bonds reinforce rather than transcend difference.

Foucault (1997), for example, points out that friendship is an important social formation as it signifies the possibility of functioning outside normative discourses, in ways that are often not possible within other relationships such as marriage or the nuclear family. While being wary of overstating the potentially transformative power of friend networks, we posit friendship can take the form of transgressive social ties that challenge norms of affiliation and contact. Friendships based along common interest groups and affinities outside prescribed notions of class, race or gender point us to possible ways in which dissimilar Others build bonds that, although sometimes fleeting, are based on principles of convivial co-existence.

As alluded to above, the articles of this special issue all demonstrate how the urban comes to be a key actor in friendship interactions within the city. Here, it is not just individuals who shape the nature of friendship networks, but it is the very ways in which the urban is experienced and configured that affects its structure and meaning. This emerges most clearly in the article by Phillips and Evans (2018) where the city enables a ‘relational curiosity’ of the Other. That forms the initial basis for friendship formation, which in turn enables the formation of commonalities and affinities. The city becomes not just the container, but the facilitator of activity-based (Richaud, 2018) or place-based (Malyutina, 2018) friendships and interactions. Whether it is to escape the alienation of the city for a migrant, or to enact new socialities beyond the configurations of work-unit life, the urban shapes the necessities and possibilities of encounter. The city itself is thus an actor, in ways that are alluded to in actor-networked conceptualisations of the urban as assemblage.

Friendships also offer everyday possibilities through which to ‘learn the city’ (McFarlane, 2011). One example of this kind of work is a discussion of ‘affective friendships’ of Filipino transmigrants in South Korea and Canada, where the relative difficulty or ease of friendship formation in these two locations allows for an understanding of the space as ‘individualistic’ or more community orientated (Tsujimoto, 2016). The city as multicultural (Harris, 2018; Lobo, 2018), anonymous (Richaud, 2018), suspicious or threatening (Landau, 2018; Killias, 2018) configures the types and modes of friendship that are possible. Collectively, the articles in this special issue then show how friendship provides us a lens through which to examine but also discuss multiple modes of solidarity. The following discussion demonstrates how such understandings move beyond commonly utilised tropes in the study of urban socialities and formations.

Beyond ethnic identities

The frame of friendship allows for an interrogation of urban interactions that goes beyond the usual examinations that revolve around the boundaries of ethnic and racialised difference. Although some of contributors examined particular linguistic communities or nationalities, the level of analysis was always the social bond or interactions, rather than the assumed ‘groupness’ of an ethnic community (Brubaker, 2004). As Glick Schiller and Caglar (2009) point out, such presuppositions often obscure power relations, hierarchies and racisms that exist within national and co-ethnic groupings.

Starting from friendship relations has the possibility to disrupt the taken-for-granted solidarities around and homogenised notions of bounded ethnic identity that mark so many studies of urban diversity and multiculture. In fact, explorations in this special issue from Malyutina (2018), Landau (2018) and Killias (2018) demonstrate that shared language, ethnicity and nationality are no guarantee of insider status or social trust (see also Bunnell, 2016). Instead, their examinations of friendship point to possibilities of more cosmopolitan, fluid and morphing identities and dynamically functioning networks. These friendships shift with time, and across transnational space, where they may take on meanings that are related to receiving contexts of migration as well as the politics of sending states.

This answers calls to look beyond nation-state boundaries and binary logics of Self/Other that are inherent in much of ethnic studies research (Glick Schiller, 2012; Vertovec, 2012). Starting from socialities allows for the discovery of alternate modes of solidarity, affinity and connection. We do not, however, want to overstate the productive and positive aspects of a focus on friendship. This lens also allows the acknowledgement of racism and prejudice and the formation of closed networks (Harris, 2018; Landau, 2018; Malyutina, 2018). However, what is key is that utilising the framework and methodological unit of friendship networks allows for a more complex interrogation of social and cultural urban phenomena that acknowledges the existence of both solidarity and social exclusion, often simultaneously.

Beyond social networks

The concept of social networks has been defined in numerous ways and is often employed loosely, but most commonly in connection with social capital and capital theory (Ryan et al., 2015). This special issue brings discussions of friendship beyond the analysis offered by a social network focus, although friendship ties have been investigated through that frame (Hendrickson et al., 2011). Here we posit that the more ethnographic and inductive examinations of friendship offer new insights into urban life that a focus on network structures alone cannot afford.

Friendship, while drawing on similar kinds of social capital, cannot be reduced to kinship, neighbourhood or instrumental ties of workplace or ethnic group. Many of our contributors have emphasised the strategic nature of their research subjects, so the utilitarian nature of friendship networks cannot be denied. This can be seen also in the kinds of ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ (Landau and Freemantle, 2009) that African migrants display in their interactions in a new urban space. However, friendship networks are not only about achieving social mobility or accessing social capital. In interrogating actor-centric friendship networks, the research highlighted in this special issue furthers the social capital literature in two significant ways.

Nature and meaning of social networks

First, the data on friendships demonstrates that it is not the existence or lack of social networks or the relative strength of capital and networks that is the only salient measure for outcomes such as social mobility and immigrant incorporation. Quantitative measures of levels of social capital and networked understandings of nodes do not tell us about the relative ability of social actors to access resources and social support, or what the costs of that access are. This points to the need to understand social networks not simply in terms of their characteristics such as size or structure (e.g. number of nodal points), but also in terms of how actors within these networks attribute meaning to them, and the social norms governing those networks. Here is where many of the articles in this special issue that adopt an ethnographic focus on friendship allow for the addition of this element to our interrogation of social networks.

The articles here show that it is also the nature of the networks – particularly if they are exploitative or enabling – that shapes outcomes in positive or negative ways (cf. Robb, 2013). This, for example, is particularly evident in contributions by Landau (2018) and Killias (2018). They highlight the important point that bonding social networks, even between co-ethnics, do not necessarily result in positive and beneficial outcomes for migrants – in terms of immigrant integration into the host society, or in terms of emotional or economic support that is so crucial especially in the early stages of the migration trajectory. This echoes previous research in particular by Menjivar (2000), where such tenuous and fragmented ties are a result of larger contextual structural factors in the network formation, rather than individualised behaviours or preferences. In Landau’s (2018) article on sub-Saharan African migrant networks, it is their condition of irregularity and extreme precarity that shapes the obligatory and demanding nature of friendships. Killias (2018) draws upon the political climate of Iran in order to describe the politics of suspicion that characterise and impinge upon the potentially pleasurable interactions between Iranian friends in a Malaysian high-rise housing estate.

Everyday and embodied

Secondly, friendship as a frame also incorporates better the existence of the affective and emotional aspects of social networks. With increasing calls to acknowledge these non-tangible elements of social relations, this special issue highlights the significance of these often overlooked aspects of urban interpersonal and networked life. The social networks literature has emphasised how the social capital garnered through networked relations enables social mobility and access to resources. While this is also true of how friendships function, they crucially include an element of affect that colours the relations between individuals and within groups. ¹

The strength of the articles in this collection comes from the ethnographic and grounded research upon which they draw to discuss actually existing ways in which friendship is performed in everyday urban life. The embodied nature of friendships is foregrounded through the sensitive and innovative methodologies employed – such as utilising participatory video and ‘gentle interviews’ and being present in unobtrusive ways. It makes clear that the body as an entity and embodied affective relations are central to formations and enactments of friendships, but are also an integral research tool within many of these intimate spaces. The highly localised nature of these friendship networks, whether in a particular city or in urban contact zones such as churches or schools, also necessitates the use of such ethnographic and embedded methodologies. The focus of these articles on embodied interactions also highlights the constant affective ‘work’ that goes into the maintenance of a friendship. As Bunnell et al. (2012) point out, much of this labour is reciprocated, but not always in equal or commensurate ways. Friendship networks are then part of the ‘phatic labour’ (Elyachar, 2010) that is often unremarkable, but that sustains everyday socialities and builds infrastructures that act as potential platforms for then more political or economic outcomes – be they immigrant incorporation into a new city (Lobo, 2018) or breaking into unfamiliar commercial spaces (Amrith, 2018).

The role of the researcher as friend is also an important aspect of this type of research that our contributors are reflexive and cognisant about, particularly the ways in which their presence made friendships more complicated (Killias, 2018) or was taken for granted within a space of diversity (Amrith, 2018; Lobo, 2018) or quotidian sociality (Harris, 2018; Malyutina, 2018). While these issues have been discussed primarily within the context of an often distant, contained and ‘foreign’ field site (Geertz, 1968), there are different considerations when conducting research and building friendships within highly urbanised and diverse spaces. One key variation is around the ethics of forming friendships that are often fleeting, temporary and meaningful only for contained periods of time and space. Especially when working with highly mobile research subjects who move within and between cities and countries, friendships are ontologically different to ones that have been built over several decades of an anthropologist’s involvement in a community. Here again, it is important to emphasise that friendships cannot be reduced to a historically contingent rendering of the concept as egalitarian and democratic, as Derrida (1997) has so eloquently argued.

The way in which friendships are implicated in the research process (but often not mentioned) is of much larger significance than this special issue has space to cover, and deserves separate, more sustained exploration in its own right (see, for example, Tillmann-Healy, 2003). However, here we wish to highlight the significance of the urban friendship networks that social scientists themselves rely upon in various aspects of their work beyond ethnographic knowledge production (Desai and Killick, 2010; Taylor, 2011; Throop, 2014), and that are often overlooked in what are perceived as more ‘objective’ discussions of methodology and sampling. Whether the researcher is an insider or outsider to the field site, the formation and management of intimate relations that lie somewhere between informant, gatekeeper and friend are often among the most integral to the process of data collection, as our contributors show.

Conclusion

This special issue brings the geographical literature around the politics and spatiality of quotidian encounter together with more sociological understandings of relationships, networks and ties built on trust, respect and reciprocity. These examinations of friendship foreground actual ways in which networks are built and examine how the locations in which they function configure their formation and enactment. This extends the literature on social capital and networks in complicating the divisions between categorisations of bonding and bridging capital, for example, but also the boundaries between utility, exploitation and convivial pleasure.

This introduction demonstrates how scholars featured in this special issue have turned the gaze more intensely on the enactment and experience of friendship networks in contemporary diverse cities. It has first attempted to provide a working definition of urban friendship networks as ‘communities of care’. The article has then gone on to show how such a focus is productive for three interrelated reasons. Firstly, friendship networks, it has been argued, are a productive tool through which we can unpack and interrogate the slippages and overlaps between private and public modes of affiliation. This gives us an insight into understanding the urban as an actor in the formation of solidarities, affinities, obligations and cleavages, which are valuable in interrogating the formation of a larger urban commons. Secondly, friendship networks allow for an alternate starting point that does not assume a priori groupings of ethnic, national or other categorical affiliations, but starts instead from the enactment of the socio-spatial phenomenon. Lastly, while analyses of networks and social capital are often focused on structures and size, a focus on friendship allows affective and embodied meanings of such formations to be foregrounded.

It remains then for urban scholars to more explicitly recognise elements of friendship in their research, and interrogate these social phenomena in conversation with broader understandings of the politics of living together in dense and diverse cities. This move opens up a sphere of investigation of a social and spatial phenomenon so central to many urban lives, but the importance of which has yet to be fully acknowledged.