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

Abstract

Chinese

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.

Keywords

epistemic resistance interspaces normalisation othering solidarity urban space youth

Introduction

In ‘The Good City’, Amin (2006) wondered whether the contemporary city could still be seen as a demos symbol of good government and the ideal public sphere. As he described, many people perceive urban space as ‘unhealthy, tiring, overwhelming, confusing and alienating’(Amin, 2006: 1011). However, in his view, visible heterogeneity and forced proximity between urban strangers, requiring constant class, gender and race negotiations, still provides a basis for an urban ethics of solidarity. Almost 20 years later, the global rise of populist movements and othering discourses concerning cultural/racial minorities seems to have further exacerbated the fixation on differences. With more than half the world’s population now living in urban areas, and increasingly in highly dense cities, it is even more urgent to reconsider what this urban ethics of solidarity might look like. As Oosterlynck et al. argue, in the current context marked by ‘complex and multiple entanglements and engagements of people’ (Oosterlynck et al., 2016: 765), we need to rethink conditions for an ethics of solidarity beyond notions of large collective movements based on shared values or claims and beyond demarcated communities. Instead, we need an alternative notion of urban solidarity, based on fluid micro-interactions which can lead to meaningfully engaging connections between citizens with different societal positions.

In this paper, we look for building blocks for developing such an urban ethics of solidarity in two apparently very different cases of urban connectivity and community-based solidarity, showing how (racialised) young people in neoliberal cities resist exclusionary and marginalising structures. The first case concerns a Los Angeles neighbourhood where young people live under the pressure of harsh police violence and intra-group violence perpetrated between residents. We see how disadvantaged and stigmatised residents in the neighbourhood develop strategies for conflict resolution based on transformative justice, creating interspaces for listening to each other’s experiences. The other case takes us to Amsterdam, where we see a theatre collective set up by young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They use art to engage with a public of very differently positioned individuals, including youth professionals, creating space for intergroup connectivity and reflection on subtle patterns of exclusion and disconnection in the urban setting.

These two empirical examples of contemporary late modern urban space, presenting different patterns of normalised exclusion and marginalisation, help us identifying conditions for what we call ‘interspaces’ for meaningful engagement across difference. Interspaces are contexts where people can create distance from the dominant discourse producing hierarchical categories and approach the other from the other’s position (Ghorashi, 2014). For this to happen, participants must ‘step back’ (Janssens and Steyaert, 2001) to create space for voices from a position of difference rather than conforming to the dominant norm. With meaningful engagement we refer to a kind of interpersonal connection which allows for non-hierarchical mutual exchange of perspectives and experiences. Through these examples we explore how individuals and groups can develop forms of reflexivity, connection, and understanding across different societal positions, thereby developing the civic competences needed for an ethic of urban solidarity centred on engaged connections at the micro-level. Searching for sources of collective resistance and connectivity across difference becomes particularly urgent in recent times, where exclusionary, racist and xenophobic political discourses based on fear are rising in both the European and US context. Looking to feminist literature, amongst others, for inspiration, we search for connections that strengthen relationality and mutual engagement while considering power differentials.

Urban relational dynamics: Stigmatisation, geographies of fear and the importance of epistemic resistance

Since the 1990s, scholars have described developments that severely affect the urban public sphere, including increases in homogenised gated communities, growing urban inequality, social polarisation, territorial stigmatisation and advanced marginalisation (Low, 2001; Sassen, 1991; van Gent and Jaffe, 2017; Wacquant, 2008, 2016). These go hand in hand with exclusionary discourses and spatial imaginaries of fear, racism and difference (England and Simon, 2010; Herbert and Brown, 2006; Nayak, 2011; van Gent and Jaffe, 2017). In his sociology of marginality Wacquant (2008) has compared American and French disadvantaged neighbourhoods. He describes how a new regime of urban marginality arises from the interaction between the normalisation of financial insecurity intrinsic to financialised capitalism, with racialisation and class hierarchies in the post-industrial, neo-liberal city, reinforced by welfare policy and policing. Despite the significant differences he identifies between the US and European urban contexts, both display forms of ‘advanced marginalisation’ which distinguish them from the model of the ‘ghetto’ that was common in the period of industrial growth.

A key aspect of these neo-liberal spaces of relegation, concentrating heterogeneous collectives of people in marginalised positions and precarious economic situations, is the erosion of connectivity, systems of solidarity and mutual support, as well as of collective identity formation and political identification, which were part of the old model ‘ghetto’. Instead, territorial stigmatisation internalised by neighbourhood inhabitants impedes collective identification, pushing residents into ‘coping strategies of mutual distancing, lateral denigration, retreat into the private sphere’ (Wacquant, 2016: 1083). Sources of collective resistance to the strong discourse of spatial degradation which is reproduced by journalists, academics or policymakers are thereby reduced.

Territorial stigmatisation also translates in geographies of fear, where dominant images of dangerous communities lead to mental city maps of no-go areas juxtaposed with racialised, classed and gendered classifications. This spatial allocation of social degradation creates economic barriers, but it also affects the behaviour and perceptions of key actors in the civic space like social professionals and the delivery of welfare services, law enforcement and policing (Wacquant, 2016). This is why epistemic resistance, rooted in collectively articulated experiences and perspectives that challenge dominant discourses, is crucial for building structures that counter inequality (Medina, 2013).

This analysis echoes major problems of late modern neoliberal societies, which appear exacerbated in these urban zones of advanced marginality. The first concerns the lack of connectivity. Individuals’ lost relational capacity connects to a larger societal trend described by sociologists of late modernity (Bauman, 2000). The dominance of private needs and frustrations in the public space empties that space of collective issues that demand solidarity across difference, leaving modern subjects severely affected by the ‘pathology of the self’ (Amin, 2012).

Secondly, the possibility of resistance is limited because of normalised structures of exclusion that are deeply engrained in discursive power, which works through disciplining of individuals’ actions and interactions (Foucault, 1977). Oppression manifests itself epistemically (soft power), through frames of knowledge, thought and language which, often invisibly, sustain structural marginalisation (Medina, 2013). Examples of this are the territorial stigmatisation mentioned above and the negative othering discourses about cultural/racial minorities that have grown stronger in many countries in the past 20 years (Ghorashi, 2018; Peterie and Neil, 2019; Wodak, 2020). These forms of soft power also sustain and legitimate hard forms of power and coercion (such as in the case of police violence towards black US citizens). Normalised concepts and frames produce epistemic injustice and inhibit possibilities to create connections across difference and reproduce exclusionary practices in which othering and inequality are intertwined.

Thirdly, late modern neoliberal democracies appear unable to combat structural inequalities between privileged groups and non-privileged groups. A large body of literature discusses the illusions, deficits and limitations of liberal, representational democracies (Baudrillard, 2009; Crouch, 2004; Žižek, 2011). With its principle that all individuals are the same and neutral policies increase equality, liberal democracy ignores the differences at the heart of inequality, by equating equality with sameness. This is paired, as argued by Appadurai (2006: 44), with an uneasiness towards cultural and racial minorities that comes from deep anxieties about the national project at the core of modernity. The basic discomfort with cultural minorities informs the growing reticence and inability to deal with increasing inequality and exclusion in many liberal democratic societies.

All this intensifies processes of estrangement and strong feelings of dis-identification with others (England and Simon, 2010), while negative emotions towards ‘strangers’ manifest in increased populist voting and racist discourse. At the same time, advanced marginalisation and growing urban inequality in these contexts may also negatively affect ‘intergroup’ interactions, that is, between people with similar backgrounds or positions. For instance, Amrith (2018) describes how social- and political-economic pressures of the neoliberal city divide people and strain friendships between ‘fellow migrants’ struggling to survive in the city, thus creating an ambivalent field of interaction that is convivial yet competitive and distrustful. Malyutina (2018) also shows how intergroup relationships are strained by power relations and multiple, layered, intersectional experiences of marginalisation and exclusion. An urban ethics of solidarity therefore needs both intragroup and intergroup connectivity, through which people can learn to identify with others having different positions in structural power mechanisms.

As there is limited opportunity for resistance to the normalisation of othering processes which sustains structural inequality, we need to consider practices that de-normalise the taken-for-granted taxonomies of self and other. Our examination of two cases of micro-interactions in the context of urban marginality and disconnection leads us to see these contexts of marginality not only as places where these problems of late modernity become particularly visible, but also as sites for new types of engaged connectivity that create possibilities of epistemic resistance.

Micro-spaces of interaction

Scholars over the past decades have examined how hybridities of urban life in ‘post-multicultural’ societies (Noble, 2012) can help reshape our thinking about living together with difference, counterbalancing the above-named problems of late modern cities. Inspired by the Chicago School, these scholars have identified encounter as a potential source of solidarity in informal interactions at the micro-level, that is, ‘solidarity grounded in encounter […] as complementary to the macro-level sources of solidarity’ (Oosterlynck et al., 2016: 769). These studies emphasise notions of conviviality (Gilroy, 2004), convivium (Amin, 2012) and ‘multiculture’ (Valluvan, 2016), which focus on cosmopolitan virtues to counter dystopian understandings of diverse societies. Wise and Noble (2016: 426) describe cosmopolitan virtues as entailing a ‘disposition of intellectual and aesthetic open-ness to people, places and experiences which involve mobility, curiosity, self-reflexivity and cultural literacies’. These become particularly visible in urban contexts, where proximity forces mutual responses and negotiations between people from heterogeneous positions across multiple lines of differentiation (Amin, 2006).

These authors have sought to part with constructions of racialised minorities that entail ‘an identitarian politics of recognition and reconciliation’ (Amin, 2012), arguing that orthodox multiculturalism, with its focus on ‘respect’ for minorities, always begins with essentialist premises that reify ethnic groups. Valluvan (2016: 207), building on Gilroy’s work, stresses that the production of racialised minorities always entails a hierarchical rationale and that the ‘underpinning logic of minority inclusion is always a longer modernist project of whiteness and its implied majoritarianism’. Therefore, he calls for a notion of convivial encounters in which markers of racialised difference, though not invisible, become ‘politically insignificant’ (Gilroy, 2004: 105, quoted in Valluvan, 2016: 207). This would lead to an ethos of ‘indifference to difference’ (Amin, 2012).

Literature on everyday multicultural practices is useful in thinking about how micro-spaces of interaction can help unsettle normalised dynamics of othering within urban contexts. But looking at the abovementioned context of advanced urban marginality, we believe in the need for sources for urban solidarity that recognise difference as an important source for epistemic resistance. We focus on everyday, place-based practices as opportunities for deeper notions of democracy based on ‘unusual’ connections, that is: connections that help unsettle ‘the normal’ and create epistemic resistance towards normalised hierarchies. This might enable us to see new horizontal alliances in which ‘deep democratic politics of the locality’ are taking place (Appadurai, 2001: 26). For Young (2002), this deeper notion of democracy involves situated inclusive conversations and collaborations in which the personal, political and contextual meet. This entails being sensitive to ‘unusual voices’ and ‘listening to silences’ to allow for diverse narrations of ideas and experiences (Medina, 2013). This idea is inspired by feminist studies in which conceptualisations of contiguity use non-hierarchical views on difference: ‘difference side by side, without sameness as the norm or the anchor by which difference is constituted’ (Oseen, 1997: 55). Such non-hierarchical relationships require a constant, and probably long-term, struggle to establish relationality while considering power relations. Therefore, urban micro-spaces of interaction that allow for mutual exchange of differentiated, embodied experiences of social positioning can be important sources for mutual understanding, identification, connectivity and solidarity which foster critical reflection on taken-for-granted and hierarchical categories.

Alternative urban interspaces in Los Angeles and Amsterdam

The following two cases explore alternative urban spaces that allow for reciprocal engagement. The first case describes how undocumented Latinx youth in community centres in Los Angeles (LA; USA) organise transformative justice sessions to heal and transform harmful power dynamics within and between communities. The second case concerns efforts to counter homogeneous zones in social work in Amsterdam (the Netherlands). It shows how performative art can help unsettle normalising othering assumptions that regulate interactions between youth professionals and urban youth from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

These cases are examples of intragroup (LA) and intergroup (Amsterdam) encounters and connection. Both exemplify interspaces which, in different ways, allow for non-hierarchical engagement that challenges essentialist notions of sameness and difference and advances reflective connections across different positionings in structures of inequality within the urban context.

These cases are part of two ethnographic studies conducted between 2011 and 2020. The LA case is part of a larger ethnographic (participatory) study with the undocumented youth movement in California and was conducted by Tara Fiorito in two different time periods: six months in 2011–2012 and six weeks in 2018. The research included 36 in-depth interviews (more than three hours each) with (predominantly Latinx) undocumented youth, 400 hours of participant observations (at more than 90 events) of the undocumented youth movement, a discourse analysis of relevant online (social media) postings, and many informal conversations. The Amsterdam case was part of a case study on encounters between youth service professionals and families or youngsters in different neighbourhoods of Amsterdam conducted by the Elena Ponzoni. The entire case study took place between May 2018 and November 2020 and involved participant observation and in-depth interviews with youth professionals (27), youngsters (15), parents (14) and other neighbourhood inhabitants or organisations.

Transformative justice in Los Angeles: Countering the ‘isms’ that show up between us

I meet Maya (a queer, undocumented, Latinx woman of colour) at Chuco’s Justice Center, a community centre in Inglewood, California. Chuco’s is home to Free LA High School, a charter school for youths who were kicked out of high school. The community space also hosts many other organisations, such as Welcome Home, a non-profit that aids youths and adults in rebuilding their lives after prison.

Maya takes me to a huge Mexican-style altar that honours the dead and shows pictures of people (predominantly young people of colour) from the neighbourhood who died from gang- or police-related violence. She points towards a picture of Chuco and tells me he was killed trying to mediate between rival gangs. Behind the altar are two big blackboards with all the names of the more than 500 neighbourhood people killed by the police between 2007 and 2014. There is also a poster with the text: ‘College Prep not Prison’. When I ask Maya how she is involved with this community centre, she answers:

‘I get invited to do workshops and hold space. I’ve taken a massage table to do therapy for people. It’s a critical place, you know. There is a very good campaign, LA for Youth, that proposes to divest 5% from law enforcement and invest it into what youth determine themselves: youth jobs, youth centres, youth workers. It’s important to move resources from policing that highly targets young people, and murders young people too.’

I say that our mutual friends mentioned that she is doing a lot of transformative justice work and I ask what it entails.

Maya: It’s holding space for healing. It’s ritual. It’s ceremony. That’s how I see it. Yeah, it’s an everyday practice, that’s how I live it. It’s recognising how power dynamics affect our relationships, even in the household, how harm happens between us. But it’s really organising circles. For me, it’s building an alternative to state violence, to the bad custom of depending on and calling the police to take care of matters of violence within the community, which can result in murder, arrest, family separation, different forms of violence. But we have to take care of the harms and violence that happen in community or in organisations. Because there is a lot of that in our relationships, in how all the isms show up between us.

Me: isms?

Maya: Capitalism, sexism, racism, you know. And homo and transphobia.

This fieldwork journal excerpt illustrates how disadvantaged and stigmatised communities, such as undocumented Latinx youth of colour in the wider Los Angeles area, use transformative justice (TJ) in urban community spaces as a healing and conflict resolution practice against harm, abuse, violence and conflict related to power differentials within and between communities. These areas have suffered from disinvestment and stigmatisation and have been targeted by oppressive anti-gang policing tactics or ‘gang abatement’ policies which have been characterised as overtly racist (Bloch and Phillips, 2022). TJ seeks to create an alternative to the legal and criminal justice regimes that disproportionately target, penalise, incarcerate and kill (young) men of colour (Hinton and Cook, 2021; Jones, 2017). Its practitioners understand prisons and immigrant detention centres to be violent places where no healing or transformation is accomplished (Mingez, 2019).

In TJ mediation sessions, the person who was harmed and the person who caused the harm are both present and share their experiences. Participants engage in a community accountability process in which community members work with the person who caused harm to take accountability for their actions and change their behaviour. That behaviour can range from harmful gossiping, public call-outs and organisational conflicts to physical violence and sexual abuse/assault. Listening to, recognising and identifying with others’ experiences (especially those of the ‘survivor of harm’) is considered essential to the transformation process. In these sessions, participants openly share and reflect on their differentiated experiences and social positionings and recognise and explore how harmful oppressive dynamics within community relationships are related to structural inequalities, injustices and traumas caused by racism, poverty, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny and legal/state violence. Thus, TJ follows the principle of ‘radical inclusion’, as the experiences and socio-historical positioning of the person who has harmed are also reflected on.

Shifting conceptions of sameness and difference

During the eight years of the study, a shift occurred in organisers’ conceptions and practices of sameness and difference. At first (2010–2012), undocumented youth created emotionally intensive rituals and ceremonies, such as sharing, healing or identity circles, to create a sense of belonging and shared group identity, or subjectivity, centred on their shared experience of being undocumented. In a 2012 interview, undocumented activist Martha commented on this: ‘We also have our identity circle that we just created. So we, more intentionally, discuss our emotions, the emotional side of being undocumented.’

Thus, the movement created ‘safe spaces’: small-scale community settings, removed from direct influence of the normalising, discursive othering power of dominant groups, in which disadvantaged and stigmatised groups can create and celebrate alternative, counterhegemonic self-definitions that resist objectifications as ‘other’ (Hill Collins, 1990). So rather than silencing their othered and stigmatised identities (something undocumented immigrants often do to protect themselves from legal and symbolic violence), in these safe spaces, healing takes place based on a recognition of shared pain, trauma, identity and agency. For undocumented youth, then, these urban spaces are considered safe in both a discursive sense and a physical/geographic sense because they are simultaneously safe from ‘soft’ normalising othering power and from ‘hard’ coercive power. That is, these healing circles are organised in urban spaces away from areas firmly designated on their mental maps of fear as ‘unsafe’, such as homogenised urban zones with much hostility towards immigrants/people of colour and areas with many Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

Recently (2017–2020), (undocumented) immigrant activists have explicitly been naming and recognising differences in socio-historical positioning, multiple intersecting identities and experiences of marginalisation, (under-)privilege, trauma and harm within their communities. This has moved the focus from sharing circles towards transformative justice circles. Undocumented queer activist JP reflected on this transition:

So there are different types of circles. There are healing circles, where you just get together and people talk about what they are going through and it’s more about sharing and healing through speech. What we are now doing is transformative justice circles. So if there was harm created, then we hold a circle with the people that have been harmed and the people who have harmed.

Whereas sharing circles within safe spaces are about creating collective identity through shared experiences of sameness, TJ circles are about recognising differences within communities and discussing one’s complicity in structural workings of power. As previously undocumented Latinx activist Belle stated, ‘TJ recognizes that there’s a lot of harm that has been caused between us, between immigrant youth, systemic oppressions in different ways’. Thus, TJ circles are spaces in which participants need to be daring: they need to dare to be confronted by the harm they caused others, to look the person they harmed in the eyes and acknowledge that harm. They need to dare to recognise different positions in the structures of power and their own experiences of trauma and disadvantage as well as privilege and complicity. During an interview, JP shared that he was going through several TJ sessions within his community organisation because he had caused harm. His reflection shows how he experienced them as transformational precisely because he had dared to be confronted by people he had harmed and ask for their understanding and forgiveness.

And then facing things that I’ve done that have harmed people and actually addressing them and be like: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for that’. And getting that validation directly and have other people validate you, like: ‘I can see why you did that and I’m sorry that you were put in that situation’. And so it’s been like transformational, because all these things, you would feel like: ‘Oh, they hate me’. And then you actually go through with it.

As TJ sessions within these communities are about creating intragroup healing, connection, understanding and solidarity, this case unsettles simplistic conceptual dichotomies, such as ‘co-ethnic bonding’ and ‘cross-ethnic bridging’ (Malyutina, 2018). It shows that intragroup relationships are also strained by power relations, neoliberal competition, and multiple, layered, intersectional experiences of marginalisation and exclusion (Amrith, 2018). Therefore intragroup practices of reciprocal engagement and care are essential for epistemic resistance and for recreating an urban ethics of solidarity.

Similar to how sharing circles are a response to both soft and hard power, TJ circles also developed in response to both the soft normalising power of discursive forms of othering and stigmatisation and the hard, coercive power of the criminal and legal system. Within media and public and political discourse, (undocumented) Latinx immigrants are stereotypically constructed as a moral threat to the nation (Chavez, 2008). Latinx men in particular are, like African American men, actively targeted, racially profiled, criminalised and deported, and the increased militarisation of the US–Mexico border and the expansion of interior enforcement programmes have led to higher rates of detention and deportation of Latinx immigrants (Gomberg-Muñoz, 2015). Thus, for many community organisers, calling the police is regarded as inviting state, police and legal violence into their homes and communities. TJ provides an alternative way to deal with violence and injustice.

Maya:

We did hold that space for the first time in my life, bringing a survivor of rape, who requested the circle, and the person who harmed together in the same circle. I did the lead support healing and accountability for the person who harmed. I can hold that space. For me it is important to bridge and connect and that it didn’t feel like two teams, or two sides. I really believe in doing the work of building the alternative to the state. We were able to prevent incarceration and detention and deportation by taking care of it amongst us without involving state violence. And I say it went really well, guided especially by the survivor saying that they got what they needed.

Decentring the subject: Emptying space of the dictatorship of the self

Undocumented Latinx youth activists performing TJ work stressed the importance of listening without judgement and being receptive towards others’ narratives of harm or injustice. Many emphasised it is about getting others’ perspectives, without centring your own. For example, in describing the TJ circle he went through, JP mentioned, ‘So we talked about the harm that is done, but it’s also about getting other people’s perspectives, so maybe you see a pattern. And then I was able to be like, “Oh wow, I didn’t see that before.”’ Norma, an undocumented Latinx activist, described a similar experience: ‘And there, I was also able to see our differences in experiences and vision and how we see the world too. But I think the biggest thing was that we were just hearing each other out. And after that accountability session, we came to an agreement on how to move forward’.

TJ facilitators actively work at developing their receptivity and sensibility towards others’ stories and experiences of injustice without having to be same as others. They seek to hold space for difference, connectivity and solidarity by creating interspaces empty of judgement and the pathology of the self, which are essential for the community accountability process. Being held accountable means taking responsibility by listening and connecting to people’s differently positioned experiences, by recognising how one’s complicity in structures of inequality causes harm to others. The community then decides as a collective what needs to be done to repair the harm and injustice suffered and to create community transformation and healing.

The practice of the TJ circles shows the possibility of collective resistance in a context of visibly oppressive and violent structures as that of LA’s redlined neighbourhoods. For decades these areas have been portrayed and imagined as an archetypal ghettos, characterised by extreme poverty and economic hopelessness, crime and neighbourhood scaled anti-gang over-policing tactics. However, Sides (2012) and the contributors to the his edited book Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles have shown that despite these historically rooted metropolitan problems, LA is undergoing a (fragile) transformation into a post-ghetto city, with the rise of community initiatives, new economic mobilisations, and a growing Latina population that offer hope for the city (Sides, 2012). The TJ circles could be seen as another example of these developments, in a context which is however still characterised by overt racial inequalities and violence.

The second case involves a different context for sharing experiences from different relational positions. It focuses on youngsters’ engagement with youth professionals who represent a system of youth care and family support provided and regulated by state institutions.

Theatrical conversations in Amsterdam: Decentring the professional gaze and unsettling distance

The evening falls as we start our bike ride. This is expected to be a real special night. In a small neighbourhood centre, a young urban theatre group will perform for parenting and youth professionals, social workers, police, youth, and parents from the neighbourhood. The evening has been organised to bring them together in an unusual space that breaks with the normal situations in which professionals and youth interact, like professional consultations, developmental guidance programmes, or training. I am invited to this unconventional encounter as part of my research on the interaction of youngsters, their families, and youth professionals in Amsterdam. It is a long bike ride from my part of town, which I take together with a teacher and youth professional who is participating in the research, a white middle-class woman about 10 years older than me. As we get further away from the city towards the outlying neighbourhood, my companion becomes increasingly uneasy. She keeps mentioning how unexpectedly far this place is and seems to wonder whether biking in the twilight in this – to her unfamiliar – suburban area is safe. When we reach the location, she seems even more uncomfortable in finding it a dark, bunker-like space. Some young men are sitting on the floor. A little at a distance, the two parenting counsellors who organised the evening stand together, excited but nervous.

The young actors’ collective is gathered around the table in the middle of the room. Cool-looking young men sitting together with their backs towards us. They greet us somewhat coldly and seem not to have any interest in our presence. At first, I had felt at ease and somewhat surprised at my companion’s nervous behaviour. The place reminds me of places I used to hang out as a youth in my Italian hometown. However, interacting with the actors and their distant attitude, I discover I am not as immune as I previously assumed to the sense of insecurity my companion and other professionals show. Although I might feel at home in this space, these young people might not feel equally comfortable with me, a white woman in her late 30s, looking quite similar to the social service professionals (mostly middle-class native Dutch women) slowly entering the space. I realise this space is by far not as simple as those spaces of laid-back interaction between youngsters I remembered from my youth. It is complicated by prejudices, fears, invisible patterns of distance, and assumptions about sameness and otherness.

The research journal fragment above illustrates the tension and (imagined) patterns of distance in an encounter between groups living the same town but perceiving each other as part of different social realities. The fragment is from one of the evenings that the Amsterdam youth services organised with a young theatre collective to shape an unconventional space for encounter between youngsters and youth professionals from groups they considered ‘hard to reach’. Compared to the urban context of LA, Amsterdam displays less overtly violent patterns, but subtler tensions leading to discriminatory and racist outcomes, often despite inclusive intentions of institutions and welfare agents (De Koning and Ruijtenberg, 2022). Racialised youth from disadvantaged urban areas face problems including labour market discrimination and pressure from increasing gentrification which accentuates patterns of inequality, weakening their sense of belonging to their living areas (Bouwman, 2023). Moreover, ethnic profiling and more diffuse forms of police racial violence exist in the Amsterdam context also (De Koning, 2017), as well as racial inequalities in juvenile criminal justice (Weegels et al., 2023), but were for a long time not openly recognised as racist structures.

This case was part of a study on how professionals in youth services tackle tensions and insecurities connected to multiple sources of difference that, in their experience, create social distance and result in unequal access to their services. The theatrical evenings were organised in different neighbourhoods considered disadvantaged or ‘vulnerable’ regarding youth problems. They involved neighbourhood youngsters and participants from their social environment: older people from the neighbourhood, police officers, social workers and teachers. During these evenings, theatre enabled exchanges about personal experiences of growing up and living together in the neighbourhood.

The theatre collective centres young urban people’s experiences and explores intersectional identities and experiences of marginality. It was initiated by theatre makers from minority groups who chose performative spaces to communicate experiences and languages which are generally disconnected from the elitist world of theatre. Young urban participants, often of migrant descent, are intensively trained to share and reflect on their own life stories and to acquire acting skills to transmit their experiences to others through plays that blend and connect participants’ various experiences. As they train, they explore their interconnected stories through theatrical research techniques but also through friendship and pedagogic relations with theatre makers. In this way safe spaces (Hill Collins, 1990) are created that allow the participants to produce alternative narratives on specific themes (e.g. sexuality, social pressure) which disrupt narrowing and oppressive images of their identity.

When the play is ready, their stories leave that protected space to enter into dialogue with various publics. The evenings in this case revolved around a piece created and performed by eight young men on what it means to ‘become men’ in Amsterdam. Two types of events were organised. In one, the play was performed first, followed by a public dialogue led by the actors and theatre makers. The other was shaped as an interactive dialogue in which the actors involved all participants in open exchanges alternated with short performances (theatre, spoken word, dance) taken from the play. Through both, interactive spaces emerged.

Intersecting lines of differentiation

The events brought together people who differ along various, intersecting dimensions of difference and are distanced by pre-existing images of each other. Not only did the participants have different life experiences and different positions in relation to societal sources of inequality such as racism, sexism and subtle mechanisms of exclusion, but they also had different proximities to the institutional system of youth policy. Indeed, a crucial aspect of these encounters was their embeddedness in the context of professional youth counselling and its outreach strategy aiming to ‘bridge the distance’ towards those considered ‘less accessible groups’. The relation between youth professionals, who are often middle-class, middle-aged women (mostly native Dutch), and these communities has been critiqued for decades as one in which normalised othering discourses become reproduced and reinforced through disciplinary practices.

Parenting support and youth counselling are contexts in which constructions of sameness and difference become especially visible (Bonjour and de Hart, 2013). While the notion of (inter-)cultural competence has been central in efforts to deal with diversity, it has been questioned in social work literature because it reproduces normalised constructions of sameness and difference (Danso, 2018; Nadan and Stark, 2017; Ponzoni and De Ruyter, 2023). Social problems involving youth in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are often reduced to problematic parenting practices linked to cultural difference, while the role of socio-economic inequality is neglected. Scholars argue that in the Dutch context, this frame reproduces exclusionary discourses in parenting support practices by reifying the presumed distance between (imagined) categories of difference, especially when low-income families of migrant descent are involved (van den Berg and Duyvendak, 2012; van Reekum and van den Berg, 2015). Thus, young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods often feel that social professionals, police and researchers approach them as ‘problem cases’.

In this context, theatre creates a context where epistemic resistance based on engaged connections across difference can arise. Whereas encounters in parenting- and youth support aim at resolving problems and working towards specific goals, the theatrical encounters emphasise openness. They create a space for emotional receptivity towards youngsters’ narratives, thereby countering the soft power ingrained in professional youth care practices. Thus, they also create an interspace that allows for unexpected connections and sensitivity to ‘unusual voices’ sharing diverse ideas and experiences (Medina, 2013).

Multi-layered identifications

Once the performance mentioned in the journal excerpt began, the subtle feeling of distance described quickly faded. The play involved eight young men who invited spectators to become witnesses to their world, which was presented as layered and full of paradoxes, containing contradictory interpretations of masculinity and complex juxtapositions of societal expectations. ‘I am not just one person!’ an actor shouted, after a long monologue about othering labels he feels subjected to. Participants later described how the actors’ openness and emotional intensity in sharing their lives created a shared sense of proximity and an emotional connection with strangers.

This space for unexpected connections was perceivable in many of the evenings organised in this project, also in the dialogues with the public. For instance, on one of the evenings, a neighbourhood resident shared that as an older homosexual resident, he had had some tensions with groups of young people from the area who exhibited homophobic attitudes in the streets, while he had also ‘watched them grow up’. He stated,

I expected to be touched most by the scene on homosexuality, but surprisingly, what struck me most deeply was the scene in which the young man talked about being black and being feared. I could feel on my skin what it was like to encounter someone in the streets who fears you for no reason.

Afterwards, he addressed the youngsters from his neighbourhood directly and described how unnatural and distressing it was for him, when he was young, to feel forced by peer pressure to be physically intimate with a girl, which made a strong impression in the room. The openness with which many participants shared intimate aspects of their personal lives was unexpected even to the artist collective. This included youth professionals talking openly about their own professional struggles, difficult choices and personal histories.

Clumsiness and dis-identification

For some professionals, the evenings were characterised not only by tensions, insecurities and clumsiness but also by distress. Although they appreciated youngsters daring to share intimate experiences publicly, some found the performances ‘too rough’ and wondered whether these rough representations of young men’s lifeworld and the pressures they experience really matched reality. As one youth professional remarked, ‘I think, at least I hope, that reality is not so harsh for young people in our city, so I was worried about sending youngsters home with such negative feelings’. This kind of reaction is surprising because young people –especially young men – participating in these evenings did recognise the scenes as mirroring their reality (as they shared in the evening plenary exchanges and in later interviews). These divergent perceptions indicate the lack of a common sense of reality concerning struggles with exclusion, injustice and pressure, which appear to be a daily reality for some but invisible to others. The same professional (and others) felt uncomfortable with the forced proximity of the play. She stated: ‘I wanted to sit in the back but was asked by the actors to sit in the front, where everything reaches you much more strongly. I got those beer drops right over me, which felt really distressing’, referring to one scene in which actors shook beer cans until they exploded. Her desire to ‘sit in the back’ mirrors the anxiety and distance described in the journal excerpt about entering a social environment that is part of one’s mental ‘map of fear’ regarding specific identities and urban neighbourhoods (England and Simon, 2010).

Openings for engagement

Other youth professionals found the induced proximity a positive experience. They reported feeling like both outsiders and insiders: they felt invited into a space primarily shaped and owned by the theatre collective and the youth in the audience, to whom they were outside observers, but they also felt embraced and invited to witness the youngsters’ struggles and to share their own personal experiences. This allowed some participants to feel comfortable enough to step back from their initial defensive and reactive attitudes and to dare to listen to others’ experiences. The emotional connections and openings the performance produced did not necessarily create a comfortable ‘safe space’ with easy recognition of each other’s experiences. However, they transformed the alienating feeling of estrangement from being confronted with otherness into the feeling of being part of the space together, a space that was complex and difficult to frame but was meaningful to all present. As one participant replied when asked whether she felt safe enough to share her experience, ‘I am not sure I felt safe, but I felt welcome’.

Listening to and reflecting on the differently located experiences led to feelings of unsettling and confusion but also to unexpected moments of engagement. As one professional shared:

I was a bit confused as to what to think about the play and about how this connects to our work as youth professionals. But I also realised that the young people on the stage, if they were in a counselling room with me, would not share these experiences in this way. I know that at the school [where I work], some youngsters experience discrimination, but they will not discuss that with me when we talk about their difficulties. […] Yes … now I have the feeling that this should change, although I am not sure how to go about.

Witnessing the play caused doubt and confusion for many professionals, leading some to reflect on their own role in structures that keep stigmatisation and distance in place. Their confusion starkly contrasted youngsters’ strong sense of recognition. Youngsters in the audience felt they could express themselves without fear of being judged and actually dared to do so. Some strongly identified with the actors, like they had known them for a long time. These evenings thus clearly contributed to decentring the professional gaze, allowing professionals to step back and create an interspace where youngsters’ complex and unsettling narratives could become the focus.

Discussion: Interspaces for meaningful engagement as sources for an ethics of urban solidarity

The tensions and divisions created by pressures of the late modern, neoliberal urban environment, supported by hard and soft forms of power, produce structures of exclusion in which othering and inequality are intertwined. Through the empirical cases that we examined we can see the impact of normalisation (soft power) which reproduces exclusion. This can also reinforce and normalise hard forms of power, particularly in the LA case, where the discursive order sustains criminal and legal justice regimes that legitimate disproportional violence against people of colour. The TJ circles in LA deconstruct criminalised images of young men as moral and physical threats, creating space to relate personal experiences with structural injustice. Similarly, although in a context which is less overtly violent, the theatrical evenings in Amsterdam dive into the complex experiences of youngsters to deconstruct biased images of manhood and of urban youth culture. Such images are mirrored in patterns of fear and in the discomfort of youth professionals, and they sustain the use of unidimensional and problem-oriented approaches towards urban youth of migrant descent in social work practices.

In the search for cornerstones for epistemic resistance to normalised power, Medina calls for modes of interaction in which differently located citizens, connecting with each other, can use their epistemic resources and abilities to resist, undermine and change oppressive normative structures. These modes for interaction must, according to Medina (2013), not only allow for talking and listening to others, but also be ‘constructive exercises’ for re-structuring our imaginations. We have therefore focused on examples of urban spaces for connectivity that go beyond forms of ‘respectful distance’ and allow for recognising difference, not as an imposed, external social category of existence, but as a (historically embedded) source of knowledge from lived experience. The engaged connections that result are ‘not based on commonality or sameness, but on being exposed to the otherness of others’ (Oosterlynck et al., 2016: 776). Difference does not disappear, but individuals with different social positioning can challenge fixations on difference and develop sensitivities towards otherness that enable them to identify with others’ experiences of injustice. We characterised these cases as examples of interspaces for meaningful engagement across difference. These are contexts that enable unusual modes of interaction, cornerstones to build epistemic resistance to the abovementioned structures of exclusion that produce both intra- and intergroup harm and distance. Especially in urban contexts of marginalisation, these interspaces may become a critical source of collective resistance to internalised negative images impeding mutual identification and solidarity, and so become crucial cornerstones for a new ethics of solidarity.

The two examples help us to distil key aspects of these interspaces, addressing the problems of late modern societies that we identified earlier: the decreased relational capacity of the individual, the subtle power of normalisation, and the failure of democratic structures to address inequality. A first aspect of these interspaces is that they require to ‘take a step back’ by decentring one’s perspective to connect with others beyond the pathology of the self and identify with others from different positions. The TJ circles in LA and the theatrical encounters in Amsterdam both show ways to unsettle conventional ways of interpersonal interaction. In LA, new forms of connectivity were created by emotionally engaging with others’ stories of harm by decentring the self; listening, recognising and acknowledging the harm and one’s complicity; and actively working not to reproduce that harm. In Amsterdam, young actors’ alternative performative narrative within a ‘welcoming’ space decentred the professional narrative and centred youngsters’ lifeworlds, enabling multiple levels of identification and emotional connection. Compared to the TJ circles, the theatrical encounters are lighter, more open-ended and consequence-free moments of interaction. But they do enable being sensitive in new ways to other people’s testimony (Medina, 2013).

A second aspect is that these interspaces allow their participants to realise the impact of normalised discourses of othering and stigmatisation and reflect on it. This requires exploring perspectives and experiences from different positions, prioritising those from disadvantaged positions. Therefore, interspaces must be both safe and daring/brave. The significance of safe spaces has been argued by black feminists to forge alternative narratives and imaginations which counter dominant negative images of the self (Hill Collins, 1990). Our cases indeed show the value of safe spaces (such as the sharing circles in LA and in the process of co-creation of the play in Amsterdam) for articulating shared experiences from the margins, to challenges discursive power. But they also show the importance of interspaces that are ‘brave’ (see Arao and Clemens, 2013), involving the courage to be confronted by others’ experiences, where participants dare to acknowledge how structures of inequality appear in their interpersonal relationships and to reflect on their own positioning or actions through the gaze of others (Ghorashi, 2021). This involves becoming vulnerable and exposed. In LA, safe spaces within a marginalised community become daring/brave because members have the courage to explore the complexity, layeredness and harmful patterns within their relationships and community and to face, acknowledge and address the harm they have caused others, thereby decentring the self to engage in shared healing. In Amsterdam, alternative narratives developed in safe spaces within a community are used to shape daring spaces with others outside the community, including institutional actors. Here, youngsters dare to step into the centre and share their experiences, while adults (including youth professionals) dare, at least is some cases, to decentre their expert gaze.

The third aspect of interspaces is connectivity, which is essential for nourishing an inclusive democratic culture and addressing the democratic deficit of structures that ignore differences at the heart of inequality. In LA, uncovering broader structures of exclusion in the TJ cycles, recognising, in Maya’s words, ‘all the isms [which] show up between us’, leads to the possibility of care- centred relations, based on shared responsibility. In the Amsterdam case, the emotional connections created through the theatrical evenings become (at least potentially) a cornerstone to question structures like (territorial) stigmatisation, which implicitly inform the attitudes and actions of social professionals and the frames of policymakers. Articulating both resistant experiences and resistant imaginations creates the space for the dissent that, according to thinkers like Young (2002) and Medina (2013), should be at the centre of democracy, as it helps ‘putting our practices and institutions in sync with the heterogeneous experiences of diverse members of society. But also with the heterogeneous imaginations that individuals and groups exercise’ (Medina, 2013: 6).

These two different examples suggest that we need multiple types of interspaces to address different contexts of exclusion existing both inside and between groups. Through revitalising and connecting their embodied knowledges, and reflecting on their interconnectivity and interdependence, participants are (potentially) enabled to make a difference through epistemic resistance. Because the soft power of exclusion works through repetition and is manifested in the daily normalisation of actions, resistance needs to be conceptualised in the same manner, that is, in terms of small changes that are taken up by individuals, groups, communities, academia, etc. in their daily actions. In this way, a contemporary ethics of urban solidarity hinges on the possibility of epistemic resistance to structures of distance or inequality and involves micro emancipation/revolutions instead of early-modern macro-collective forms of emancipation (Zanoni and Janssens, 2007). It involves the meaningful engagement that allows developing the courage, receptivity and sensibility to both see injustice and engage in justice-based transformation. Through these examples, we hope to have contributed to novel imaginations to envision sources for such urban solidarity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are very thankful to all the participants in our case studies in Los Angeles and Amsterdam, as well as to our colleagues from the Identity Diversity and Inclusion group at VU Amsterdam who commented on earlier versions of this text.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We would like to thank the NWO (016.Vici.185.084) for its financial support.

ORCID iDs

Elena Ponzoni

Halleh Ghorashi

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