The City as a Place of Encounters? Eh...I don't think so

The city is supposed to be a place of  encounters, that is how cities like London partly arose, out of a meeting place for the merchant class.  

Yet at its apogee, its present day culmination, the city is a fragmented terrain. A city is no longer the meeting place of the classes, on the contrary it is the structured place of separation; suburbs, ghettos, thoroughfares, banlieues are organised to keep the 'other' and confrontation at bay.

The social space of the city is organised to keep class relations to an abstraction, 

The desire for a sense of place become all the more fierce in the community of money as they endeavour to seal themselves off

Like the elite bodyguard of a Roman Emperor, London post codes are the Praetorian guard. 

Inhabitants of the 'most desired' areas in the city seal themselves off with all manners of signs and symbols.

For in these days of increasing urbanisation, global democratisation; of threatened  population movements, the hordes, the 'other', whether imagined or not, are always in the mind, like a rat gnawing in the skull, always threatening to storm those protective gates. 


Source  Consciousness and the Urban experience  by David Harvey