The crowd and citylife: Materiality, negotiation and inclusivity at Tokyo’s train stations

Abstract

In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perceptions of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’– materiality, negotiation and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others.

Density and the compact city

“…Second, in work with Romit Chowdhury and Colin McFarlane in Tokyo (2021), we showed how the commuting crowd on the city metro develops multiple relations to high density compactness. This includes affective conditions of joy, laughter, calm, withdrawal, and frustration, as well as series of mundane negotiations as people move, wait, and weave, and more serious concerns around gendered or racial harassment.…”

Public transport as public space: Introduction

“…Public transport is a site in which strangers are encountered, a site where one meets society in its diversity. Bus, tramway and metro rides might be solitary, but nonetheless they happen in the co-presence of fellow passengers, often in dense environments (Chowdhury and McFarlane, 2022). As Augé (2002: 30) claimed, a ride on the metro involves ‘collectivity without festival and solitude without isolation’.…”

“…To capture such connections, Kemmer et al (2022: 289) argue for the notion of ‘exposure’, marking as it does ‘the relationality between structure and agency in situational contexts’. In commuting, relatedly, ‘an everyday politics of inclusion’ is revealed in micro-encounters (Chowdhury and McFarlane, 2022: 1355).…”

Density and pandemic urbanism: Exposure and networked density in Manila and Taipei

“…The research discussed here is part of a broader European Research Council supported research project, DenCity , that compares dimensions of high-density urban living (e.g. Chen et al, 2020; Chowdhury and McFarlane, 2022; Habermehl and McFarlane, 2023; Joiner et al, 2022; McFarlane, 2021; Tripathy and McFarlane, 2022). The research in Manila and Taipei took place from winter 2020 to late summer 2021, focussing on how cities managed and experienced the pandemic, and was supplemented by additional research trips and monitoring into late 2022.…”