Conviviality is not enough: a communication perspective to the city of difference

This article interrogates the ways in which urban communication enables or prevents politics of conviviality in the multicultural city. A multimethod, primarily qualitative, study in a London neighborhood exposed extensive communicative fragmentation along ethnic and class lines. Does such communicative separation lead to segregation? Is togetherness ever possible? Rather than a togetherness/separation binary, our study revealed a dialectic that rests upon diverging distribution of modes of communication in the city: media often separate urban dwellers and face-to-face communication brings them together in momentary but important association. This dialectic and its various incarnations give rise to a spectrum of politics of conviviality: civility through Othering; civility through negotiation of We-ness and Otherness; and politics of civic engagement and solidarity.