Social civility and happiness of urban meeting. The figures of the "old man" and "baby"

Abstract

The urban social interaction was for long time –and it still is– thought in a negative way:  it is often defined as opposed to the social spaces of inter-recognition, to the long-standing enrollment of it in time, or to its capacity of setting at play the distinctiveness of individuals. By such a great unfavorable comparison, the fleeting relationships among anonymous individuals are linked with all of social relations representing the most factual things: the self-apparent evidence of the “codes”. This article, a by-product of an ethnographic research carried out in Paris, proposes to reconsider this perspective in order to try to identify the ephemeral social relationships’ worth of the city. The research focuses on those situations where spontaneous openness to the others is demonstrated, being this a set of close relationship where certain ways of disinterested recognition are present, which cannot be reduced to safeguard individual’s face neither to instrumentality of places or individuals.