How do we represent “strangeness” in contemporary city cultures? How do strangers function in urban life today and why does this matter in the diverse environments and social spaces of identity around us. Such cultural constructs of the estranged individuals lay claim in different ways to their being unique, local, cosmopolitan, multicultural, sophisticated, weird, innocent, or simply, authentic in a non-compromising way. Openness, fluidity and diversity provide some keys for negotiating with the claims to dynamism and vitality in the global economy of culture implied. How strangers now meet, talk to and fight with each other, live together amid difference and indifference, or encounter each other seductively or violently is affected by how each city in question has been imagined and represented as a particular space of encounter. Examining the work, and play, of such encounters in various forms of urban culture would reveal how some current discourses saturating our public spaces help to shape identity and difference in the urban imaginary that delimits for the city-dweller a strange field of everyday practice.

As a foundational concept in urban theory, “the stranger” delineates a state of intensified indifference (Simmel) as we re-think the condition of people’s estrangement in city lives across many kinds of borders. The Symposium situates this contemporary challenge in the contexts of colonial and post-colonial encounter. To go beyond isolated frames of analysis, we shall aim for a dynamic cultural politics of the present, in which we try to examine the strangers’ social condition of existence, discriminate the fleeting perspectives implied in the very strangeness of contemporary lives, and compare how strangers survive a cultural field that more often than not works to dis-engage the otherness of ordinary identities.

Funded by Research Grants Council, Hong Kong SAR, 2006-2008