Convivial encounters in the city. On welcoming the other

Abstract

The urban is a site of diversity, multiplicity and conviviality under threat from commercialization, not least through tourism. The dominant socio-spatial logic of capitalism has urbanized its extractive practices capturing value from the urban and social fabric and its affective and communicative values. This monetizing of everyday life through all manners of platform capitalism embedded in ubiquitous connectivity will erode urban cultural diversity. As a counter measure the paper discusses the theoretical contours of urban conviviality and will conceptually explore how to re-story the urban fostering such conviviality, engaging with the most recent tourism policy of the city of Amsterdam. Conviviality mediated through a vibrant urban fabric can make for spaces of alterity and reinstate use-value as central to our economic systems. Countering thereby capitalist monoculture of urbanity, urban design animated by care and responsiveness can foster multiplicity and conviviality. Applied to the tourism encounter and a reoriented understanding of hospitality allows for tourism animated by autonomy and creativity, personal interdependence and redistributive justice, contributing to the momentum needed to overturn the deadening urban frontier of capital accumulation.