Leisure in the City. Part I

Leisure has become an increasingly important feature of urban life. In recent times, a plethora of institutions varying from coffeebars to amusementparks have emerged offering a good time to leisure seekers, providing numerous skilled and unskilled jobs, and creating opportunities for businesses both at the higher and lower end of the market. Also outside the world of more formal institutions, urban dwellers find leisure, for instance by playing soccer on neighborhood squares, flaneuring around boulevards or loitering on street corners. Set in the space of the urban realm, many leisure activities involve interaction or even competition with others. The emergence of social media has added a new dimension: using mobile devices it is now possible to engage with (anonymous) distant others who are not in situ. This added dimension substantially changes the spatial and social dynamics of leisure activities as well as the institutional nexus.

The combined spatiality and social life of leisure activities connects to multiple urban spatial themes, varying from convivial gathering that ‘third places’ offer (Oldenburg), interaction with strangers sought or avoided in the shared realm (Goffman, Simmel), access to public space and the right to participate in the urban (Lefebvre), or the democratic debate on public issues (Habermas). Leisure can function as an instrument wielded by as well as an instrument wielded against an authoritarian state. This panel invites paper proposals engaging with leisure in the urban realm. How does this come about? How is it initiated, accommodated, regulated? By whom? Why? What are its consequences?