Convivial Chance Encounters: 'Contact-Supporting Circumstances' in Urban Public Space

The article is concerned with an issue which is not comprehensively covered in the broad 'living with difference' literature on encounters in public places: What makes the city's diverse strangers actually interact face-to-face? Drawing on long-term urban ethnography in Oslo, Norway, the article explores 'contact-supporting circumstances' in urban public space: basic circumstances that authorise or encourage convivial chance interactions among diverse strangers. The research reveals that a wide range of circumstances support such interaction, principally 'exposed and openings positions' and 'mutual openness'. In categorising and empirically substantiating these circumstances, which mostly have been investigated as individual material or social factors, the study adds to existing work in the fields of everyday multiculturalism, conviviality and their like. It does so by expanding upon a lesser-known part of Goffman's pioneering interactionist work, demonstrating how Goffmanian microsocial concepts can help portray diversity or multiculturalism as an interactional reality and thus open up original perspectives to 'larger' societal issues.