VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

Conviviality matters. It is proven to increase individual and community resilience and has the potential to improve community sustainability. It makes cities more liveable. The, now widely acknowledged, loneliness pandemic is often partly blamed on processes of industrial capitalism leading to urbanization and a failed promise of cosmopolitanism—a cosmopolitanism that has not delivered for great swaths of people the kind of conviviality or support that one might hope Diogenes’s vision would naturally lead to. Instead, for many, certain aspects of industrial capitalism have created enclaves, ghettos, closed shops, urban alienation, et cetera, putting up barriers as much as enabling flows. This paper takes as its starting point the assertion that the processes of industrial capitalism have not been conducive for conviviality. It suggests that it may be time to turn away from contemporary Western ideas of friendship as being about finding one’s soulmates or being seamlessly pulled towards one’s ‘consumer tribe’ (Maffesoli, 1995), and instead to return to a much earlier idea of friendship as embedded in mutual reliance and civic action. Think Epicurus’s garden as opposed to Central Perk in the TV show Friends – a conviviality based on genuine diversity around the table. This form of resilience, born out of conviviality less coloured by consumerism and ‘lifestyle’, and in which the disconcerting globalised ‘stranger in our midst’ (Rumford, 2013) can plausibly become a friend, better enables resilient, sustainable communities and is key to our future survival. This paper explores forms of conviviality in urban settings, from mutual ownership, to community kitchens, and asks whether we might need to engage in anthropocenic thinking and adopt a radically changed understanding of our own place in the universe.