Beyond Conclusion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Towards New Understandings of Coexistence

Abstract

The chapter elaborates on the complexity-informed approach through which we have illuminated that in the urban everyday, social relations and dynamics do not unfold through fixed categories or stable identities. Rather, social bonds, belonging, a sense of exclusion, separation, and meanings evolve through fleeting encounters, mundane routines, affective resonances, and situated interpretations as people encounter “difference” and live with one another. The chapter reflects on the potential and limitations of the book’s interdisciplinary approach that was applied through a threefold strategy – a multisited methodology, a refusal of identity-based framings, and an interdisciplinary, multimethod design. The chapter works as a provocation: it presents a call to rethink how we study, represent, and engage with urban life. It invites us to dwell in the ambiguities, frictions, and emergent constellations that make up the city. On these grounds, it purports that complexity can be conceived of as an epistemological and methodological intervention that can have profound conceptual ramifications.