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Serendipity

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Urban Ethics in the Anthropocene
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Abstract

Despite the stultifying legacies of modernist planning, cities today nonetheless aspire to become convivial places characterized by some form of serendipity. However, neither the meanings of serendipity in the urban context is clear, nor is the prospect for designing serendipity straightforward. Moreover, existing discourse tends to narrowly typify urban serendipity as instrumental to the aims of the creative city. In this chapter, four new vectors are proposed to expand on the meanings of urban serendipity beyond the creative city stereotype. They are namely urban serendipity as an (i) emergent effect of large cities; (ii) as a threatened experience in the Smart City; (iii) as an encounter with ‘more-than-human’ agencies and other living systems in the city; and finally, (iv) as a moral encounter with others.

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Chan, J.K.H. (2019). Serendipity. In: Urban Ethics in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0308-1_5

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