Corridors of Dissociation

Abstract

There is a large body of work pointing to the city as a space of differential rights (e.g., Lefebvre 1968, Harvey 2003, Purcell 2003). This chapter contributes to this field by exploring everyday encounters in culturally diverse neighbourhoods, when exclusion is spatialized and common. Here, we examine ways in which difference is expressed through corridors of dissociation. This concept concerns dispositions and practices that channel certain people to different locations in public space and signify a kind of perceptual partition. We explore the cases of Indian migrant workers in Singapore, Nigerian migrants in Hillbrow, linguistic landscapes of Astoria and Hillbrow and shopping malls in Singapore and Hillbrow. By delineating how corridors of dissociation operate in each of those locations, we point to the commonalities in structuring spatial behaviours across places.

While ‘rooms without walls’ demonstrate ways in which diverse groups come together in public spaces, we must be cognizant that many people are excluded from spaces of encounter, either by their own decisions (based on social discomfort, fear of confrontation or lack of physical security) or directly by others (through racist acts, policing or other more subtle modes of making people unwelcome). Corridors of dissociation channel people along exclusionary physical and mental trajectories. Such social and spatial patterns of segregation, or of selectively ‘balkanizing’ spaces (ethnic/linguistically, or as ‘safe’ areas for people in precarious situations), bear directly on the ways configurations of diversification develop, how diversity relates to popular representations, and how ‘diversity’ is encountered in non-segregated spaces.