A protest, a zoning dispute, a shouting match at a public hearing: each looks, to anyone who prefers order, like a breakdown of civic function. Read differently, civic friction is one of a city’s most precise sensors. Conflict surfaces exactly where competing claims on shared space have become incompatible — information that a quiet, conflict-free public sphere would never generate, because the incompatibility would simply remain unspoken. Suppressing visible friction does not resolve the underlying incompatibility; it only disables the sensor that was reporting it. DissensusAcceptance returns from political theory in its most concrete urban form: accepting that a certain baseline of civic friction is diagnostic rather than pathological changes how a city should respond to it — less as disorder to be managed away, more as data about where the city’s own arrangements have stopped fitting the people living inside them.
Dikeç, M. (2007) Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gandy, M. (2014) The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harvey, D. (2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Caldeira, T.P.R. (1996) ‘Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation’. Public Culture, 8(2), pp. 303–328. Cresswell, T. (2024) Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction (2nd edn). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
