Talking To Strangers To Revitalize Urban Spaces
Urban-life lessons from talking to strangers.
Last weekend, dwellers in 20 cities witnessed an unusual sight. Two chairs facing each other in the middle of a square.
On one sat a smiling student. On the other, a sign:
As part of the Open Chair Democracy Talks campaign, we youth fellows of the International Youth Think Tank invited passers-by for a conversation on democracy. These were the cities involved:
All over the world, tens of people were asked the same questions, at the same time. Rich, poor, young and old were pushed to reflect on their role as democratic citizens.
Why doing this, you might ask. Good question. Well, we had two goals in mind:
- We wanted to collect the opinions of ordinary people — we already know what experts think. We did this by talking to anyone that had a few minutes to spare. No pre-requisites. No filters. Just the raw thoughts of people nobody listens to.
- We wanted to spark a conversation in their minds. Between themselves and themselves. Am I doing enough to contribute to my community? Can I consider myself an active citizen? People stood up from that chair with those questions in mind.
I did this in Kristiansand, Norway. I put the two chairs in the very centre of the city: in the middle of the triangle town hall-cathedral-Starbucks. It was a Saturday afternoon, sun was out, one of the first real days of spring in Scandinavia. Thus many people were strolling down the centre.
Norwegians are known to not be very talkative. They won’t strike a conversation unless they really need to. It’s not that they are shy. Most Norwegians are just strongly individualistic. Their way of being polite is to not disturb you. One example of this is the “Norwegian arm”.
For a norwegian, asking someone to pass them the salt is more unpolite than stretching their arm across the table and grabbing it themselves. In Southern European cultures, this would be the other way around.
So, you can imagine how low my expectations were when I set out to talk to strangers in Norway.
Surprisingly, it worked out. People stopped and had a lot to say (sometimes too much).
The same happened in all the other 19 cities involved in the project. Talking to strangers was much easier that we thought.
In this article, I don’t want to talk about the answers we collected. That’s another story.
Here I want to see if this idea of striking random conversations can tell us something about what urban life looks like - and could look like.
If you live in a city (and if you come from planet Earth there’s a 60% chance you do), you’re missing out. The amount of people living literally next to you is just crazy.
There’s thousands, sometimes millions of personal stories around, but you don’t engage with them. And it’s not because of you. I don’t do it either. We all have stuff to do and no time to talk to anyone.
The great thing about cities would be that they allow us to meet other people. They put us right next to them, so that we can bump into and get to know each other. This way we can exchange stories and knowledge. We can teach and learn and innovate.
But looking around I see us trying to minimize the number of interactions we have with strangers. We start the day sorrounded by people we know. We go to one place where we know everybody, then another one. And eventually we come back home.
In between these movements, we try our best to ignore anyone we do not know.
We acknowledge their presence with short eye contact, to then retreat ourselves in the safe shrine of “I’m going somewhere and I’m in a hurry”.
There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s the basis of marking personal boundaries in anonymous crowds. It’s how we keep mentally stable and at ease living close-packed with millions of human beings.
But I do feel like we’re missing out. Cities are huge vibrating libraries of personal stories. And we’re always reading the same books.
Instead, let’s try to hypothesize a situation in which you have nothing better to do other than wandering (very rare) and you have no shame at all about walking up to random people (almost impossible).
You approach every stranger you bump into. Some of them ignore you for the same reasons you have always ignored them. But some others don’t, and you strike a conversation.
Someone will tell you about what they’re cooking for dinner: a special Iranian dish you’ve never heard of. A girl will show you what she’s listening to. You might as well like the song and look the band up on google. An old man will give you a non-requested tip about how to make good friends and let go of bad ones.
Whatever it is, you’re learning. You’re visiting those shelves in the library you’ve never looked into.
All those people passing by on the street… what do they know I don’t know?
Now, let’s go back to us sitting in front of an empty chair waiting for passers-by to stop.
What we did was taking a public space of moving— the street— and transforming it into a place of settling. People had to stop and sit in order to talk to us.
Done that, we started tapping into the knowledge of the city. All those personal stories we ignore on the street, we started reading them page by page, question by question.
And it was illuminating.
Talking to strangers is beautiful and human and a sign of madness. A sign of madness? Yes, think about it. If someone approaches you on the street out of nowhere like “Hey, how are you doing?” — you think they’re mad.
That’s because we have stigmatized it.
The Open Chair Democracy Talks wants to be, among other things, an effort to normalize human-to-human interaction. We want to make the most out of living in cities by opening up people to the wonderful universe of strangers.
If we don’t use them to speak to each other, cities are just loud, trafficked and claustrophobic places of crowded loneliness.
When we interact, they become exciting vibrant colorful places of innovation.
Next time you see two chairs facing each other, and one of them is empty, what do you do?
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