Le Ray 429mode of acknowledging the other’s presence while establishing some dis-
tance, not to show too much attention or curiosity—organizes copresence
in urban environments.^9 Others have insisted on the fact that urban space
is not an empty setting: architectural devices, equipment (including light
and sound equipment) and services provide city dwellers with landmarks
to interact with and structure their behaviors. In French sociology, atten-
tion has notably been given to the diversity of “engagement regimes” and
forms of argumentation with which actors produce and discuss public
issues or justify themselves by referring to a “public good.”^10 Since the
beginning of the 1990s, extensive efforts have been made to go beyond
the distinction generally established between urban and political (but also
judicial, media or art-related) publicness.^11 Relieu and Terzi, in this way,
try to bridge the most ordinary activities of city-dwellers on one hand and
mainly discursive political controversies or public debates on the other.
They indeed consider civil inattention (between pedestrians and car-driv-
ers for example), participation in a police investigation as a witness (in
relation to a car accident in this case) and collective action (calling for the
improvement in traffic regulations) as many different ways to “engage”
with a public space, all of which contribute to the production of urban
publicness. More specifically, they argue that urban public experiences
“embody and concretely constitute different modalities of living together,”
which gives them a political dimension.^12 Methodical operations regu-
lating activities in urban space are indeed inscribed in a system of nor-
mative mutual expectations: while following a procedure or mobilizing
specific knowledge in this space, one expects that the other will be able to
act in an appropriate way. If I am about to walk on a pedestrian crossing,
I expect the car drivers to stop and let me cross. Likewise, if I run with
my luggage in the direction of the train platform, I expect other people in
the way to step aside to facilitate my run to catch the train. This practical
knowledge makes us ordinary members of society, helps us to solve every-
day practical issues and provides frameworks for behaving adequately.
But these methodical operations and normative expectations also “create
and maintain common ways of sensing, acting and judging ... They deter-
mine, in the same movement, the viewpoint from which a community
can consider itself as unified and the relevant categories to behave and
circulate within this community.” Because they contribute to defining and