Ash Amin: Everyday Life, Infrastructure and Social Cohesion

Everyday life and infrastructure as the basis of social cohesion are the thread of the work of Ash Amin, a British geographer of Ugandan origin and professor at the University of Cambridge, who has spent three decades explaining how living together is produced in cities of strangers. Against theories that seek cohesion in shared identity or common values, Amin locates it in the ordinary: in the bus stop, the market, the library, the park and the water and electricity networks that allow different people to coincide and depend on one another without needing to know each other. The city coheres, he argues, not through what its inhabitants think but through what they share in using it.

Micropublics: coexistence is cultivated in small spaces

His first contribution was the idea of micropublics, formulated in 2002 after the disturbances between communities in northern England. Amin observed that intercultural dialogue policies and grand public spaces did little for coexistence, while places of everyday, compulsory contact, schools, workplaces, sports clubs, allotments, residents' associations, produced familiarity between groups that avoided each other in the street. Cohesion, he concluded, is cultivated in small spaces where people do things together, not in speeches about tolerance.

Land of Strangers: a city habitable for strangers

In Land of Strangers (2012) Amin extended that intuition to the whole city. Urban societies are made of strangers who will never form a community in the strong sense, and pretending otherwise leads to excluding whoever does not fit. The alternative is a politics of careful indifference: institutions, spaces and services that treat everyone well without demanding belonging, and that make the city a habitable place for strangers. Amin shows that hostility toward migrants and minorities grows where public services deteriorate, because competition for what is scarce turns the neighbour into a rival.

Lively infrastructure: pipes, stairways and relationships in the favela

His work on infrastructure takes the idea onto material ground. In the article Lively Infrastructure (2014), based on research in a favela in Belo Horizonte, Amin shows that the improvised pipes, electrical connections, stairways and paths that residents themselves build are not merely technical objects but the fabric that organises collective life: who helps whom, how conflicts are settled, which rules are respected. Infrastructure is social because it produces relationships, and when the state provides it decently, it extends that relational capacity to the whole city.

Seeing like a city: maintenance and care above the grand project

With Nigel Thrift, in Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) and Seeing Like a City (2017), Amin proposed understanding the city as a set of systems that work without anyone fully directing them, networks, flows, routines, and warned that most of what makes a city habitable is invisible and taken for granted until it fails. That view connects with Susan Leigh Star and AbdouMaliq Simone, and places the maintenance, repair and care of infrastructure at the centre of urban politics, above grand projects.

For planning, Amin's lesson is twofold. Investing in everyday infrastructure, transport, water, libraries, schools, markets and well-kept parks, is the most effective cohesion policy, because it gives all inhabitants a common ground of mutual dependence. And designing spaces of compulsory, cooperative contact, rather than grand symbolic squares, is what produces familiarity among strangers. A city that looks after the ordinary, Amin concludes, looks after coexistence.