Habits of difference in high-rise living

This chapter interrogates the habits of everyday sociability amid the intersection of two pressing challenges of modern urban life: the growing incidence of high-rise living and its reconfiguration of neighbourhoods and neighbourly relations; and the complex diversity of cities premised on increasing migration and transnationalism. This linking emerges from a set of broader concerns around the ways forms of cohabitation shape the possibilities for intercultural ‘conviviality’ or the capacity to live together in a context of increasing ethnic difference, especially given that higher urban densities and higher rates of migration are seen to be causes of greater social fragmentation. Drawing on research in the urban centre of Parramatta, Sydney, and based on interviews with residents in areas of high-density and council staff, this chapter argues that such urban complexities complicate ideas of habit, suggesting that we need to focus more on the diverse logics of ‘environing conditions’ and the open-ended processes of habituation. It argues that while habitual capacities to engage with diversity are partly shaped by built form and social policy, they are largely mediated by the trajectories of people’s lives and the investments in ‘inhabiting habit’ that these trajectories allow them to make.