The Empire of Scrounge Meets the Warm City: Danger, Civility, Cooperation and Community among Strangers in the Urban Public World

Abstract

This article offers alternative views on scrounging—looking through garbage to find valuable objects—as a disorderly activity, and on urban public life as dangerous because of disorderly people. The European micro sociological perspective on the fleeting but positive moments of urban public life, as developed in’ The Warm City’ (Müller in De warme stad: betrokkenheid bij het publieke domein. Jan van Arkel, Utrecht, 2002), is used to reread and reconstruct Ferrell’s ethnographic work in the ‘Empire of Scrounge.’ The focus of my article is to more deeply examine the public interactions scroungers have with scroungers and non-scrounging citizens. Ferrell’s interest in, and presentation of, his material leaves out this kind of micro analysis of stranger-interactions while scrounging in public space. My article shows that, in contrast to the belief that scroungers disrupt social order (and therefore need ‘policing’), scroungers often interact in a civil and careful way with strangers in order to purposively sustain public order, which allows them to continue their informal waste management. The overall image of urban public life which comes with these interactions is that of a ‘Warm City’, a social environment that consists of civility, cooperation and community among strangers.