DATE: Thursday, 9th August

TIME: 5.30 for 6.00 PM

VENUE: UTS Building 10 (235 Jones Street, Ultimo), Level 6, Room 440

RSVP: Transforming.Cultures@uts.edu.au

Dr David Bell, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK

Hospitality and the City

The concept and practices of hospitality have generated considerable cross-disciplinary interest in recent years, enlivened by interventions from a broad range of perspectives which have used hospitality as a 'social lens'. These studies have also looked closely at hospitality as a doing, a set of practices or performances -- whether in formal, commercial settings (the 'hospitality industry') or in the everyday encounters of ordinary life. In this talk, I will explore three key ways in which hospitality practices have been framed in an urban context: sites for doing hospitality in cities. First, I will discuss the role of formal, commercial hospitality spaces -- bars, cafes, hotels, restaurants -- in producing forms of sociality and conviviality. While these settings have been critiqued for 'instrumentalizing' hospitality, I will argue that they are nevertheless playing a vital role in changing the culture of cities. Moreover, these hospitality spaces are being used in reimaginings of urban life and in attempts to regenerate city centres. Second, I will focus on the role of food and eating, especially eating together, as a practice used to promote community cohesion and 'social regeneration'. In particular I will discuss how community arts groups seek to use food and eating as a way to draw different groups of people together, and thereby explore the idealization of urban commensality as productive 'social work'. Last, I will think about the 'throwntogetherness' of city life, and how informal, intersubjective interaction -- what I have called 'moments' of hospitality -- are equally important, if often fleeting and elusive, components of the hospitable city. Despite critiques of modern urban life as alienated, hurried, ill-mannered and unwelcoming, I will argue that we can see in these moments at least the possibility of hospitality as an ethics of social relations.