Everyday coexistence: A research agenda for rethinking living-together in the city

How do we live together? This question, at the heart of society, is vividly debated in contemporary European cities in times of rapid demographic changes and rising inequalities. While these discussions often point towards increased differences and the emergence of new cleavages over identity, they fail to grasp what unfolds in everyday relationships. Creating a dichotomy opposing identity and alterity, thinking through difference muffles the power relations that impact how living-together unfolds and how people experience it. Inspired by ethnographic explorations in six cities in Finland, France, and Sweden, the article proposes an alternative, and more nuanced way to unpack the complex dynamics of what takes place between people in daily relationships. Giving prominence to what arises in-between people, we formulate a research agenda into everyday coexistence that unpacks how everyday life emerges as a contested domain of continual negotiations and persisting tensions, where the living-together is at the same time already there and permanently reinvented. This renewed epistemological horizon that the concept of the everyday opens, shifts attention toward the inherently open and relational existential space between the self and others and reinstates the importance of taking note of abundance and open-endedness in the study of living-together.