Concepts for prospecting common ground139Even the most traditional ommunities of fate� of course, have important magined�components, but the point about the magined community�as Bauman discusses it, is that elief in their presence is their only brick and mortar,�as he puts it. They are constituted only at an ideological level, and therefore they can only be constructed through symbolic resources. Because everything has a symbolic dimension, anything can in principle be called on in the community-construction process. Urban settings, however, provide a particularly rich and potent source of material here: they are full of other people, they are large and unavoidably noticeable, they affect our daily lives in pervasive ways, and because they physically envelop individuals together, they can easily be seen as spatial analogues of communities themselves. The presence of other people in urban settings is a key resource here; not only for the physical meetings on which face-to-face community depends, but as symbolic resources for the construction of imagined community too. The importance of this more etached�symbolic relationship is central to understanding why eople-watching�is an important aspect of city life to many citizens. It helps to explain, for example, why William H.Whyte, observing performances in New York First National Bank Plaza, found himself looking at eople looking at people who are looking at people who are looking at the show�24 and why, in the very different setting of the Amsterdam pavement caf, Jan Oosterman found the same: The most important and favourite activities of people on the sidewalkcaf are watching people go by, being entertained by street life and inhaling the atmosphere of the city. Chairs are always placed towards the street, like chairs in a theatre are placed towards the stage.25 The only requirement for enjoying these pleasures is a supply of other people, who merely have to be there: enerally speaking, one does not want to get involved with anybody passing by. People mainly come to see the spectacle in front of their eyes.�6 The vitality of public space, measured according to the level of pedestrian encounters which it offers, is clearly the most important potential resource in these terms. In addition to the physical presence of other people, the spatial characteristics of given settings also offer rich symbolic resources for users to call on in constructing the imagined community they long for, to make sense of their everyday lives. We are concerned here with the degree to which the characteristics of these morphological elements lend themselves to interpretation, by those who long for imagined community, as being appropriate to the imagined community they desire. s this appropriate as our place�is the important question here, whatever different implications ur�might have in specific instances. All things being equal, urban transformations which increase the likelihood of an affirmative answer are likely to be evaluated more positively than those which reduce it. Places which seem positive in these terms are often said to have an appropriate identity. There is a problem here, however: in the light of recent and current events in many parts of the world, we have to be very aware of the dangers which can all too easily arise from fostering an s�versus hem�sense of imagined community, demonising he others�in today multi-cultural societies. Appropriate identity, like cleanliness and biotic
