The lacy city

 In China Mieville's fascinating The city and the city, two cities occupy the same space: tightly enmeshed physically, but powerfully separated culturally with different cultures, economies, building styles, fashions and language. Citizens avoid seeing things occuring in the other city even though they might be on the same street. It's called 'unseeing'. People pass through a border control point to see a place the other city, even though the route they travel might take them back along the same roads to a building right next door to their starting point.

It sounds like wildest invention, but it's not so different to life in an ordinary European city. I live in Southampton, but I haven't walked or even driven down every street. Not even every street in my area. I follow a fairly small set of routes to and from work, my son's school, particular shops, friends' houses, the stations. My Southampton is a lacy little subset of the city as a whole, reflecting my lifestyle and tendencies like a kind of fingerprint. It will be just as unique - as would anyone's, especially those with less regular lives.

As well as my sub-Southampton physically, I live culturally in a sub-Southampton. I work with and live near people who generally share my outlook, I connect digitally with people who share my interests. My father, who worked in social housing for many years and felt passionately about homelessness, has made our homeless population very visible to me - but many people 'unsee' those in doorways with cardboard notices. Other people unsee other groups. I myself try to unsee unnervingly raucous groups of teenagers in the street, trusting that they will elect to unsee me in return as I scuttle middle-agedly by.

It seems harmless, but in the city riots five years ago, the rioters were almost certainly throwing their stones across an invisible division into another city, one that shared a name and a location, but wasn't theirs.