Affective practices in the European city of encounter

The city's pivotal role in generating, assembling and mobilizing differences provides fertile ground for examining a spectrum of ‘close’ and ‘strange’ encounters between people, the accompanying expressions of emotion and the circulation of embodied affect as they unfold in a culturally diverse world. In this context, I first attend to the different ways in which the papers in this special feature demonstrate the significance of affective practices in influencing urban encounter in the European city of difference. I then explore from the vantage point of a very different site—the newly independent, post-colonial, multicultural, rapidly globalizing city of Singapore located in Asia—the conditions that go into the production of ‘different’ or ‘similar’ affective practices shaping human encounters with difference.