The ambivalence of familiarity: understanding breathable diversity through fleeting encounters in S ingapore's J urong W est

This paper contributes to the recent interest by geographers on urban diversity and encounters and is motivated by the significance of living with difference in grounded, prosaic ways. I situate co‐existence with strange others in shared public spaces through the interrogation of fleeting, prosaic ways people manage such diversity in their everyday encounters. Drawing on ethnographic data based on S ingapore's neighbourhood of J urong W est, I expand on a politics of diversity that acknowledges distance, limitations and ambivalence among people who are personally unknown to one another. I develop the notion of the familiar stranger as a way to interrogate the potentials and limitations of coexisting with difference, where positive and strained relations can occur simultaneously. Rather than demanding cohesion and integration, I argue that a far more open form of coexistence would acknowledge these kinds of sociality that do not force people to engage beyond the present precisely so that diversity can become unremarkable and everyday. In this sense, this paper argues for a non‐prescriptive way of understanding coexisting with difference where exchanges of ambivalent and fleeting nature can pave the way for a politics of breathable diversity.