On Spaces of Hospitality

Although specialists in hospitality have worked extensively on hospitality with respect to relations between different nations or between nations and individuals of a different nationality, for instance when they seek asylum, Jacques Derrida preferred to focus instead upon the relationship between the guest and the host. This has provided a much-needed rethinking of how to understand hospitality as a way of relating, as an ethics and as a politics. Within this work, there have often appeared discussions of ‘spaces of hospitality’, but these spaces have remained largely abstract. This is where this paper comes in: It will re open discussions of spaces of hospitality with an introduction into an on-going research project that studies the performative, structural and social dynamics of cultural encounters focusing on forms of hospitality that are related to particular sites in the city, namely the market place, the religious sanctuary and places for the performing arts and cultural heritage. For the modern city they are the tightly woven fabric of social reality, and their configuration can make certain cities more hospitable than others, is the leading idea