Abstract

Everyday urban life is held together by countless small moments of shared presence. People move through streets, parks, shops, and transit spaces alongside others they barely know, adjusting their conduct just enough for encounters to remain workable. Much of this coordination passes unnoticed. This dissertation begins from that ordinary achievement. It asks how people living in, or regularly moving through, the Montréal district of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) coexist amid difference, and what practical repertoires help sustain everyday co-presence under uneven conditions.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in NDG, the dissertation follows routine situations in which residents encounter one another on sidewalks and at bus stops, in cafés and dépanneurs, in parks, gardens, and running groups, and at local events. It attends to the micro-settings in which people come into view of one another and to the small adjustments by which ordinary shared life is managed. Rather than treating diversity as a stable background condition, the analysis examines how difference becomes salient in particular situations, how it is handled through ordinary interaction, and how it can also recede as other practical concerns take precedence. These encounters are shaped by uneven conditions of participation, including time pressure, fatigue, mobility, and material insecurity.
The dissertation argues that coexistence is best understood not as a settled ethos or normative ideal alone, but as the ongoing practical maintenance of ordinary co-presence. People can live side by side without strong attachment, shared identity, or explicit agreement, but this requires work, usually in the form of small acts of acknowledgment, restraint, accommodation, avoidance, cooperation, and repair. I describe these patterned but flexible competencies as convivial repertoires. They emerge through repetition, shift across settings, and are exercised within the limits of particular circumstances. They are also materially situated, since the built environment and the organization of local settings shape what forms of attention, coordination, withholding, and involvement become possible.
By foregrounding ordinary encounters as a primary site of the practical work through which shared life is sustained, the dissertation contributes to debates on urban sociality, civility, and coexistence by working at the scale of practice rather than policy or explicit discourse about diversity. More broadly, it shows that shared urban life is sustained not only through interaction in particular encounters, but through repeated and uneven forms of participation that help make local life workable over time.