I arrived in Lyon at nine years old with a Nigerian accent, a winter coat that was far too thin and no idea where anything was. For the first year, the city felt like a vast machine that ran perfectly well without me. People were polite and entirely uninterested. It took me a long time to understand that this indifference was not hostility. It was, in its own strange way, a kind of freedom. It was also, for a child, very lonely.
The German sociologist Georg Simmel described this condition at the start of the twentieth century. In his essay on the metropolis and mental life, he argued that city dwellers develop a protective reserve, a blasé attitude that allows them to cope with the overwhelming stimulation of crowds, traffic and strangers. The same reserve that frees us from the gossip of the village also prevents us from being known. The city gives you anonymity. What it does not automatically give you is a place.
Jane Jacobs, watching her street in Greenwich Village half a century later, saw how that gap could be bridged. She wrote about the intricate daily ballet of the sidewalk: shopkeepers opening up, children heading to school, neighbours nodding without necessarily knowing each other's names. These light, repeated contacts produce what she called eyes on the street, a web of casual attention that makes a place feel safe and inhabited. Belonging, in her account, is not a grand feeling. It is an accumulation of small recognitions.
The right not to be a stranger
Kant, in his essay on perpetual peace, argued for a limited but important principle: the right of a stranger arriving in a foreign land not to be treated with hostility. He called it the right of hospitality. It is a minimal claim. It does not guarantee a welcome, a home or a job. But it establishes that arrival itself should not be punished. Cities, which exist largely because of strangers, arguably owe their newcomers something more generous than that minimum, and often give less.
Amadou Sy-Laurent has cut hair in the same shop in the Guillotière neighbourhood of Lyon for twenty-two years. He estimates that half his clients were born outside France, and that most of them first came in for something other than a haircut: directions, a phone charger, a conversation in a familiar language. The shop, he says, is where people practise being regulars before the rest of the city is ready to treat them as such.
Nobody belongs to a city on the first day. You belong the day someone notices you did not come in.
That idea of noticing absence strikes me as the best definition of belonging I have heard. It suggests that a city becomes ours not when we know it, but when it knows us, even a little. And it places responsibility on everyone, not only on planners and politicians. The person who greets the new neighbour, remembers the name of the man at the kiosk or asks after the woman who missed her usual bus is doing civic work, whether or not they would call it that.
Who, then, is a city for? Not only for those born there, and not only for those who can afford its most expensive streets. At its best, a city is for anyone willing to become a regular somewhere: a café, a bench, a barber's chair. It took me years to feel at home in Lyon. When it finally happened, it was because a baker I had seen almost every day for a decade asked, one morning, where I had been all week.
