Abstract

The recent growth of sociological attention towards everyday life (both as empirical domain and theoretical perspective) raises the issue of how different research approaches build the link between the «part» they study and the «whole» to which it refers to. The paper proposes a research perspective on situated urban interactions which allows the overcoming of three analytical limits recurring in how the link «part/whole» is recurrently built in a variety of research practices. Both the limits and the proposal developed to address them are introduced discussing the empirical evidences collected between 2012 and 2014 in the area of Via Padova, in Milan. In particular, three cases of typically urban interactions are addressed: the everyday exchanges among passing strangers on the sidewalk, the participation to a festive «multiethnic parade» and the devastations occurred during an improvised street demonstration. The variety of the chosen cases and of the techniques adopted for studying them allow to illustrate the theoretical peculiarity of the proposed perspective, based on the analysis of the relationship between the "interaction styles" and the scenes in which they are practiced. The benefits associated to the proposed perspective are discussed with respect to its possible extension in the analysis of other empirical domains (than those addressed in the paper) and in relation to its application to both single case-studies and to heterogeneous inventories of cases referring to the same local context.