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‘What makes city life meaningful is the things we hide’

In this article we bring Marshall Berman’s writings on public space, politics and subjectivity into dialogue with a literary rendering of similar themes by Orhan Pamuk in his 2015 novel A Strangeness in my Mind. Our aim is to elaborate upon Berman’s undeveloped notion of ‘existential space’—first suggested in a review of an earlier Pamuk novel—through an extended encounter between the authors. This article begins by comparing the urban writings of Berman with Pamuk’s novel across three broad, overlapping themes: (1) the contingency of space; (2) authenticity and experience; and (3) openness, inclusivity and danger. In the analysis that develops out from this dialogue, we interpret existential space to imply any urban space—a room, a street, bar or square, for example—that is appropriated, in an act of struggle, by occupants or users as ‘an everywhere’: an inclusive place from which to connect with others and from where to pursue transcendent goals such as love, creativity, equality, justice or joy. This points to the fragile temporality of existential space, to how the meaning of the ‘present’ may be deferred or ‘hidden away in the back of the mind’ because such spaces are simultaneously concrete and preoccupied with another time (and place).