Trust and the City

The chapter by Ulrike Gerhard, Judith Keller, and Cosima Werner analyzes transformations of trust on the urban scale. Trust is explored as a socio-spatial concept by applying two quintessential urban geographic rationales to trust: the relational and the mobile. Subsequently, four related themes are detailed that help grasp this urban dimension of trust empirically. These themes-cities as imaginative spaces, cities as social spaces, the temporal dimension of urban development, and the meaning of home and housing as spatial fixations-do not constitute a comprehensive list of research areas, but they are drawn from different long-term research projects that seek to understand recent struggles and increasing inequalities in US cities.