Sidewalk Encounters: Card Playing and Neighborhood Use in a Lisbon Suburb

Abstract

Card-playing encounters are discussed in detail as a practical and symbolical neighborhood-use (Blokland, 2003) enacted by an elder-men peer-group. Research underscores the relationship between the elderly peer-group members’ practices and the neighborhood’s public space appropriation, their public characters’ attributes (Jacobs, 1972) and behavior, and social construction of a sidewalk small social place. Among aged peer-group members, sidewalk card-playing accounts for an increase in social and psychological benefits, ranging from social contacts to memories self-expression, derived either from the gaming situation or from its pervasive sociability.

Citation

Nunes, J.P. (2016), "Sidewalk Encounters: Card Playing and Neighborhood Use in a Lisbon Suburb", Public Spaces: Times of Crisis and Change (Research in Urban Sociology, Vol. 15), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 53-78. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1047-004220160000015003

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