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This chapter explores a common, but typically overlooked urban practice: smoking outside the workplace. This activity is analysed as an attempt to create marginal spaces of brief retreat from the acceleration and agitation of the workplace. By talking to smokers about what drives them into the street, and capturing smokers photographically, we discover that these people are seeking moments of breakaway from the dominating involvement of the commercial city. The practices we observe in this chapter are typical of what Erving Goffman refers to as ‘away’ activities: strategies for briefly escaping from the absorption of all-consuming social situations. We conclude by asking whether these urban pauses could be stretched to a point where they challenge the compulsion of the overwrought rhythmic order of the capitalist city.

This introductory chapter starts off by discussing the differences and interconnections of visual sociology and urban sociology in their quest to understand human settlements. It then moves to argue for expanding the focus to other disciplines that are equally geared toward researching aspects of the city in visual and multimodal ways, since the urban context cannot be studied comprehensively without engaging a multitude of disciplines and trying to make productive connections between them. The chapter continues with a concise overview and discussion of each of the contributions in this first of two volumes of “Visual and Multimodal Urban Sociology” in the “Research in Urban Sociology” series. These twin volumes explore multiple ways in which the city and city life may be approached, studied, and expressed through visual and multimodal means and methods, thereby as much as possible including sensory experiences other than those related to seeing and hearing. It concludes with drawing some contours and challenges of visual and multimodal urban studies and the critical role of technology in advancing this cross-disciplinary field of inquiry.

Tioxide Group has announced the rationalization of its European activities into a new business, Tioxide Europe.