Summary
Conviviality, in everyday use the enjoyment of company, has two separate meanings in social thought. For the social critic Ivan Illich, in ‘Tools for Conviviality’ (1973), it is the opposite of industrial productivity: people acting freely and creatively with each other and their surroundings. He judged tools, institutions like schooling and healthcare included, by whether they leave room for that.
For Paul Gilroy, a cultural theorist who grew up in London’s East End, it names ordinary multi-ethnic city life, where “one set of habits flows into others and all of them are altered by that encounter”. He doubts any government programme could engineer it: “It will emerge organically from everyday life.”
Rationale
Gilroy finds interdependence already lived, unplanned, on ordinary city streets: contexts of the sort Part 1 wants grown, there before anyone designed them. We share his doubt about “engineering a shift”.