“I Am an Unashamed Cityphile”: Making Sense of a World of Strangers in Ann Arbor, Amsterdam, and Beyond

This article describes the social construction of Lofland's A World of Strangers (1973), which has become a seminal publication on social interactions in urban public places. I focus on her methods, research locations, references, and positionality. I will refer to my meetings with her and analyze two unpublished documents: the methodological appendix of her book and her 1966 paper “In the Presence of Strangers.” The article shows that her book was profoundly shaped by middle‐class rules of public behavior in Ann Arbor in 1966, her symbolic interactionist understanding of the fragile self, and her positionality shaped by class, gender, age and race.