Arriving in an unfamiliar city.

People associate particular possibilities with urban life: work, freedom, entertainment, encounters. They fear being overwhelmed, loneliness and exclusion. Tokyo inspires different hopes and fears than Berlin or Zurich. Those who arrive in an unfamiliar city bring ideas with them – about urban life and about the city in which that life is supposed to unfold. There they encounter people with their own experiences, habits and ideas about living together. What happens in this encounter? How does the city change those who arrive? And how do those who arrive change the city?

The prose of Peter Weiss (1916–1982) takes us directly into this encounter. In Report on the Institutions and Customs in the Settlements of the Grey-Skins (Bericht über Einrichtungen und Gebräuche in den Siedlungen der Grauhäute), begun in 1953 and published only in 1968 in the collection Aus aufgegebenen Werken; in the novel Fluchtpunkt (1962); and in the story Der Fremde (1980), published under the pseudonym Sinclair, Weiss explores different experiences of arrival. A traveler tries to understand the unfamiliar activities of a city. An emigrant searches for a place to live in Stockholm. A narrator enters a city accompanied by his past.

Discovering and Experiencing

In the Report, the traveler encounters a city whose institutions and customs he does not know. At first, he sees an “intertwined throng of living beings”. From an elevated position, he observes movements, routes and vehicles. Then he descends into the crowd, enters a shop and, carried along by others, finds himself on a means of transport. He observes, imitates, misunderstands and revises his assumptions. What seems self-evident to the inhabitants is something he must gradually work out for himself.

The readers, too, initially fail to recognize what is happening. The collection and issuing of tickets appears as a “game of exchange”. The ticket guarantees its holder the “right to participate in this gathering”. Only gradually does the everyday activity become recognizable for what it is. Weiss avoids familiar terms and thereby reveals what they usually conceal: people must meet certain conditions in order to participate in a shared activity.

How much understanding a city depends on acquired knowledge can be experienced in many places. Anyone arriving at an airport in Tokyo for the first time encounters signs and terms whose connections are not immediately apparent. Suica, PASMO, JR, IC Card, Green Car – one can read the words without knowing how the system works. One observes others, compares, asks artificial intelligence for help and tries to develop an understanding of the whole from individual experiences.

The traveler in the Report already brings certain ideas with him. In his uncertainty, he recalls the stories told in his homeland about the inhabitants of the unfamiliar city. They are said to be bloodthirsty and vengeful. When people in a shop laugh at one of his awkward movements, he fears an attack. But nobody attacks him. Those present return to their activities. The traveler lacks the knowledge needed to find his way. At the same time, he possesses supposed knowledge that distorts his perception. Ignorance and prejudice alike make encounters with the unfamiliar more difficult.

The Report can be read as a literary exercise in unlearning. Weiss strips things of their familiar names and forces us to look more closely. The order of the city emerges from individual observations that remain provisional. The outsider’s perspective reveals how much of what appears self-evident rests on learned rules and social conventions.

In Der Fremde, Weiss connects entering a city with the past of the person arriving: “Thus I enter the city, covered in the dust of the past.” The city may be new, but the person entering it is not. They bring memories, expectations and wounds. Their previous life helps determine what they perceive and what they expect of their future.

In Fluchtpunkt, this experience becomes concrete in an arrival whose date is precisely recorded. On 8 November 1940, the narrator reaches Stockholm. From the railway station, he travels to a boarding house where an acquaintance has reserved a room for him. This first journey already shows how much arrival depends on relationships mediated by others. In the room, the narrator finds traces of previous occupants. “This room was now to contain my footsteps,” he writes. An unfamiliar space is to become the setting of his own life.

The city is already inhabited. Its spaces are in use, its opportunities are distributed, its relationships are established. The newcomer must find a place in a world of everyday life that has developed without them. At the same time, they bring their own history, abilities and ideas of a possible life. Where can they live? How can they earn a living? What relationships can they establish? The answers depend on their own possibilities, on the people they encounter and on the social conditions under which they must live. Understanding a city and being able to live in it are different experiences.

Belonging and Changing

The traveler in the Report experiences a moment when his foreignness recedes. He has adapted his behavior to his surroundings and is no longer singled out by those present. Nobody examines his clothing or looks at him long enough to notice any differences. The fact that nobody pays attention to him makes him “part of the whirling whole”. He feels relieved that “everyone accepts him”. For a moment, his presence has become a matter of course.

Being able to participate in everyday urban life does not yet mean belonging. A person may know the routes, speak the language, work and maintain relationships – and still be treated as a foreigner. Belonging depends on whether others are willing to recognize someone as an equal member of their community.

In his Lessing Prize speech Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Sprache (1965), Weiss describes how a person can even be denied membership in their own linguistic community: “When he seeks to speak on his own behalf, his words are declared invalid.” Here, foreignness does not arise from insufficient knowledge or inadequate adaptation. It is socially and politically produced. To deny the validity of a person’s voice is to deny them equal participation in collective life.

Those already present do not form a homogeneous community. Many have themselves arrived at some point; others have lived in the same place for generations. What some experience as a familiar order appears to others as an imposition. Even among those supposedly native to a place, experiences of belonging and foreignness differ. Newcomers do not enter a closed world. They enter existing relationships, establish new connections, change habits and challenge expectations. They change their own lives – and the city in which they arrive.

Foreignness is part of urban life: the urban makes it possible for people with different histories, experiences and ideas to live together. Their encounters create new relationships, generate conflicts and change habits. The city is not a closed whole. Its distinctive character emerges from what endures and from what new people and experiences bring to it.

Distilling and Remaining Open

City brands create a “fictional completeness” (Christoph Peters, Tage in Tokio, 2021): different experiences, narratives and expectations come together to form an image through which the city becomes imaginable as a whole. Nobody can fully grasp its diversity. Such images provide orientation and generate expectations. They emerge both from a city’s organized self-presentation and from the experiences and stories of the people who come into contact with it. Every act of distillation highlights certain characteristics while allowing others to recede. What corresponds to the familiar image appears typical. What deviates from it is declared an exception or overlooked. Precisely because the image provides orientation, it can become resistant to contradictory experiences.

Weiss’s outsider’s perspective invites us to question the familiar terms used by city brands. What does it mean in everyday urban life when a city describes itself as open, international or livable? We could treat the word “open” in the same way as the ticket in the Report: set aside the familiar term and describe precisely what happens. Who gains access to a city and its opportunities? Who belongs as a matter of course, and who must repeatedly justify their presence? Whose experiences shape the image of the city, and whose remain outside it? When a city brand speaks of a collective “we”, the question arises of who is entitled to speak for the city and to change its understanding of itself.

A city brand can provide orientation, articulate shared aspirations and make a city’s distinctive character recognizable. The ideas it conveys must remain open to scrutiny and change. The experiences of newcomers reveal what opportunities a city offers, what boundaries it draws and how its inhabitants deal with differences.

If cities are continually transformed through the coexistence of different people, their brands cannot be concerned exclusively with preserving an existing identity. Newcomers are not merely the intended recipients of an urban promise. They themselves help shape what will distinguish the city in the future. For individual cities, this suggests a strategic option: to make openness to outsiders and to the unfamiliar the core of their brand. Such a positioning would express a willingness to grant people of different backgrounds belonging and opportunities to participate in shaping the city, and to allow new experiences, ideas and ways of life to change it. Openness would not simply be a characteristic that a city claims for itself, but an aspiration guiding its future development.

This aspiration would have to be grounded in the city’s actual living conditions. It would challenge its institutions as well as the people already living there. In the face of nation-state exclusion and the xenophobia of right-wing populism, it would acquire political significance. It would be credible only if the urban community were willing to practice openness in everyday life – including where newcomers challenge familiar ideas and habits. A city that makes openness the core of its brand does more than promise to welcome outsiders. It declares its willingness to become a different city through their presence.