A city can look badly dysfunctional on the surface and still hold together through the daily practices of the people who live in it. Households, markets, mosques and schools become places where residents facing constant uncertainty find ways to improve their lives without waiting for official fixes. Ordinary craftsmen, shopkeepers and minor public servants, not planners alone, shape which changes actually turn out well.
When people of very different occupations live and work packed tightly together, you can no longer read who someone is or what they do from how they look or where they are. A modest storefront or an ordinary neighbour may hide quite a different role. Getting by in such a place means learning not to trust surfaces.
In cities split between gleaming towers and vast slums, the largest share of residents lives in between, neither rich nor destitute. This middle majority absorbs the city's contradictions in daily life, moving among megastructures, chain stores, informal settlements and late-night street markets. Seeing the city only as rich versus poor misses the people who do most of the work of keeping it going.
Neighbours from different backgrounds keep a shared city going not only by working together but also by deliberately keeping their distance. Choosing when to engage and when to stay apart is itself a way of letting different people coexist. How residents size each other up shapes which of these they choose.
The improvised arrangements residents make with each other can work as a practice run for a shared urban commons, even before any formal commons exists. Each workaround tests how people might jointly manage space, resources and trust. The habits of cooperation are built in these small trials rather than handed down by design.