Streets, sidewalks, stores, and stories - Narrative and uses of urban space

This article is an interpretive ethnography of young people's uses of space s in Ybor City, a National Historic Landmark District in Tampa, Florida. Th e analysis focuses particularly on a record store popular with young people . The author seeks to understand why it and other places attract particular groups of people and to discern the character of the public life generated by the ways people occupy such spaces. The narrative quality of spaces is crucial to understanding why people choose to gather in them and also sugge sts something about the tenor of public life in contemporary America. Peopl e are attracted to narrative spaces that in their ambiguity offer the possi bility of an interactive public life, yet when people gather in those space s, they often merely congregate into separate "lifestyle enclaves" and disp lay their difference from other groups.