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The idea behind this book has a long history. It was inspired less by my academic work than by my family life and side jobs. It is the result of living in and moving between urban and rural neighborhoods as a child, teenager, and student.

If one walks down Karl-Marx-Straße in the Neukölln district of Berlin, for example observing the street life at the busy crossing of Rathaus Neukölln, the intersection of one subway line and several bus lines, one can see shoppers, residents, local employees, and commuters on their way to work or nearby schools squeezing out of the subway exits. Most sidewalks are heavily crowded with people, whereas others are almost empty. At second sight, one might also notice that the lively sidewalks host a variety of smaller and medium-sized stores of many kinds: bakeries, flower stores, hair and nail salons, grocery stores, butchers, several takeaways, diners and restaurants, cafés, textile and shoe stores, cell phone stores, as well as chain stores, bank branches, and supermarkets; the opposite sidewalks host block-long chain stores or vacant warehouses.

Having established the historical and structural context for Karl-Marx-Straße’s contemporary daily life as well as for local businesses’ survival, this chapter elaborates further on the underlying theoretical concepts that informed the selection process of certain businesses along Karl-Marx-Straße in order to explain why businesses are special sites for interaction and what kinds of interactions occur there. Subsequent chapters will explain the sampling of the specific types of businesses that constitute social life in Berlin-Neukölln.

The context and direction for this study was guided by the premise that storekeepers are important figures in neighborhood life, from which the three sets of sensitizing concepts were derived to help set the context and direction for my study. I combine the concepts of public characters and third place and use the nexus between them. It is often public characters, or owners, that perform “public character practices” to a certain extent, and who operate third places.

The following subchapters provide background and contextual information on each of the investigated businesses. In order to understand the social space, the social processes that occur within the space, and their actors, a description of the business design and spatial outlay is provided. The different parts intertwine each case’s description with first explanations about the actors, the internal social life, and the way these businesses are operated.

This chapter analyzes data from interviews and observation with regard to the precise features that make businesses sites for interaction, and eventually, for community. More precisely, I aim to determine the distinct material and social features that support sociability and interaction among customers, staff, and owners. The data and concepts generated from interviews and observations are thereby analyzed using the features Raymond Oldenburg ascribed to his so-called third places as a conceptual lens.

The previous chapter discussed how the sampled businesses’ socio-spatial features offer “more” to the businesses’ customers and employees. This chapter shifts its focus on to the business owners themselves, examining how their social practices generate and maintain a particular socio-spatial context. On Karl-Marx-Straße, local business owners are not only important for sustaining local economic activity, but also for creating places of practiced (cultural or ethnic) diversity and sociability.

This chapter brings together the lessons learned about how store owners and their businesses foster positive interactions – a social “more” – among neighborhood residents. It substantiates the appropriateness of viewing store owners as socially important figures whose business activities contribute to local social life – by building places where community is practiced. Drawing on the deep ethnographic data described in previous chapters, it offers a grounded (emerging) theory focusing on the micro-interactions in the stores, summarizing how the manifold interactions described in previous chapters cumulate into new patterns of belonging and understanding in everyday urban life.