Intimacy and emotion: introduction

The impact of the urban on incomers has been particularly interrogated. The role of emotion, notably feelings of belonging, safety and security, to the physical and mental health of urban inhabitants has been highlighted, with social and economic marginality playing a significant role in a range of health, educational and economic outcomes. Such emotional geographies are deeply inflected by gender, race and other facets of identity. Scholarship has also demonstrated the ways that emotion is an important constituent of space in a Lefebvrian sense, where space is both constituted by and produces social relationships. As well as 'emotional geographies', the concept of the 'emotional community' has held particular resonance for urban historians. Mark Steinberg's emotional dramas were played out in the writings of journalist Olga Gridina, whose imagining of urban Russia as site of moral breakdown and despair was inflected in how she interpreted the behaviours of those she wrote about.