Concreature

Noun: a person whose home is the city and was born and raised in the city. Someone who feels at home in the concrete jungle where everyone is anonymous. It reminded me of the text by Sara Ahmed: “Who Knows? Knowing Strangers and Strangerness’’ I have read while doing research on empathy. She says that anthropology allows the stranger to be familiar in its very strangerness. This is a really interesting sentence to me, especially the being familiar in its very strangeness part. Sometimes it feels good to be a stranger and be unfamiliar in a certain environment. To me, this feeling mostly occurs in the city, where people mostly are very anonymous and where people don’t know each other. You walk past so many different people, but you won’t ever get to know them. I know a lot of people that love this feeling of being anonymous and being a stranger in a huge population of a city. I would call these people concreatures, because their familiar environment is a place where they are a stranger to everyone around them and vice versa. These people are most of the time born in this concrete jungle, so they have conditioned themselves to this place and the people that are living in this place.

"Damn, you don't know everyone in your street? You’re such a concreature!"