“a sense of inclusion, a sense of belonging, a sense of being a citizen”
Setha Low (2025), excerpt from an interview with Sara Ivry for JSTOR Daily.
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A public square can appear entirely open while remaining governed by rules that no one has written down.
Cultural anthropologist Setha Low has spent decades investigating these contradictions, exploring how public spaces acquire meaning through their histories, physical arrangements, everyday activities, and the expectations of those who use them. Her ethnographic research in San José, Costa Rica, revealed that plazas are not simply architectural settings where social life occurs. They are places whose social character is continually produced through interaction, interpretation, and competing claims of belonging.
Low's contribution reaches beyond the study of public architecture. Her research asks how people learn to inhabit shared environments, why a place can feel welcoming to some and intimidating to others, and what communities communicate through their ordinary practices. In Why Public Space Matters (2023), she extends these questions to the value of social contact, public culture, and the emotional atmosphere of shared places. Her work provides a compelling foundation for considering how hospitality becomes more than personal kindness. It can become part of the social structure through which people learn whether they have a place.
The Place That Knows How to Welcome
The chair appeared to be available. It stood at the edge of a small gathering in an unfamiliar town square, slightly apart from the other seats and close enough to the conversation that someone sitting there might reasonably expect to participate. The visitor had been watching the gathering for several minutes, trying to determine whether the people knew one another or had simply assembled at the end of the afternoon. No signs marked the space as private, and nothing suggested that the chair belonged to anyone. Yet taking a seat felt less straightforward than it should have.
The visitor recognized the awkwardness of entering a place whose customs seemed obvious to everyone except the person newly arrived. People were greeting one another without introductions, moving chairs between conversations, and anticipating the arrival of others whose names the visitor did not know. The social arrangement was visible, but its instructions were not. What looked like a casual public gathering was also a small world of accumulated knowledge. Those who belonged understood its rhythms without thinking about them. Someone unfamiliar with those rhythms had to interpret each gesture and decide whether an invitation had actually been extended.
As the gathering grew, an older participant noticed the visitor standing nearby. Rather than offering an elaborate welcome, she moved another chair toward the group, leaving it slightly outside the circle until the visitor chose to approach. Then she shifted her own seat to create a wider opening. The gesture was modest enough to pass without comment. No one interrupted the conversation to introduce the stranger, and no one made the visitor's arrival into an event. The arrangement of the gathering had simply changed, making participation possible without demanding an immediate performance of sociability.
The scene is illustrative, but the uncertainty it describes is familiar. Entering a new workplace, neighborhood, school, volunteer organization, or informal social circle often requires us to read conventions that existing participants no longer notice. We discover who speaks first, how disagreement is expressed, whether conversation is genuinely open, and which invitations can be accepted without embarrassment. A setting may be accessible in every formal sense while still requiring considerable social knowledge to navigate.
This reveals an important limitation in our ordinary understanding of hospitality. We tend to imagine a welcoming community as one inhabited by welcoming individuals. The two are related, but they are not interchangeable. A person may be kind while participating in customs that inadvertently make newcomers uncomfortable. Conversely, a community may establish practices that help strangers participate even when no particularly outgoing individual is present to guide them. The deeper question is not simply whether people are friendly. It is whether the ordinary arrangements of their shared life provide a recognizable place for someone who has not yet become an insider.
How Welcome Becomes a Custom
During her ethnographic work in Costa Rica, Setha Low encountered a revealing example of how informal rules shape public life. She describes being told that she could not occupy a particular bench because it was Roberto's customary place. Roberto was not there, and the bench was located in a public plaza. Nevertheless, the people familiar with the setting understood that the seat belonged to him in a social sense. Its significance came not from a formal property right but from an expectation sustained through repeated use and communal recognition.
The episode captures something that an architectural plan or public-access policy cannot easily convey. A plaza may contain benches available to everyone in principle, while the people who regularly occupy it recognize claims that are invisible to a stranger. Such arrangements need not arise from hostility. They may express loyalty, affection, respect, or a shared understanding of someone's place within the community. Yet the same customs can create uncertainty for newcomers because the social meaning of an apparently ordinary object is not equally available to everyone.
Low's research on plazas in San José examined precisely this interaction between physical space and cultural meaning. In her 1996 and 1997 studies, she explored how historical development, patterns of activity, local relationships, and changing social values helped shape the experience of public places. A square did not possess one uniform meaning simply because its physical boundaries were shared. Its significance depended partly on the people using it and the expectations through which they understood one another's presence.
The implication extends well beyond public squares. Every established group develops some collection of informal practices that help participants coordinate their behavior. A weekly gathering may have customary seating arrangements. A neighborhood organization may rely on people knowing when decisions are made. A workplace may expect newcomers to understand who can be approached without an appointment. These practices reduce uncertainty for those who have learned them, but they can transfer that uncertainty onto people arriving without the same social knowledge.
Here we encounter a paradox at the center of belonging. Customs make shared life easier because they allow people to anticipate how others will behave. Yet precisely because they become habitual, established participants may stop recognizing how much knowledge is required to understand them. A community can therefore become increasingly comfortable for its regular members while making entrance progressively more demanding for outsiders.
This does not mean that customs should be eliminated. Shared practices make cultural life possible, preserve meaningful relationships, and give places a recognizable character. The problem arises when a community treats familiarity as evidence that its practices are self-explanatory or universally comfortable. A custom that has served one group well may require adaptation when different people begin participating. Understanding the difference between preserving a valued tradition and protecting an exclusionary habit is part of the responsibility that comes with belonging.
Low's later work offers a useful framework for examining this responsibility. She distinguishes social contact, public culture, and affective atmosphere as important dimensions of public-space experience. People may encounter one another without developing meaningful relationships. They may occupy the same environment while interpreting its expectations differently. They may also experience its emotional character in ways that depend on their histories, identities, and previous encounters. A space filled with people is not automatically a place where everyone can participate comfortably.
Research on everyday cues of belonging reinforces the importance of these less visible conditions. Freeman, Henn, and Frahsa (2026), examining public spaces in a culturally diverse neighborhood in Bern, Switzerland, identify behavioral, spatial, linguistic, and emotional signals associated with experiences of inclusion and exclusion. The study does not establish that any single gesture will reliably produce belonging. It does, however, support attending to the ordinary details through which people interpret their place in a social environment.
The practical challenge is to make the invitation to participate easier to recognize without demanding that everyone behave in the same way. An established group might explain how its activities work rather than assuming newcomers will observe and understand. A familiar participant might create an opening for someone who prefers to listen before speaking. A community might reconsider an arrangement that makes sense to its regular members but presents unnecessary obstacles to others. In each case, hospitality begins to take shape as a quality of the group's practices rather than merely a reflection of individual personalities.
When Hospitality Becomes Part of the Place
Imagine the visitor returning to the square several weeks later. The gathering is no longer entirely unfamiliar, although much about it remains to be learned. The visitor now recognizes several faces, knows when the chairs will begin to appear, and understands that someone standing near the outer edge of the circle may be uncertain whether joining is welcome. The customs that once demanded careful interpretation have become easier to recognize. Familiarity has made the place more comfortable, but it has also given the visitor something that was previously missing: the ability to notice another person's uncertainty.
One afternoon, someone new approaches the gathering and stops where the visitor once stood. There is no formal responsibility to act. Nothing requires the visitor to intervene, and it would be easy to assume that a more established participant will take care of the situation. Yet the visitor remembers the small adjustment that made an earlier invitation possible. Without announcing what is happening, the visitor moves a chair outward and makes room beside the circle. The newcomer is free to accept or decline, but the possibility of joining is no longer quite so difficult to interpret.
The importance of this moment lies not in the generosity of any one individual. What has changed is that the visitor has learned a practice and can now help sustain it. A gesture once received from someone else becomes part of the visitor's own understanding of how the gathering works. The practice is no longer confined to the person who first performed it. It has begun to circulate through the community, carried by people who recognize its purpose and repeat it when circumstances invite them to do so.
There is a meaningful difference between a kind act and a welcoming custom. An individual gesture responds to a particular situation. A custom establishes an expectation that similar situations will be met in a recognizable way. When the expectation is constructive, it reduces the dependence of newcomers on chance encounters with unusually considerate people. They may still need courage to participate, and the group may still misunderstand their needs, but the conditions of entry become more intelligible.
The difference also changes how we understand responsibility. Hospitality is often treated as a personal virtue, something displayed by generous people and admired by those who benefit from it. Yet a shared custom asks more of a community. It requires people to consider whether their ordinary arrangements make participation possible, whether those arrangements can be understood by newcomers, and whether they remain appropriate as the community changes. The responsibility is distributed among participants rather than placed entirely on a host or on the person seeking admission.
Such practices are never beyond criticism. The informal claim to Roberto's bench illustrates how a custom can recognize one person's place while introducing uncertainty for another. An arrangement may be meaningful to established participants and still deserve reconsideration when its consequences become visible. The goal is not to replace the character of a community with a perfectly standardized welcome. It is to preserve what gives shared life meaning while remaining attentive to the people those customs have not yet accommodated.
This returns us to the idea of an invisible legacy. We often imagine what we leave behind in terms of possessions, achievements, advice, or memorable acts of generosity. Yet communities also inherit ways of doing things. They inherit expectations about who may speak, how strangers are approached, which difficulties are acknowledged, and whether unfamiliar people must struggle alone to learn the rules. These arrangements may survive long after their origins are forgotten, shaping encounters among people who never knew those responsible for establishing them.
The most durable form of hospitality may therefore be one that eventually ceases to attract attention. An extra chair is prepared because that is simply what people do. Someone explains an unfamiliar routine because the explanation has become part of the routine itself. A newcomer can find a way into shared life without depending entirely on the initiative of a particular person. In these moments, a community has done more than perform a welcome. It has begun to make welcoming part of its character.
A community's hospitality becomes an enduring legacy when making room for others is no longer an exceptional act but an ordinary part of how the place works. The gesture may be small, and the person who first performed it may be forgotten. What remains is the possibility that someone arriving tomorrow will find a place already prepared for them.
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Practice: The Welcome Gesture
Estimated time: 9 minutes
Familiar environments often contain quiet customs that make some people feel immediately comfortable while leaving others uncertain about how to participate. This exercise invites you to reconsider one ordinary practice in a community, social group, or shared environment you know well. You will explore how a small adjustment might become a dependable invitation that others can recognize and sustain.
Expected outcome: Identify one practical change that could make participation easier for someone unfamiliar with your environment.
Scientific Context & Summary
Public space as a social and cultural accomplishment
Anthropological research distinguishes the physical organization of public places from the cultural meanings constructed through everyday use. Low's (1996) ethnographic investigation of two plazas in San José, Costa Rica, examined their historical development, sociopolitical organization, activity patterns, and experienced meanings. Her analysis shows that public spaces emerge through social practices, interpretation, and competing claims rather than functioning as neutral settings independent of the people who inhabit them.
Low (1997) further investigated how the cultural representations of those plazas changed in relation to material conditions and social values. Together, these studies provide an evidentiary basis for examining how unwritten expectations influence participation. They do not experimentally demonstrate that any particular hospitality custom causes greater belonging or that repetition necessarily produces an inclusive community.
Social contact, public culture, and atmosphere
In Why Public Space Matters, Low (2023) examines social contact, public culture, and affective atmosphere as dimensions of public-space experience. Opportunities for encounter do not guarantee meaningful or comfortable interaction, while shared cultural practices can be interpreted differently depending on a person's position and previous experience. The emotional atmosphere of a place may likewise affect whether participation feels inviting, uncertain, or unwelcome.
This framework helps clarify why physical accessibility and social inclusion are not equivalent. A gathering may be open to anyone while retaining practices understood primarily by regular participants. The scientific value of Low's work lies in making those social dimensions available for investigation, not in providing a universal formula for creating welcoming communities.
Everyday cues of inclusion and exclusion
Freeman, Henn, and Frahsa (2026) examined experiences of belonging in public spaces within a culturally diverse neighborhood in Bern, Switzerland. Their qualitative research identifies behavioral, spatial, linguistic, and emotional cues through which participants experienced recognition, belonging, and exclusion. The findings provide a contemporary example of how subtle features of everyday social environments can shape people's interpretations of whether they are welcome.
The study's qualitative and context-specific design limits the generalizations that can be drawn from it. It does not establish a causal effect for any single gesture or justify assuming that one community's customs will have the same meaning elsewhere. The appropriate conclusion is that ordinary practices deserve investigation because they may carry important social signals, not that a particular intervention has been proven effective across settings.
Customs, continuity, and human agency
The article's central proposition concerns the possibility that welcoming behavior can become a shared and enduring practice. The research reviewed here supports examining the social meaning of recurring expectations, but it does not directly measure the transmission of hospitality customs across generations or prove that welcoming gestures become durable institutions.
The distinction matters because customs can preserve both accommodation and exclusion. Their value depends on their consequences, the perspectives of those affected, and a community's willingness to revise them when circumstances change. A constructive custom can offer continuity without requiring that every participant experience it identically or conform to a single model of belonging.
The accompanying Practice is intended for reflection and personal learning. It is not a validated psychological assessment or an empirically established intervention for increasing social belonging.
Bibliography
Ivry, S., & Low, S. (2025, November 11). On the meaning and value of public spaces [Interview transcript]. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/on-the-meaning-and-value-of-public-spaces/
Low, S. M. (1996). Spatializing culture: The social production and social construction of public space in Costa Rica. American Ethnologist, 23(4), 861–879. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1996.23.4.02a00100
Low, S. M. (1997). Urban public spaces as representations of culture: The plaza in Costa Rica. Environment and Behavior, 29(1), 3–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/001391659702900101
Low, S. M. (2023). Why public space matters. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197543733.001.0001
Freeman, J., Henn, R. E., & Frahsa, A. (2026). Everyday cues of belonging: How subtle signals in public space shape healthy, inclusive neighbourhoods. Wellbeing, Space and Society, 11, Article 100449. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wss.2026.100449
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