Abstract:

Everyday life is not mere the leftover space for urban development, but rather a crucial site that connects cultural meaning, the experience of modernity, and urban social structure. The cultural turn in urban studies since the 20^th century brought everyday life to the center of sociological analysis of the city, and critical theories of everyday life grounded in spatiotemporal frameworks have since become a key theoretical resource. Yet existing research on urban everyday life in China has tended to privilege spatial practice, while engagement with the temporal dimension has remained largely confined to the more expansive registers of teleological time and eventful temporality organized by major events. The sociological imagination grounded in “everyday time” remains considerably underdeveloped. This paper thus proposes the analytical perspective of “daily temporality”, emphasizing that the temporal rhythms, routine repetitions, physical arrangements and micro-ordering in daily life are not merely passive recipients of structural changes, but rather an important foundation for the generation, accumulation and development of historical logic. Revisiting the taken-for-granted time arrangements of urban life, and attending to the structures of meaning, affective experience and reservoirs of practical capacity that are embedded in them, as well as to the continuity, discontinuity and reorganization of these daily arrangements in the temporal dimension, holds distinctive sociological value for understanding the experience of modernity, the transformation of urban culture and the micro-generation mechanism of social structure in contemporary China.

Key words: everyday life, everyday temporality, urban culture, spatiotemporal framework