The intuitive meeting point

Airports, as the primary hubs for international travel, take their function seriously as regards the meetings of strangers – something that happens frequently as a consequence of mass travel. Generally – probably in the arrivals hall - they provide a readily identifiable location, typically symbolised as a big dot surrounded by inward pointing arrows, beneath which people who have never met face to face before can do so. The provision of such a facility seems obvious.

In less organised places it may be less so, hence the clichéd recourse to red roses and rolled up copies of the “Daily Telegraph” or the promise to “meet you under the clock”. We’ll all have encountered the problem from time to time and found a way of dealing with it. Though the ubiquity of mobile phones does take away some of the challenge : “I’m over here; I can see you, I’m waving at you”. But what if neither of you has any idea what the other one looks like ?

In the absence of a real need, one may imagine the contrived situation. If someone said he was going to meet you on a particular date at noon, in a specified large city, but he didn’t say exactly where, what would be the spot to make for to have the greatest chance of meeting him successfully? This was the question that the Nobel prizewinning American economist Thomas Schelling asked as long ago as 1960. The city in question was New York, and the answer he came up with was Grand Central Station, and specifically the information booth there. Such focal places are thus known as Schelling points.

At an intersection in Shibuya, Tokyo, 1,500 people are said to cross simultaneously from eight directions every time the traffic lights change, and 250,000 people per day pass through at a weekend. Nearby, the bronze statue of the faithful dog Hachiko, the pet of a professor of agriculture who commuted through Shibuya station and died in the 1920s, acts as an informal meeting place, and in fact as the local Schelling point.

So what of London ?  I guess the answer would be Piccadilly Circus, but I’m unsure if the spot would be right next to Eros, or by the enquiry windows in the Underground concourse. Perhaps it would depend on whether it was raining or not. It’s the most obvious marker of centrality in the city, and maybe some of the people one finds hanging around there are hoping desperately that some personally important character, someone long lost from their life, will turn up there one day. Equally, I’m very sure some aren’t doing this. Piccadilly Circus has several roles in the subjective geography of the metropolis, and for this reason I have chosen it for the front cover illustration for my forthcoming projected book “Tourist In Your Own Town”. Sub-titled “The Psychogeography of Everyday Life”, it includes among its pages discussion of urban centrality, Schelling points, and very many other phenomena – some of  which feature from time to time in these blog entries.