This book examines the essence of a particular personal experience within a New York City public space. The principal approach, both theoretical and methodological, is the phenomenological perspective, an in-depth study of such a surprising experience in the real world from the first-person point of view. The book introduces a new concept of “the situated self,” that is, the whole entity of the respondent’s subjective world about his or her particular urban experience in public. It is one’s “being-in-the-word” or lived experience in the real world. Another important feature of...