Post-cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence

by Caroline Humphrey (Editor), Vera Skvirskaja (Editor)

Overview

Examining the way people imagine and interact in their cities, this book explores the post-cosmopolitan city. The contributors consider the effects of migration, national, and religious revivals (with their new aesthetic sensibilities), the dispositions of marginalized economic actors, and globalized tourism on urban sociality. The case studies here share the situation of having been incorporated in previous political regimes (imperial, colonial, socialist) that one way or another created their own kind of cosmopolitanism, and now these cities are experiencing the aftermath of these regimes while being exposed to new national politics and migratory flows of people.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857455116
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/01/2012
Series:	Space and Place , #9
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	260
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Caroline Humphrey is a Research Director in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal, and India. Her research interests include socialist and post-socialist society, religion, ritual, economy, history, and the contemporary transformations of cities.

Vera Skvirskaja is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. She has worked in arctic Siberia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Her recent research interests include urban cosmopolitanism, educational migration in Europe and coexistence in the post-Soviet city.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja

Chapter 1. Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan City
Caroline Humphrey

Chapter 2. Negotiating Cosmopolitanism: Migration, Religious Education and Shifting Jewish Orientation in Post-Soviet Odessa
Marina Sapritsky

Chapter 3. At the City’s Social Margins: Selective Cosmopolitans in Odessa
Vera Skvirskaja

Chapter 4. ‘A Gate, but Leading Where?’ In Search of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism in Post-Soviet Tbilisi
Martin Demant Frederiksen

Chapter 5. Cosmopolitan Architecture: ‘Deviations’ from Stalinist Aesthetics and the Making of Twenty-first Century Warsaw
G. Michał Murawski

Chapter 6. Sinking and Shrinking city: Cosmopolitanism, Historical Memory and Social Change in Venice
Joanna Kostylo

Chapter 7. Haunted by the Past: Immigration and Thessaloniki’s Questionable Path to a New Cosmopolitanism
Panos Hatziprokopiou

Chapter 8. ‘For Badakshan – the Country without Borders!’: Village Cosmopolitans, Urban-Rural Networks and the Post-Cosmopolitan City in Tajikistan
Magnus Marsden

Notes on Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"What emerges as common features of these cities mark their unique contribution to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as ideal and practice, raising crucial questions about who is or can be cosmopolitan and where cosmopolitanism is in the world. Loosely connected by their orientation to both Europe and Asia, the shifting valences of this outlook over time have important consequences for the cities' respective cosmopolitan-ness, as well as the meaning and nature of cosmopolitanism."  ·  Urban History

"In their new book, Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja have excelled in building a ...magnificent world of cultural identities without ends. The authors and editors offer a compelling exploration of the multilayered ideas about what makes "us"and "them"in six cities: Odessa, Tbilisi, Warsaw, Venice, Thessalonica, and Dushanbe...Humphrey and Skvirskaja take the deeper, anthropological, microscopic view of the everyday experiences of people. And in this they do an excellent job."  ·  Slavic Review

 

"Taken together, these [chapters] individually offer valuable insights into the dynamics of urban co-existence (or lack thereof)...[and] reveal that cosmopolitanism's definitions and meanings only exist in the plural, that the formation of cosmopolitan ideas and communities is inevitably contingent and place-specific, and that the forces preaching exclusion and intolerance are often at least as powerful as those promoting cultural acceptance in a rapidly globalising world... a useful text for courses concerned with globalisation and urbanism."  ·  Urban Studies

"This volume captures the spirit [of the renewed interest in the city] well and delivers a lively set of essays. Here, the shift away from the usual story about immigration and how to cope with it takes us, instead, to a widely shared perception of the loss of diversity and shared lifestyle, often without regard for actual statistics on multi-ethnic urban populations."  ·  Bruce Grant, New York University

EBOOK COMMENTARY

"What emerges as common features of these cities mark their unique contribution to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as ideal and practice, raising crucial questions about who is or can be cosmopolitan and where cosmopolitanism is in the world. Loosely connected by their orientation to both Europe and Asia, the shifting valences of this outlook over time have important consequences for the cities' respective cosmopolitan-ness, as well as the meaning and nature of cosmopolitanism." - Urban History

"In their new book, Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja have excelled in building a ...magnificent world of cultural identities without ends. The authors and editors offer a compelling exploration of the multilayered ideas about what makes "us"and "them"in six cities: Odessa, Tbilisi, Warsaw, Venice, Thessalonica, and Dushanbe...Humphrey and Skvirskaja take the deeper, anthropological, microscopic view of the everyday experiences of people. And in this they do an excellent job." - Slavic Review

"Taken together, these [chapters] individually offer valuable insights into the dynamics of urban co-existence (or lack thereof)...[and] reveal that cosmopolitanism's definitions and meanings only exist in the plural, that the formation of cosmopolitan ideas and communities is inevitably contingent and place-specific, and that the forces preaching exclusion and intolerance are often at least as powerful as those promoting cultural acceptance in a rapidly globalising world... a useful text for courses concerned with globalisation and urbanism." - Urban Studies

"This volume captures the spirit [of the renewed interest in the city] well and delivers a lively set of essays. Here, the shift away from the usual story about immigration and how to cope with it takes us, instead, to a widely shared perception of the loss of diversity and shared lifestyle, often without regard for actual statistics on multi-ethnic urban populations." - Bruce Grant, New York University

From the Publisher