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Post-cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence

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Volume 9

Space and Place

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Post-cosmopolitan Cities

Explorations of Urban Coexistence

Edited by Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja

260 pages, 14 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN  978-0-85745-510-9 $135.00/£99.00 / Hb / Published (August 2012)

ISBN  978-1-78238-677-3 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Published (October 2014)

eISBN 978-0-85745-511-6 eBook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9780857455109


View CartYour country: - edit Request a Review or Examination Copy (in Digital Format)Recommend to your LibraryAvailable in GOBI®

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

Description

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.

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.

Subject: Urban StudiesAnthropology (General)Refugee and Migration Studies
Area: EuropeMiddle East & Israel

An interview of the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey. Filmed by Alan Macfarlane on 5 August 2010 and edited by Sarah Harrison. Generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust.



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