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Cosmopolitan Urbanism

  • Price: $54.95 $49.46
  • Paperback: 260 pages
  • Also available in Hardback and e-Book
  • Published: December 2005
  • ISBN: 978-0-415-34492-0
  • Publisher: Routledge

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In order to attract investment and tourism, cities are increasingly competing to re-brand themselves as cosmopolitan, and in recent years, cosmopolitanism has become the focus of considerable critical attention in academia. Here, renowned editors and contributors have come together to produce one of the first books to tackle cosmopolitanism from a geographical perspective.

Central to the cosmopolitan process is how traditionally marginalized groups have become re-valued and reconstructed as a resource in the eyes of planners and politicians. This fascinating book examines the politics of these transformations by understanding the everyday practices of cosmopolitanism. Which forms of cultural difference are valued and which are excluded from this re-visioning of the contemporary city? Organized in three distinct parts, the book covers:

  • production and consumption, and cosmopolitanism
  • the spatialities of cosmopolitanism
  • the deployment, mobilization and articulation of cosmopolitan discourses in policy-making and urban design.

The volume is groundbreaking in examining the complex politics of cosmopolitanism in empirical case studies from Montreal to Singapore, London to Texas, Auckland to Amsterdam. With a strong editorial steer, including general and section introductions and a conclusion to guide the student reader, Cosmopolitan Urbanism employs a range of theoretical and empirical approaches to provide a grounded treatment essential for students of human geography, urban studies and sociology.

Table of Contents

1.Introduction Part 1: Envisaging Cosmopolitan Urbanism 2. Cosmopolitan Urbanism: A Love Song to our Mongrel Cities 3. The Paradox of Cosmopolitan Urbanism: Rationality, Difference and the Circuits of Cultural Capital 4. Strangers in the Cosmopolis Part 2: Consuming the Cosmopolitan City: Materialities and Practices 5. Sociality and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: National, Cosmopolitan and Local Imaginaries in Auckland 6. Cosmopolitanism by Default: Public Sociability in Montreal 7. Cosmopolitan Camouflage: (Post-) Gay Space in Spitalfields, East London 8. Negotiating Cosmopolitanism in Singapore's Fictional Landscape Part 3: Producing the Cosmopolitan City: Cultural Policy and Intervention 9. Multicultural Urban Space and the Cosmopolitan 'Other': The Contested Revitalization of Amsterdam's Bijlmermeer 10. Working-Class Subjects in the Cosmopolitan City 11. Planning Birmingham as a Cosmopolitan City: Recovering the Cepths of its Diversity? 12. Cosmopolitan Knowledge and the Production and Consumption of Sexualised Space: Manchester's Gay Village 13. Conclusion: The Paradoxes of Cosmopolitan Urbanism

Author Biography

Jon Binnie is Reader, Julian Holloway is Lecturer and both Steve Millington and Craig Young are senior lecturers in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University.