Post-cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence

Published by Berghahn Books 2012

Post-cosmopolitan Cities

Explorations of Urban Coexistence

Edited by: Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja

Volume 9 in the series Space and Place

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780857455116

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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.

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.

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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1 Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan City Caroline Humphrey Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
Chapter 2 Negotiating Cosmopolitanism: Migration, Religious Education and Shifting Jewish Orientations in Post-Soviet Odessa Marina Sapritsky Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Chapter 3 At the City’s Social Margins: Selective Cosmopolitans in Odessa Vera Skvirskaja Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
Chapter 4 ‘A Gate, but Leading Where?’ In Search of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism in Post-Soviet Tbilisi Martin Demant Frederiksen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	120
Chapter 5 Cosmopolitan Architecture: ‘Deviations’ from Stalinist Aesthetics and the Making of Twenty-First-Century Warsaw G. Michał Murawski Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Chapter 6 Sinking and Shrinking City: Cosmopolitanism, Historical Memory and Social Change in Venice Joanna Kostylo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	170
Chapter 7 Haunted by the Past and the Ambivalences of the Present: Immigration and Thessalonica’s Second Path to Cosmopolitanism Panos Hatziprokopiou Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
Chapter 8 ‘For Badakhshan – the Country without Borders!’: Village Cosmopolitans, Urban-Rural Networks and the Post-Cosmopolitan City in Tajikistan Magnus Marsden Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Notes on contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	240
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 260
Keywords: Urban Studies; Anthropology (General); Refugee and Migration Studies

eBook

Published: August 1, 2012
ISBN: 9780857455116