The dialectics of urban cosmopolitanism: between tolerance and intolerance in cities of strangers

Abstract

Cosmopolitan cities have been envisioned as colourful, aesthetically creative places at the centre of trade routes and empires, imaged in their bazaars and cafes, where spices and exotic objects are traded or avante-garde artistic and literary expatriates congregate. In the twenty-first-century world of accelerated migrations, cosmopolitan cities are made visible in the proliferation of ethnic restaurants and festivals. But despite their cultural heterogeneity, cosmopolitanism in cities remains a fragile achievement. Such cities have the potential, it seems, to erupt into violence or, on the contrary, to display an intercultural creativity that transects and transcends social divisions. Building on Humphries and Skvirskaja’s work on ‘post-cosmopolitan’ cities, the present paper compares Eastern Mediterranean cities historically famous for their cosmopolitanism like Istanbul and Thessalonika, contemporary post-Communist cities like Sarajevo or Odessa and twenty-first-century global cities like Cairo or London to ask: what makes these cities both cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan?