Caroline Humphrey - Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence

Bodily, geographic, and architectural sites are embedded with cultural knowledge and social value. This series provides ethnographically rich analyses of the cultural organization and meanings of these sites of space, architecture, landscape, and places of the body. Contributions to this series will examine the symbolic meanings of space and place, the cultural and historical processes involved in their construction and contestation, and how they are in dialogue with wider political, religious, social, and economic institutions.

Gisa Weszkalnys

Edited by Cordula Gdaniec

Steven C. Dinero

Edited by Maria Kousis, Tom Selwyn, and David Clark

Volker M. Welter

Edited by Godfrey Baldacchino

Edited by Judith Kapferer

Performing Place, Practising Memories: Aboriginal Australians, Hippies and the State

Rosita Henry

Edited by Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja

Hariz Halilovich

Michaela Schuble

Edited by Michael Minkenberg

Edited by Gwyneth Cliver and Carrie Smith-Prei

Edited by

and

First published in 2012 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2012, 2015 Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja

First paperback edition published in 2015

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Post-cosmopolitan cities : explorations of urban coexistence / edited by Caroline Humphrey, Vera Skvirskaja.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-85745-510-9 (hbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-677-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-85745-511-6 (ebook)

1. Sociology, Urban. 2. Cosmopolitanism. 3. Urbanization--Social aspects. 4. Immigration and emigration--Social aspects. I. Humphrey, Caroline. II. Skvirskaja, Vera.

HT151.P626 2012

307.76--dc23

2011052021

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-0-85745-510-9 hardback

ISBN: 978-1-78238-677-3 paperback

ISBN: 978-0-85745-511-6 ebook

CHAPTER 1
Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan City

CHAPTER 2
Negotiating Cosmopolitanism: Migration, Religious Education and Shifting Jewish Orientations in Post-Soviet Odessa

CHAPTER 3
At the Citys Social Margins: Selective Cosmopolitans in Odessa

CHAPTER 4
A Gate, but Leading Where? In Search of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism in Post-Soviet Tbilisi

CHAPTER 5
Cosmopolitan Architecture: Deviations from Stalinist Aesthetics and the Making of Twenty-First-Century Warsaw

CHAPTER 6
Sinking and Shrinking City: Cosmopolitanism, Historical Memory and Social Change in Venice

CHAPTER 7
Haunted by the Past and the Ambivalences of the Present: Immigration and Thessalonicas Second Path to Cosmopolitanism

CHAPTER 8
For Badakhshan the Country without Borders!: Village Cosmopolitans, Urban-Rural Networks and the Post-Cosmopolitan City in Tajikistan

The project that introduced the idea of the post-cosmopolitan city and that led to this book was generously supported by an AHRC grant for speculative research (20052006) and the Centre for History and Economics at Kings College, Cambridge. Our subsequent long-term ethnographic research in Odessa, Ukraine was made possible by the AHRC programme Migration, Diaspora and Identity designed by Professor Kim Knott. Various conferences organised within the framework of the programme enabled us to discuss our ideas on post-cosmopolitanism at interdisciplinary fora and to meet some of the contributors to this volume. We are grateful to Katie Roche for facilitating our participation in these events.

CAROLINE HUMPHREY AND VERA SKVIRSKAJA

This book is about the kind of cosmopolitanism found or not found in cities. It arose from a perception that many great cities, from Bukhara in Central Asia to Venice in Europe, once famous for being cosmopolitan places, are no longer so in the twenty-first century, or at least not in the same way as before. Discussing this, we arrived at the tentative notion of the post-cosmopolitan city that is explored in this volume. Our book first of all draws attention to the fact that the inhabitants of many contemporary cities, diverse as they are, share at least one thing: a sense that something precious has been lost, or sidelined, and that other less generous relations have taken their place. We do not carry out a sustained investigation of the worldwide causes of recent transformations in great cities in general, which would involve an inevitably complex analysis of different concatenations of political and economic forces such as new forms of capitalism, globalisation, the emergence of nation states from former federations, migration, changes in work patterns, and so forth, and has been the subject of a large literature. Rather, we concentrate on particular cities with a history of vibrant combination of many cultures; we describe the way in which cosmopolitanism was practised and sustained in them, the hostility it nevertheless often had to contend with, and the fragility of cosmopolitanism in recent years. The main part of the book then focuses on an anthropological study of the new kinds of relations that are being formed today in more nationalistic contexts. We hope thus to draw attention to an important trend in present-day urban life in many parts of the world, but also to illuminate precisely what the changes are in the quality of relations in these places.