Cosmopolitan Urbanism

by Binnie; Jon

• ISBN13: 9780415344913
• ISBN10: 0415344913
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-04-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Cities are increasingly competing with one another to re-brand themselves as cosmopolitan in order to attract investment and tourism. Urban spaces associated with cultural difference such as Chinatowns and gay villages have become core to many cities' attempts to market themselves as global cities. Central to this process is how traditionally marginalised groups in the city have become re-valued and reconstructed as a resource in the eyes of planners and politicians. Cosmopolitan Urbanismexamines the politics of these transformations by understanding the everyday practices of cosmopolitanism by drawing together the works of leading urban scholars. Which forms of cultural difference are valued and which are excluded from this re-visioning of the contemporary city? This accessible book is groundbreaking in examining the complex politics of cosmopolitanism in accessible, empirical case studies. These range from Montreal to Singapore, London to Texas, Auckland to Amsterdam. The groundednature of the discussion of cosmopolitanism makesCosmopolitan Urbanisman accessible student guide to debates on the subject.

Table of Contents

Introduction : grounding cosmopolitan urbanism : approaches, practices and policies	p. 1
Cosmopolitan urbanism : a love song to our mongrel cities	p. 37
The paradox of cosmopolitan urbanism : rationality, difference and the circuits of cultural capital	p. 53
Strangers in the cosmopolis	p. 70
Sociality and the cosmopolitan imagination : national, cosmopolitan and local imaginaries in Auckland, New Zealand	p. 89
Cosmopolitanism by default : public sociability in Montreal	p. 112
Cosmopolitan camouflage : (post-)gay space in Spitalfields, East London	p. 130
Negotiating cosmopolitanism in Singapore's fictional landscape	p. 146
Multicultural urban space and the cosmopolitan 'other' : the contested revitalization of Amsterdam's Bijlmermeer	p. 171
Working-class subjects in the cosmopolitan city	p. 187
Planning Birmingham as a cosmopolitan city : recovering the depths of its diversity?	p. 204
Cosmopolitan knowledge and the production and consumption of sexualised space : Manchester's gay village	p. 220
Conclusion : the paradoxes of cosmopolitan urbanism	p. 246
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