Cosmopolitanism: the migrant and the city

"City life is carried on by strangers among strangers" 

Zygmunt Bauman

Cities offer a vantage point from which explore people's encounter with difference: urban settings continually articulate and re-articulate the relation between "us" and "them" in a variety of ways, allowing different degree of cosmopolitanism. It is, as a matter of fact, impossible to give a simple or coherent definition of what cosmopolitanism is, since it seems rather to function as an "empty signifier" (Szerszynski, Urry 2002: 469) whose meaning is negotiated according to different cultural realities and to rapidly changing times. It is, broadly intended, a "mode of managing cultural and political multiplicities" on a global, national and personal/social level. (Vertovec, Cohen, 2002: 4). The space of analysis, then, can be narrowed down, grounded to a specific spatial context: cosmopolitanism can be studied through the lens of the city, the cosmopolis.  

 Urban settings contribute to determine one's sense of global identity. For example, "ethnic restaurants, import stores, international media and architectural forms" (Binnie et all: 15) available in the inner-city neighborhoods help the middle-class citizens to feel "citizens of the world" (whether this feeling is genuine or just part of a cultural aesthetic is a question open to debate) but without having to move beyond their safe cultural enclaves. The general tendency in urban planning seems to focus on "the production of commodified spaces of alterity" (Binnie et all: 18) in which the only interactions happening are, in fact, between members of the same cultural elite mutually appreciating each other's openness to cultural diversity. Cosmopolitanism is a commodity in and of itself: the cosmopolite is educated, knowledgeable in foreign cultures, confident enough and skilled enough to deal with difference. Another example of the self-fashioning of the city's global identity are the ethnic quarters within cities, spaces where the cultural practices are inextricably intertwined with economic practices (Bell, Jayne, 2004), and whose very existence is used to advertise the city as cosmopolitan.  

   Ethnic enclaves, while allowing migrants to create a network of social interactions and employment opportunities, hinder linguistic and social adjustment to the host country. People living within these spaces have no access to the services of mainstream society, from which they remain visibly separated, and their upward mobility is therefore extremely limited (Pre-Anders et all). These examples lead to wonder about who is really involved, who actively participates, in the so-called cosmopolitan interactions: equating 'cosmopolitanism' to urban policies of inclusion of diversity makes for a rather simplistic view.

Martina Cincotto

• Vertovec S., Cohen, R. (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice Oxford University Press
• Szerszynskis, B. and Urry, J. (2002) ‘Cultures of Cosmopolitanism’, The Sociological Review 50(4): 461–81. 
• Binnie J., Holloway J., Millington S., Young C. (2006) Cosmopolitan Urbanism Routledge 
• Bell D., Jayne M. (2004) City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City, Ashgate
• Per-Anders E., Fredriksson P., Aslund O., (2003) "Ethnic enclaves and the economic success of immigrants: evidence from a natural experiment" The Quarterly Journal of Economics. no.1: 329-357.