Cosmopolitan Urbanism

This paper is in English, but I wrote an abstract in French for a newsletter:

Montréal est-elle une ville vraiment cosmopolite? Si « cosmopolite » est synonyme de « pluriethnique », la réponse sera oui, mais bien d’autres sens se cachent dans cette notion qui a resurgi dans les débats en sciences sociales, notamment en études urbaines. En général, le cosmopolitisme serait la volonté de s’engager avec l’Autre, à travers les différences ethnoculturelles ou nationales. Selon certains chercheurs, cet engagement se déroule au sein des interactions individuelles; pour d’autres, c’est un projet politique collectif. Encore d’autres considèrent que le cosmopolitisme est un concept récupéré par les élites pour se distinguer ou pour vendre des produits « exotiques ».
Selon les auteurs de ce chapitre, le cosmopolitisme de Montréal se constitue plus dans les interactions de la vie quotidienne que dans les projets politiques, en partie parce que ceux-ci sont plutôt préoccupés par la question nationale. Ce cosmopolitisme peut paraître banal ou teinté par la consommation, parfois sans compréhension, des signes de l’Autre, mais c’est tout autant une base nécessaire pour vivre ensemble. À titre d’exemple, les habitants du Mile-End ont une représentation partagée de leur quartier comme cosmopolite qui y facilite la cohabitation. Ce genre de représentation peut s’appliquer également à la ville entière, créant à Montréal, en contraste avec le reste du Québec, un cosmopolitisme flou, impossible à légiférer, fait de coprésence dans les espaces publics de la ville et d’une valorisation générale de la diversité ethnoculturelle. C’est en effet un cosmopolitisme « par défaut ».

On Berlin’s Museum Island, a controversial architectural monument is in the process of completion: the reconstruction of the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), now renamed the “Humboldt Forum”. The project, which encapsulates the city’s vexed relationship with its social, cultural and political heritage, also has much to tell us about the way Berlin — and Germany — sees itself in post-socialist Europe.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS
EXTENDED ABSTRACT (750 WORDS)
DEADLINE NOVEMBER 1ST, 2015

This edited collection will be published by Palgrave MacMillan (final acceptance subject to submission of chapter details and peer review) in the series Consumption and Public Life. More details about the publisher and the series: http://www.palgrave.com/series/Consumption-and-Public-Life/CUCO/
Editors
Julie Emontspool and Ian Woodward, University of Southern Denmark

Details:

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, please submit a document containing chapter title, author details and a 750-word extended abstract to juli@sam.sdu.dk

• Notification of Acceptance: December 20th, 2015
• Submission of full Chapters (max. 9000 words per chapter, incl. references): June 1st, 2016
• Submission of final (revised) chapters: September 15th, 2016


Cosmopolitanism has been a topic of intense research interest across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in the last 15 years. Most contemporary commentators have concurred that cosmopolitanism as a form of ethical practice is associated with a conscious openness to the world and the potential for a relational dialogue with people and things that are culturally different (Delanty, 2009; Hannerz, 1990; Thompson and Tambyah, 1999). The cosmopolitanism question is essentially whether or not people develop feelings of solidarity and responsibility for widening circles of strangers, seek to understand and be changed by incorporating others’ viewpoints and practices which are apparently unlike their own, and feel responsible for environments far away from them (Appiah, 2007; Cheah, 2006; Stevenson, 2002).

While researchers currently grapple with the abstract philosophical dimensions of the concept, they also seek to understand how everyday, vernacular forms of cosmopolitanism work, and how people acquire and learn cosmopolitan competencies and habits (Woodward and Skrbis, 2013). In this context, it is not an exaggeration to observe that consumption opportunities and practices constitute a large part of people’s engagements with diversity and cultural difference (Germann Molz, 2011). But, in what ways does this consumption matter to diffusing cosmopolitan cultures, and in what ways might it complicate them, or even deform them? And, in what ways can scholarship from diverse disciplinary perspectives work with each other to shed light on these questions?

The purpose of this book is to examine the consequences of cosmopolitan ideals and cosmopolitanisation processes for consumption and market practices on a global scale. By discussing not only the positive side of cosmopolitanism but also the problems and challenges related to it, this book takes an informed, critical look at issues and practices of cosmopolitan consumption and markets. The goals of the book are to:
• produce a collected work of high scholarly quality that has an enduring impact on the way researchers understand and conceptualise the cosmopolitan possibilities of consumption
• be the first major collection to frame and directly address controversies and questions around the relationship between consumption and cosmopolitan ethics
• develop a cross-disciplinary research conversation for understanding how consumption practices and processes relate to cosmopolitanism, in what ways they might or might not contribute to cosmopolitan processes and through what symbolic, cultural and economic processes this occurs