Post-cosmopolitan Cities

Caroline Humphrey is a Research Director in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal, and India. Her research interests include socialist and post-socialist society, religion, ritual, economy, history, and the contemporary transformations of cities.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroductionCaroline Humphrey and Vera SkvirskajaChapter 1. Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan CityCaroline HumphreyChapter 2. Negotiating Cosmopolitanism: Migration, Religious Education and Shifting Jewish Orientation in Post-Soviet OdessaMarina SapritskyChapter 3. At the City’s Social Margins: Selective Cosmopolitans in OdessaVera SkvirskajaChapter 4. ‘A Gate, but Leading Where?’ In Search of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism in Post-Soviet TbilisiMartin Demant FrederiksenChapter 5. Cosmopolitan Architecture: ‘Deviations’ from Stalinist Aesthetics and the Making of Twenty-first Century WarsawG. Michał MurawskiChapter 6. Sinking and Shrinking city: Cosmopolitanism, Historical Memory and Social Change in VeniceJoanna KostyloChapter 7. Haunted by the Past: Immigration and Thessaloniki’s Questionable Path to a New CosmopolitanismPanos HatziprokopiouChapter 8. ‘For Badakshan – the Country without Borders!’: Village Cosmopolitans, Urban-Rural Networks and the Post-Cosmopolitan City in TajikistanMagnus MarsdenNotes on ContributorsIndex

“What emerges as common features of these cities mark their unique contribution to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as ideal and practice, raising crucial questions about who is or can be cosmopolitan and where cosmopolitanism is in the world. Loosely connected by their orientation to both Europe and Asia, the shifting valences of this outlook over time have important consequences for the cities’ respective cosmopolitan-ness, as well as the meaning and nature of cosmopolitanism.”  ·  Urban History“In their new book, Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja have excelled in building a …magnificent world of cultural identities without ends. The authors and editors offer a compelling exploration of the multilayered ideas about what makes “us”and “them”in six cities: Odessa, Tbilisi, Warsaw, Venice, Thessalonica, and Dushanbe…Humphrey and Skvirskaja take the deeper, anthropological, microscopic view of the everyday experiences of people. And in this they do an excellent job.”  ·  Slavic Review “Taken together, these [chapters] individually offer valuable insights into the dynamics of urban co-existence (or lack thereof)…[and] reveal that cosmopolitanism’s definitions and meanings only exist in the plural, that the formation of cosmopolitan ideas and communities is inevitably contingent and place-specific, and that the forces preaching exclusion and intolerance are often at least as powerful as those promoting cultural acceptance in a rapidly globalising world… a useful text for courses concerned with globalisation and urbanism.”  ·  Urban Studies“This volume captures the spirit [of the renewed interest in the city] well and delivers a lively set of essays. Here, the shift away from the usual story about immigration and how to cope with it takes us, instead, to a widely shared perception of the loss of diversity and shared lifestyle, often without regard for actual statistics on multi-ethnic urban populations.”  ·  Bruce Grant, New York University