ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitan urbanism is, I argue, the conjunction of particular forms of professional, rational knowledge and its acquisition in the spaces of key metropolitan centres. In its avowed openness to difference, cosmopolitan knowledge is allied with current ideas of transversal rationality as a logic of transition between spaces and cultures, rather than a traditional rationality based on hierarchy and fixed location. Rather than this cosmopolitan knowledge being based on ‘decontextualised cultural capital’ (Hannerz 1996: 108), however, I argue that it relies on the time-space particularities of the acquisition and reproduction of the various strands of cultural capital. Thus the circuits of cultural capital that make cosmopolitan knowledge possible are often antithetical to cosmopolitanism as a form of openness to difference. The drive to keep all social fields in play results in a narrowing of the social field and of the encounter with others. The more coherence there is between the circuits of economic and cultural capital, the more likely it is that the field is socially elite and exclusive, and this militates against the ideal of cosmopolitanism being open to otherness. I explore the paradoxes of cosmopolitan rationality using the examples of elite gentrification in Sydney and London, and ‘provincial’ gentrification in Bristol, England.
