ABSTRACT
This concluding piece stems from the book editors Jonathan Rokem and Camillo Boano's conversations in 2015-16, with Michael Safier. Michael Safier joined the Development Planning Unit (DPU) at its 1971 inception in the University College London (UCL). Since 1990, he has been developing ideas about cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan development and cosmopolitan urbanism in relation to planned intervention in the context of contested and divided cities in a global perspective. In a set of conversations about the book's theoretical and geographical approach, Michael shared his personal interest in cosmopolitan urbanism as an overarching approach to make sense of changing global forces, and the prerequisite to reframing what has been labelled as the post-colonial in relation to urban geopolitics and planning in different contested cities. The idea of the post-colonial has produced a whole subject discipline in the historical and social sciences that is paralleled by other post-discourses, of which the most celebrated have been the postmodern, the post-structural and the post-developmental.
