ABSTRACT
In popular usage ‘cosmopolitan’ expresses a modern style of urbanity characterized by cultural liveliness and a certain sophistication. Its symbols are chic cafés, arts festivals, international fashion and food, and vibrant streetlife. In academic usage ‘cosmopolitan’ is transposed to ‘cosmopolitanism’ where it has political and ethical content, offering an idealized view of society as a place of ‘togetherness’ where ‘otherness’ has been banished to less civilized times. This ideal is structured around cultural openness to a mix of differences, primarily those of ‘race’ and ethnicity, expressed in terms of a connectedness beyond boundaries of national identity, a ‘planetary humanism’ which includes ‘the otherness of the other’ (see Gilroy 2000; Beck 2002). Neither popular nor academic versions of ‘the cosmopolitan’ present us with a view of the urban in which social class is a significant feature; instead class is superseded by culture. The language of cosmopolitanism does not readily conjure images of the black or white working class, or of poor immigrants or refugees. Its central ethic or ‘good’ is cultural openness and tolerance, not social and economic equality. This chapter argues for the importance of seeing cosmopolitanism in relation to class, an importance which can be explored through discourses of urban culture and identity, and practices of urban life in the dense flows, mixes, conflicts and convergences of social difference. First, with regard to how urban culture is represented, how we assess the usefulness of cosmopolitanism as an idea largely depends on our positionality
or ‘way of seeing’. This is suggested by the question ‘Who gets to articulate the nature of our contemporary urban conditions?’ Given the historical and contemporary development of Western cities through class relations, analyses of urban culture that do not consider class are missing a fundamental dimension of urban space and its narration – very often expressing a non-reflexive middle-class positionality. Second, with regard to practices of urban life, the recognition that cosmopolitanisms represent the best way of conceiving of urban cultures, which are too heterogeneous to be lumped together in a single analytic (Pollock et al. 2000), requires accounts of cosmopolitanism to be grounded in terms of place and class relations, that is, in historical and geographical conditions.
