ABSTRACT
Focusing on the idea of the city as a space of encounter between cultures, this chapter proposes to examine competing notions of the cosmopolitan, transnational, multicultural and postcolonial city in order to explore various forms of difference which are valued in or, on the contrary, excluded from contemporary urban discourses. On the one hand, it celebrates hybridity, intermingling and mongrelization and sees the city as a fusion of cultures; on the other hand it considers the metropolis as a mosaic of distinct cultural and ethnic backgrounds that coexist within a community encouraging and welcoming difference. The more universally oriented notion of cosmopolitanism conceptualizes cities as nodes in a global cultural network and considers them as the endpoints of migratory movements that produce cultural mosaics. Dominant French discourses which tend to ignore Paris’ colonial legacy and multicultural diversity generally favor images of the city as the world’s unique cultural capital.
