ABSTRACT
Large cities, and urbanity in general, have long been recognized as centers of cosmopolitanism, that is, as places in which people have access to multiple lifestyles, confront diversity on a daily basis, and frequently adopt a tolerant attitude that accepts social and ethnic differences with a minimum of rancor. The relations between urbanism and tolerance have a long history going back at least to the nineteenth century, when Vaughan (1843/2010), among others, argued that urban life inculcated residents with intelligence and empathetic morality. Because many of their residents tend to swim in deep oceans of information, work in producer services that require relatively high degrees of education, rub shoulders with immigrants, have access to food, music, and movies from around the world, and are exposed to diverse cultures through museums, schools, ethnic festivals, and tourists, large cities-especially global cities-global cities may be seen as repositories of cosmopolitan consciousness. The construction, negotiation, and politics of the geographies of difference and exclusion have become an important line of thought within the discipline of geography (Sibley, 1995; Valentine, 2008), an issue closely related to the spatiality of empathy and caring (Lawson, 2007; Silk, 1998). However, this literature has rarely attempted explicit ties to urban geography. Of particular interest here is the ways in which tolerance, arguably the core cosmopolitan ethic, is produced disproportionately in global cities.
