ABSTRACT
Cities are transformed under variable historical and social conditions. One way of
characterising this phenomenon is to talk about regimes defined as systems of
local governance. My hypothesis is that the processes analysed by authors dealing
with contemporary situations in this volume, including the case study on which
my contribution is based, may be understood as instances of a cosmopolitan city-
building regime.2 In other words, they are related to forms of governance in
which translocal flows play a crucial role. This type of regime, which relies on a
series of actors’ competence to navigate between different cultural references,
allows or disallows certain types of flows and plays a central role in shaping
urban forms that increasingly mingle different aesthetics and typological solu-
tions. Most often, analyses of urban regime change are based on general diag-
noses of governance change in terms of political economic theory (Harvey 1989;
Hall and Hubbard 1998; Brenner 2004) or political histories of local governance
(Stone 1989, 2005). In this chapter, I follow a slightly different route by focusing
on changes in urban forms. Although I will not therefore develop a classical
urban regime analysis, I will use it to frame the analysis of these forms. It will
allow me to locate them within a historically shaped system of action, compara-
ble to other systems of action elsewhere, instead of considering them as free-
floating, idiosyncratic urban features.
