ABSTRACT
Ma is a Japanese term for an in-between realm, an esoteric term used widely to characterise mental, physical, social and spatial conditions. In New York there is an institute of urban planning that specialises in creating links between US and Japanese urban policies. In the book The Japan-ness of Architecture the architect Arata Isozaki uses the word to describe the in-between realm in which Western concepts, ideas and models are translated and transferred into the Japanese hemisphere. The book is written from New York with an idea of awe. It is rooted in the cosmopolitan agenda. The cosmopolitan agenda is one of international politics, but also one of sociology. As Gerard Delanty has argues a cosmopolitan sociological imagination differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity. French sociology, including the late work of Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is the noble heir of the Enlightenment anti-imperialists.
