Cosmopolitan Urbanism

Jon Binnie is Reader, Julian Holloway is Lecturer and both Steve Millington and Craig Young are senior lecturers in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Cities are increasingly competing with one another to re-brand themselves as cosmopolitan in order to attract investment and tourism. Urban spaces associated with cultural difference such as Chinatowns and gay villages have become core to many cities' attempts to market themselves as global cities. Central to this process is how traditionally marginalised groups in the city have become re-valued and reconstructed as a resource in the eyes of planners and politicians. "Cosmopolitan Urbanism" examines the politics of these transformations by understanding the everyday practices of cosmopolitanism by drawing together the works of leading urban scholars. Which forms of cultural difference are valued and which are excluded from this re-visioning of the contemporary city? This accessible book is groundbreaking in examining the complex politics of cosmopolitanism in accessible, empirical case studies. These range from Montreal to Singapore, London to Texas, Auckland to Amsterdam. The grounded nature of the discussion of cosmopolitanism makes "Cosmopolitan Urbanism "an accessible student guide to debates on the subject.

1.Introduction Part 1: Envisaging Cosmopolitan Urbanism 2. Cosmopolitan Urbanism: A Love Song to our Mongrel Cities3. The Paradox of Cosmopolitan Urbanism: Rationality, Difference and the Circuits of Cultural Capital 4. Strangers in the Cosmopolis Part 2: Consuming the Cosmopolitan City: Materialities and Practices 5. Sociality and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: National, Cosmopolitan and Local Imaginaries in Auckland 6. Cosmopolitanism by Default: Public Sociability in Montreal 7. Cosmopolitan Camouflage: (Post-) Gay Space in Spitalfields, East London 8. Negotiating Cosmopolitanism in Singapore's Fictional Landscape Part 3: Producing the Cosmopolitan City: Cultural Policy and Intervention 9. Multicultural Urban Space and the Cosmopolitan 'Other': The Contested Revitalization of Amsterdam's Bijlmermeer 10. Working-Class Subjects in the Cosmopolitan City 11. Planning Birmingham as a Cosmopolitan City: Recovering the Cepths of its Diversity? 12. Cosmopolitan Knowledge and the Production and Consumption of Sexualised Space: Manchester's Gay Village 13. Conclusion: The Paradoxes of Cosmopolitan Urbanism