Cosmopolitanism and the Social Experience of Cities

Abstract

Considers shifts in the conceptualization of cosmopolitanism concomitant with 20th-century urban life. How Simmel, Weber, & Chicago school members Robert Park & Louis Wirth grappled with the problematics of cosmopolitanism is addressed in terms of the dialectic between alterity & bureaucratic rationalization that coexisted in the city. It is argued that contemporary urbanists must contend with a cosmopolitan dialectic that has since assumed the form of a disputation between flexibility & indifference, which is attributed to changes in modern capitalism. Three ideas about the nature of this dialectic are posited in terms of globalization & the crisis in citizenship, the proliferation of flexibilized institutions & their relationship to physical urban forms, & the regime of noninteractive differences that substitutes for alterity. The distinction between cosmopolitan & local is deemed false. J. Zendejas