Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja (eds) Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence, Berghahn, New York and Oxford, 2012. 250 pages, 14 illustrations. $ 70.00, £ 40.85, ISBN: 978-0-85745-510-9.

This is a thought-provoking collection of essays on select  cities with a history of cosmopolitanism, or the vibrant combination of many cultures.  The book presents the ways in which cosmopolitanism was practiced and sustained in them and discusses its decline in nationalistic contexts as well as its transformation in our contemporary globalized world.  A sense of nostalgia for something precious being lost underpins this diverse collection of case studies that include the cities of Odessa (three chapters), Tbilisi, Warsaw, Venice, Thessalonica, and Dushanbe.  While the approach adopted by the various authors is predominantly anthropological, urban social geographers may nevertheless find some of these case studies useful.

This collection starts with an introduction by the editors, Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaya, who explain their conceptualization of the cosmopolitan city. In contrast to some sociological approaches that equate cosmopolitanism with globalization, their anthropological approach focuses on cosmopolitanism as ‘a capacity for openness, an appreciation of others and an ability to stand outside the givens of one’s own community’ in the context of incorporation into ‘political regimes (imperial, colonial, socialist, authoritarian)’ (page 2). This ‘traditional cosmopolitanism’ as a thing of value is challenged by the replacement of multinational states by nation-states. It is also challenged by globalization, which  produces a new kind of cosmopolitanism of standardized environments and non-interaction as a guarantor of public order.  World cities like London, New York and Tokyo used to get most of scholarly attention in these regards.  By focusing instead on mid-size cities where ‘the kind of high-end globalised capitalism described by Sennett is merely a thin upper layer, in some places vanishingly small, and any case the revolution in consciousness does not seem to have taken place’ (page 4), this provocative collection of essays essentially celebrates the remnants of urban solidarities and engagement with outsiders in different forms than before. These traditional cosmopolitanisms are ‘located in unexpected parts of the city, or etiolated into vulnerable skeins’ (page 5) and conditioned by various political, social and cultural limitations.  ‘It is this delicate balance of “living together and apart” that this book seeks to elucidate’ (page 5) in contrast to the ethics of tolerance/indifference, multiculturalism, or xenophobia and violence. Humphrey and Skvirskaya believe that ‘cosmopolitanism can survive in “the post” although it may take new forms, come to occupy different social spaces, be pushed to the margins and be overshadowed by indifferent tolerance’ (page 6).  This is an excitingly unconventional research agenda.

The first case study in the book is not, as one may expect, Venice, the city where the very word ‘ghetto’ emerged, but  Odessa.  Another surprise is that the chapter does not start with a discussion of cosmopolitanism, but of its reverse, which is the destructive energies of violent mobs against people seen as alien (pogroms).  Ignoring the site’s Ancient Greek and Ottoman Turkish past, the chapter starts its historical account of the city with the claim that ‘Odessa was founded from scratch by Europeans in the late eighteenth century’ only later to explain that the region was populated as an outcome of the defeat of the Ottoman Turks by the Russians. The liberating ethos of the Russo-Ottoman war, as well as the protective role of the frontier city of Odessa for the occupied Christian peoples of the Ottoman Balkans should have perhaps been included in the discussion of the city’s cosmopolitanism, especially with regard to its Greek dimension.  The very name of the city is hypothesized to be related to the Ancient Greek name Odissos.  Soon after founding the city in 1794, Catherine the Great issued a decree to relocate Greeks and Albanians there who served Russia in the war and provided funding for the transfer of urban residents from the Balkans who wished to resettle to Russia.  Despite this minimization  of the liberating dimensions of Tsarist actions in the area for the oppressed peoples of the Balkans and the downplaying of Odessa’s Greek heritage, the chapter provides interesting facts about Odessa’s ethnic geography. For example, it shows how central Odessa had no ethnic quarters or ghettos (page 26). It also illustrates the regional geography of pogroms and discusses cosmopolitan topologies.  The chapter nevertheless confusingly concludes that ‘Odessa can be seen to have been a post-cosmopolitan city ever since the eclipse of the first city-building Freemasons and the pogroms of 1821’ (page 59). However, if the new city had been founded just 27 years earlier, one is left wonder whether it actually had any time to  become cosmopolitan. Also, since the focus of the chapter is on pogroms that happened afterwards, it is not clear why there is no discussion of the devastating effects of the German occupation of the city during World War II.

Lack of discussion of the Soviet period in general is especially regretful since the second chapter (also on Odessa, by Marina Sapritsky) jumps straight to the post-Soviet period.  The chapter discusses Odessa’s remaining and returning Jewish populations and local understandings of Jewishness informed by the city’s historical cosmopolitan orientations and the Soviet era.  This chapter includes a somewhat repetitive account of the history of the settlement of Odessa (with, again, no reference to the disastrous impact of the occupation of the city by the Germans during World War II).  The main focus is on the activities of Jewish organizations and on the experiences of some returnees to the city in the post-Soviet period.  Here the cosmopolitan and urban discussions seem to be episodic and replaced by  a narrow ethnic perspective (the author claims that ‘the most “cosmopolitan” aspect of Odessa has always been ... its Jewishness’, page 86).

The third  chapter on Odessa, by Vera Skvirskaya, focuses on two of its small post-Soviet ethnic communities, Afghan immigrants and Ukrainian Roma. The two communities have been selected, the author claims,  ‘because they illustrate two different modalities of marginality’ (page 94): one historically internal and the other recently external.  As in many places across Europe, these two tiny communities in Odessa are surrounded by suspicion and negative attitudes.  Based on accounts of the author’s local acquaintances from these communities and of Slavic interlocutors, this chapter often reads as a collection of mutual complaints and even stereotypes (e.g., Roma perspective claims such as ‘a working-class Slav man is more likely to drink heavily and live off unstable income rather than investing time and effort in securing prosperity’ remain problematically unchallenged, page 110).  The author’s own claim that the racist construct of ‘blacks’ is Soviet (page 115) is unsupported and especially regretful.  With this continuing focus on the marginal, the cosmopolitanisms of the mainstream ethnic groups and of the formative Soviet period are once again ignored.

The following chapter by Martin Demant Frederiksen  explores ‘how in Tbilisi today some types of “difference” continue to be seen as a natural part of the city, whereas others are seen as intrusions, making it questionable whether cosmopolitanism actually exists’ (page 121).  Here too, the author does not consider the Soviet period and focuses instead on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as on the city’s recent political and socioeconomic situation.  Nevertheless, the account offered in this chapter is relatively more balanced than the previous ones. The Orthodox Church and Russian legacies are discussed for the first time in the book.  In the author’s words, ‘The Russian people and Russian cultural elements were still acknowledged [by Georgians] as part of people’s lives rather than an imposition’ (page 133). Discussion of the city in this chapter also seems to be less exclusively socio-ethnographic and geographers will appreciate the attention given to places (e.g., the ancient Zoroastrian temple lost in Tbilisi’s old town) and geopolitical spaces (Tbilisi as a gate to both East and West).

In Chapter 5, G. Michal Murawski finally focuses on the Communist period in Poland. He argues that this was ‘anything but a time of demographic diversity’ (page 141).The Holocaust, the post-war population exchange, the government-led ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign and ‘homogenizing’ minority policy, made Warsaw the most Polish and least cosmopolitan capital of Poland in modern times. The chapter nevertheless focuses  on architectural representations in modernist buildings of what the author claims to be ‘the city’s re-emergent cosmopolitanisation amidst Soviet-style homogeneity’, an architectural ‘resistance movement’ in response to the Stalinist cultural policy in the 1950s (page 142). Most geographic with its focus on urban landscape, this chapter is richly illustrated by photographs of various buildings in the city and may be valuable for discussions of ideologies’ impact on cityscapes in urban courses.  Readers should keep in mind though the deviant, Stalinist meaning of the term cosmopolitanism in this chapter:  as a Moscow-trained Polish architect put it, ‘[c]osmopolitanism in arts takes the form of attempts to snatch away national foundations, national pride, because people with trimmed roots are easier to push out of place and trade to the slavery of American imperialism’ (page 146).  Therefore, the book’s organizing theme of post-cosmopolitanism does not seem to be relevant to this chapter.

In the following chapter Joanna Kostylo reminds the reader that Venice was one of the most cosmopolitan cities of Europe, ‘the first multicultural, multiethnic, overcrowded metropolis’ (page 170).  The city was born as a community of exiles (page 172), yet the only segregated group was the large Jewish community, thus in 1516 the first ghetto was created. The chapter provides a useful account of Venice’s early cosmopolitanism and the fortunes of its Jewish ghetto. The main part of the chapter, however, focuses on the contemporary city.  Kostylo observes the increasing ghettoization of the local population that rarely mixes with tourists in the same places for food and entertainment.  She also considers the important role immigration has increasingly come to play in the Venetian tourist industry. The chapter ends with a discussion of modern Venetian identity. Few residents could be called ‘real Venetians’; global tourism and informal migrants make Venetian citizenship increasingly fluid and transient once again. This chronologically deep and open-ended chapter should have perhaps been placed as the book’s very first case study and as an introduction to discussions of anti-Semitism elsewhere.

Panos Hatziprokopiou’s chapter discusses Thessalonica.  It echoes many of the book’s  themes, with the addition of the nationalization of memory and space and the consequent collective fantasies of continuity and homogeneity as well as the selective forgetting of ethnic or religious ‘difference’.  Cosmopolitanism in the city is reactivated with the arrival of globalisation and the rise of migrant landscapes.  Yet it seems that the author is unsure about usefulness of the (post-)cosmopolitanism concept in the case of Thessalonica: ‘cosmopolitanism may be too vague a concept to account for present-day challenges and rapid social change’ (page 211).

The last chapter (by Magnus Marsden) focuses on the city of Dushanbe and discusses the networks that connect local Pamiris people living in their home region of Badakhshan to others living in Dushanbe. While this is the most unique place discussed in the book, its inclusion into this collection remains questionable. Relatively isolated and predominantly rural, Tajikistan’ urban cosmopolitanism makes sense only in the context of a larger Soviet space and this context is not provided.

I would argue that the book is only partially successful in realizing its intriguing agenda.  First, despite its cosmopolitan focus, the methodologies applied are often ethnocentric rather than cosmopolitan, multiethnic, or mainstream. The city of Odessa, for instance, is presented in two chapters mostly from the perspective of one ethnic group (the Jews).  One may wonder if the conclusions would remain the same if a more inclusive (or non-Jewish) perspective were used instead.  Second, while many of the cities considered are former Soviet cities, this collection mostly ignores the Soviet period. Of the chronologically different  types of cosmopolitanism (imperial, Soviet, post-Soviet/globalized), it is the Soviet one that is paradoxically  closest to the editors’ Derridean ideal of cosmopolitan city ‘as a place of hospitality where a non-indifference to the “other”, a positive welcome rather than mere tolerance, operate as a norm of sociality’ (page 5).  Hopefully this book will provoke further studies into the impact of the Cold War on cosmopolitanism in different urban settings.