Toward Cosmopolitan Politics: an Urban Perspective

Cosmopolitanism is commonly associated with cities and a philosophical view of the world, more recently with cultural and political models of globalisation and the scholar, Ulrich Beck. But surprisingly little in Beck's work on cosmopolitan modernisation was actually about the city, and the references in urban studies are rather few. Exploring how the cosmopolitan notion links and differentiates both fields, this paper contributes to an urban perspective on cosmopolitan social sciences. While cosmopolitan sociology has turned to cultural politics, a recent cosmopolitan revival in the urban debate combines postcolonial anthropology of diversity with culturalist critique of political economic neoliberalism. Continuing the cosmopolitan controversy, the paper enquires how the urban context contributes to ontological definitions, analytical concepts, postnational methods, reflective agency, epistemological challenges and democratic politics. It begins with the claim that the history of cities and urban thought poses a specific case of cosmopolitan diversity that challenges national dominance as well as functionalist globalisation. Therefore, urban studies bring a diverse and extensive experience to cosmopolitan research that contributes to postnational conception as well as warning of culturalist limitations and neoliberal dominance. Relational urbanism moves comparative methods from pregiven functional units to the dynamic processes constituting transnationalisation in and between different local contexts. But to critically reflect here Europe's powerful geopolitical role from nation-building to neoliberal globalisation, European metropoles can contribute important internal perspectives to postcolonial history and analysis. In addition to such transnational scholarly exchange, urban research addresses interdisciplinary problems of technical and social innovation. By posing questions about material, societal and epistemological power, the urban field offers a laboratory for cosmopolitan research in knowledge and practice. Thus, shifting cities back into the focus of contemporary social sciences, the need for an open-ended conception of urban politics also contributes to further elaborate a cosmopolitan agenda in political sciences.