Sweeping the Streets, Cleaning Morals: Chinese Sex Workers in Paris Claiming Their Belonging to the Cosmopolitan City

Since 2016, hundreds of Chinese migrants selling sexual services in Paris have been the target of systematic control operations by the police, whose clear objective is to “sweep” prostitution out of some neighbourhoods. In reaction to these measures, a group of Chinese women organized their own collective, The Steel Roses (Les Roses d’Acier), and asked the local government to better prevent violence against sex workers, rather than fight sex workers themselves. By doing so, they tried to embody political agency, and asked for the local government to include them as part of the “local diversity” and as legitimate city users. In a context of local gentrification, where diversity is presented as an important characteristic of these multicultural neighborhoods, such a mobilization by migrant sex workers underlines the ongoing controversy around the definition of diversity, as well as controversy in terms of who is legitimate to embody urban imaging. This chapter proposes to describe the controversy launched by the Chinese sex workers in some districts of Paris as another case study of the ways political power relations contribute to the definition of what is diversity and who belongs to a city defined in terms of cosmopolitanism.

What’s in a Street? Exploring Suspended Cosmopolitanism in Trikoupi, Nicosia

Situated at the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, the island of Cyprus has always been a bridge as well as a border between the Middle East and Europe. It has also been an important place of both emigration and immigration. The situation in Nicosia, the capital city, is marked by decline following the 1974 conflict and partition. At the same time, however, the city has become an important settling place for international migrants, whose presence has grown during the last 20 years. Today Nicosia’s situation lies between a typical south European city (in which migrants find room in the interstices) and a post-war city. Following the growing effort within migration studies to use the street as a laboratory of diversity and cosmopolitanism (Susan Hall), this paper focuses on a single street. Formerly an important business street, Trikoupi Street is now well known as one of the most cosmopolitan streets in Nicosia, in which south Asians, Arabs, Sub-Saharan Africans as well as Eastern Europeans converge. These different populations correspond to different migratory waves as well as different modes of incorporation into local society. In this chapter, we aim to see how the street level may help us to reflect upon important topics in Cyprus such as contested citizenship, urban change, local/global connections, as well as new forms of cohabitation and patterns of subaltern cosmopolitanism. We also aim to reflect upon the multiple temporalities of the neighborhood, in order to show how the history of the street (and the history of the neighborhood) impacts on current ways of life in Trikoupi. We define the current situation as “suspended cosmopolitanism.”

Migration, Urbanity and Cosmopolitanism in a Globalized World: An Introduction

Globalization and migration have generated acute and often contradictory changes: they have increased social diversity while inducing global homogenization; they have sharpened differentiation of spaces and statuses while accelerating and amplifying communication and circulations; they have induced more complex social stratification while enriching individual and collective identities. These changes happen to be strikingly visible in cities. Urban contexts, indeed, offer privileged sites of inquiry to understanding the social dynamics of globalization, informal belonging and local citizenships, transient and multi-layered identities, symbolic orders and exclusionary practices. But cities are also material sites and they create multisensorial scapes that shape experiences of globalization and social change. They operate through multiple scales, connecting horizontal extensions and vertical layers of the city with generic, landmark, interstitial and neglected places. Far from being mere contexts, cities are both changing and being changed by migration and globalization.

Cosmopolitanism in US Sanctuary Cities: Dreamers Claiming Urban Citizenship

Sanctuary cities are on the rise and undocumented migrant activism is growing in both the US and Europe. In this context, it seems appropriate to revisit the concept of sanctuaryin its relation to undocumented activism. Based on literature in the field and on ethnographic observation, this chapter explores the way US sanctuary policies foster new forms of urban citizenship to undocumented migrants who rely on the city for their practices, introducing the concept of cosmopolitanism to discuss their “acts of citizenship.”

Figures of the Cosmopolitan Condition: The Wanderer, the Outcast, the Foreigner

In this chapter, I go through a series of figures embodying the cosmopolitan condition seen as a banal, everyday experience of migrants in urban borderlands. Using ethnographic accounts of migrants’ itineraries and social encounters, the chapter explores a series of urban spaces which are social “borderlands” and their inhabitants: neighbourhoods, squats, camps. Through stories and descriptions of connections and exploitation, settlement and displacement, it investigates the existence of an everyday or banal cosmopolitism experienced by Sudanese, Eritrean, Sri Lankan, Afghan or German dwellers of Beirut, Paris, Patras, and New York. It describes the cosmopolitan condition in the sense of a lived experience, an experience of sharing the world, no matter how inegalitarian and violent this may be.

Generic Places, the Construction of Home and the Lived Experience of Cosmopolitanization

The chapter explores the way in which people under conditions of movement and change deal with plurality in contemporary urban settings by tracing the home-making experiences of a group of Mexican professionals in Madrid (postgraduate students, academics, IT professionals, journalists, and others). While their idea of home aligns discursively within an ideal version of cosmopolitanism (“at home everywhere”), in practice their strategies to feel at home in Madrid show that these privileged movers tend to rely on specific though generic places characterized by their homogenizing tendencies, such as hotel chains, generic coffee places and airports, to achieve a feeling of home.

Branding Cosmopolitanism and Place Making in Saint Laurent Boulevard, Montreal

The boulevard Saint-Laurent is the embodiment in Montreal of the gap between the French-speaking eastern part and the English-speaking areas in the west part, but it is also the place where immigrants settled during the twentieth century, thus creating specific neighborhoods (Little Italy, Chinatown, and Portuguese and Jewish sectors). These neighborhoods, that once symbolized poverty and marginalized communities, have been undergoing processes of both social and urban change as well as gentrification. They are now repositioned, through the urban planning, marketing strategies, and cultural events (celebrations, festivals, urban tours) produced by public and private stakeholders, as places to visit. Cosmopolitanism is being integrated as a marketing strategy to promote places and to redefine districts as destinations of leisure and tourism (Shaw S, Bagwell S, Karmowska J, Urban Studies 41(10), 1983–2000, 2004). The boulevard is a lever for branding strategies: “ethnic” neighborhoods clearly highlight the assets of cosmopolitanism through food, shops, associations or symbols such as colors, flags or ornaments. This chapter focuses on these actions of branding and the use of the cosmopolitan past of the street and their impact on the representations of pedestrians, inhabitants and users.

Everyday Cosmopolitanism in African Cities: Places of Leisure and Consumption in Antananarivo and Maputo

African cities are sometimes considered “off the map” as underdeveloped peripheries alienated from cultural globalisation. The intrinsic ethnic and cultural diversity of African cities is often overshadowed by a distant perception of their overall “blackness” and a supposed cultural uniformity. These cities have always been places of intense circulation and mass settlement both from within the continent and from outside, may it be from Asia, Europe and the Middle East in colonial contexts notably but also more recently Latin America. However, African urban diversity and the recent changes it underwent has received little academic attention.This chapter describes cosmopolitan practices and representations in Antananarivo (Madagascar) and Maputo (Mozambique), mainly but not only focusing on Chinese diasporas and communities sharing Chinese origins through observation and interviews. Cosmopolitan interactions in old or newly created so-called “ethnic” places such as restaurants, casinos and other leisure settings are under study to discuss processes of neighbouring cosmopolitanism at the very local place. Residents of African cities display features of cosmopolitan urbanites with intense variation across contexts and communities.

Cosmopolitan Dubai: Consumption and Segregation in a Global City

This chapter attempts to think cosmopolitanism outside the framework of normativity and to unravel how it can be grounded in non-Western and non-integrative contexts. In a deeply inegalitarian Emirati society, Dubai’s cosmopolitanism intertwines three main features: globalization, consumption and segregation. After quickly describing these characteristics, I illustrate how the state and its corporations shape cosmopolitan landscapes in order to achieve the status of a global city and then demonstrate how these spaces are experienced by its users. To unpack Dubai’s cosmopolitan urbanism, I have chosen to study two ordinary (and overlooked) spaces, far cries from iconic architectural successes. Global Village is an outdoor mall and entertainment park selling products from all over the world. It epitomizes the commodification of difference, where cosmopolitanism is performed as a form of consumption. International City is one of the rare urban projects built for housing low and middle-class foreign residents. In this suburban cosmopolitan district, inhabited mainly by non-Westerners, logics of segregation are spreading against “bachelors,” usually constructed as a threat to urban order in the Gulf. In these two ordinary spaces, frequented mainly by non-Westerners, a kind of cosmopolitanism from below emerges. This cosmopolitanism is not exempted from tensions and contradictions, where inclusive logics of consumption coexist with exclusive logics of segregation.

Making Cosmopolitan Spaces: Urban Design, Ideology and Power

There is a growing scholarly consensus over the transformation of the urban public place from a challenging, conflicting and negotiated one to a festive and convivial place. Decades of gentrification, renewals and city branding have fostered an urban form made of well-regulated and controlled islands of publicness in a sea of privatopias. Beyond structural forces, urban policies and the action of households and citizens, a key role has been played by global architecture and design. With this chapter, we will address this issue looking precisely at the practices of conceiving and designing the public places by urban designers. How the ideals of a cosmopolis, urban and democratic, is put in place by professionals dealing with neoliberal constraints, post-democratic states and refined middle-class users? What is the contemporary meaning of cosmopolitanism, when related to the urban core? Cosmopolitanism for whom, under which conditions? The chapter will provide a case-study detailed analysis of the perspective of urban designers towards projects and urbanism, with a specific attention to public space design.