Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence explores the contours of cosmopolitanism in cities whose cosmopolitan characteristics seem to have been eroded or transformed. The case-studies draw on ethnographic research focusing on multiethnic sociabilities to explore the presence and absence of cosmopolitanism today. Six cities are explored in nine chapters: three on Odessa, Ukraine; and one each on Tbilisi, Georgia; Warsaw, Poland; Venice, Italy; Thessalonica, Greece; and Dushanbe, Tajikistan. All are places where current constellations of difference are perceived as lacking the qualities of cosmopolitan sociability that once defined the city. As the editors explain, there is ‘a sense that something precious has been lost, or sidelined, and that other less generous relations have taken their place’ (p. 1). While the historical events that contributed to this loss are not the same, all have been affected by national regimes whose internal orientations were antithetical to the cities’ once inclusive qualities. Today's dynamics of globalization, especially around labour migration, have yielded cities where relationships of difference are more strained and less convivial.

Cosmopolitanism is both concept and social fact, an ideal whose features are debated even as it is recognized as existing. The editors posit a loose definition of cosmopolitanism, maintaining that ‘the term must always imply a capacity for openness, an appreciation of others and an ability to stand outside the givens of one's own community’ (p. 2). At the same time, in emphasizing Appiah's located cosmopolitanism over Kant's citizen of the world or Sennett's globetrotter, they acknowledge the persistence of the national in a concept always striving beyond the nation. The complexity of concepts and cases with which Post-Cosmopolitan Cites: Explorations of Urban Coexistence engages is conveyed by its title. The volume's strength lies in exploring the multidimensionality of cosmopolitanism and challenging a fixity of meaning.

The cities examined in the volume span a geographic swath from north-eastern to southern Europe and to Central Asia. The volume's title, in not specifying geographic area, suggests that it aspires to speak to discussions of cosmopolitan urbanism generally. Nevertheless, what emerges as common features of these cities mark their unique contribution to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as ideal and practice, raising crucial questions about who is or can be cosmopolitan and where cosmopolitanism is in the world. Loosely connected by their orientation to both Europe and Asia, the shifting valences of this outlook over time have important consequences for the cities’ respective cosmopolitan-ness, as well as the meaning and nature of cosmopolitanism. While Venice's orientation to the east and west as a trading hub of the Ottoman Empire shaped its cosmopolitan nature, today, in an era of global labour migration and the uneven geography of cheap consumer goods, there is a fear of pollution from the ‘East’ (p. 185; also see chapter on Tbilisi). Betraying the limits of tolerance in an uneven geography of global capital, these dynamics suggest the need to interrogate a potential underlying eurocentrism of cosmopolitanism.

In these cities, cosmopolitanism is a spectre haunting the present, emerging as myth (Odessa), discourse (Thessalonica), palimpsests (Tbilisi, Venice) or a novel (Tbilisi). Felt as something lost, cosmopolitanism evokes another time and other ways of living together at a moment in which urban diversity is seemingly marked largely by inequality and distance. The cases in which a cosmopolitan past is located in the built environment most clearly evince the loss posited by the book and the changing significance of a cosmopolitan past. In Tbilisi, a Zoroastrian temple now provides the foundation of a private residence, while in Venice, memories of the city's ‘openness’ and ‘multi-ethnic past … are now deeply buried in the recesses of the material structures of the city’ (p. 186). And though marginalized groups of Roma and Afghans in Odessa, whose skills at moving amongst groups, inter-ethnic marriages and ability to code switch, mark them as cosmopolitan, in general the authors affirm that cosmopolitanism tends to be the purview of bourgeois, secular citizens, excluding and exclusive of economically marginalized residents and religious expression (see especially the discussions of modernist architecture in Warsaw and of observant Jews in Odessa and Venice).

When close scrutiny is paid to the kinds of living together that takes place in diverse cities, one finds as many exclusions as inclusions, as much xenophobia as openness, inward orientations co-existing with outward orientations. The volume emphasizes these dimensions of cosmopolitanism, both within one space and time and across longer timespans. Hence, a ‘cosmopolitan city’ might also be the site for pogroms (Odessa) and intense national orientation (Thessalonica), while defining features of cosmopolitanism may have been more fragile than suggested by myth (Venice). Even in Odessa, generally agreed upon as a cosmopolitan city, ‘cosmopolitan relations were sporadic and historically specific … Such webs were dissimilar to one another, and formed distinctive situated patterns in the city … Whatever their form, they were always a “thread,” a skein of relations that co-existed with other, different and mutually exclusive relations’ (p. 45). Thus, cosmopolitanism itself emerges as an elusive aspiration, a typology that any given case cannot live up to in full. Writing about Thessalonica, Hatziprodkopiou suggests that ‘“cosmopolitanism” may be too vague a concept to account for present-day challenges and rapid social change’ (p. 211). The lingering question that remains is whether this might be true in general, not only under current circumstances.