The Other Global City

Global cities are generally exclusively defined by flows of global capital. This narrow conception of global urbanity invalidates cities such as Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul which has been a global city for over fifteen centuries, Abbasid Baghdad that once was a global city for science, and Bombay which has long claimed to be a global city for cinema and the arts.

The present volume attempts to redress the balance. It contends that thinking about the city in the longue duree and as part of a network of regions, contests both imperial and nationalist ways of reading cities. In doing so, it looks at what recent literature overlooks, presents neglected counter-cartographies and foregrounds subaltern cosmopolitanisms. Chapters on Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut present counter-cartographies of cities that were as much Asiatic and African as European, while those on Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo highlight an alternative cosmopolitanism in Asian cities amid conflict and violence.In addition to the famous question, who has the right to the city, The Other Global City asks, do cities have rights? Seeking a way to re-imagine the global city, the present volume should be required reading for anthropologists, sociologists, urbanists and planners and will also be of interest to the general reader. Contents
List of Maps
List of Photographs
Prologue and Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Rereading Global Cities: Topographies of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism in Asia

SECTION I
Cosmopolitanism and the State
2. Beneficence and Difference: Ottoman Awaqaf and Other Subjects
3. Living Together in Lhasa: Ethnic Relations, Coercive Amity, and Subaltern Cosmopolitanism
4. Intelligent City: From Ethnic Governmentality to Ethnic Evolutionism

SECTION II
Cosmopolitanism Compromised/Denied
5. Impossible Cosmopolises: Dislocations and Relocations in Beirut and Delhi
6. Limiting Cosmopolitanism: Streetlife Little India, Kuala Lumpur
7. Invisibility and Cohabitation in Multiethnic Tokyo
SECTION III
Cosmopolitan Microprocesses
8. Cairo Cosmopolitan: Living Together through Communal Divide, Almost
9. Cosmopolitanism and the City: Interaction and Coexistence in Bukhara
Contributors
Index

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Author/Editor Details
Edited by: Shail Mayaram, Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi