Toward a New Metropolitanism

The volume explores the challenges posed by versions of a new metropolitanism and cosmopolitanism in the age of postfordism, globalization, and postmodernity in a comparative transatlantic perspective. It addresses the revisions of the value-laden contrasting notions of the 'European" and the 'American city," as they manifest themselves in two prominent, though in many ways different metropolitan cities - New York City and Berlin - that have played crucial, changing, but also 'atypical" roles in their respective societies throughout modernity and have a vital tradition of transnational, cosmopolitan urban culture. For the 1990s, a decade of deep social, political, and cultural transformations, they provide important case studies for pursuing the crucial questions of a redefinition and semantic reconfiguration of public spaces, of the topographies of power, of the visual order of urban design, of the social role of public culture, of the meanings of citizenship, of the politics of memory, of the new politics of cultural difference, and of the workings and visions of a new metropolitan cultural imaginary as articulated in new multi- and intercultural modes of the mass media and the literary strategies of 'new ethniCities" in urban fiction. The essays are by distinguished American and European scholars from a range of academic disciplines, written from different cross-cultural, comparative, and transdisciplinary perspectives.