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. * Urban History
In their new book, Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja have excelled in building a ...magnificent world of cultural identities without ends. The authors and editors offer a compelling exploration of the multilayered ideas about what makes usand themin six cities: Odessa, Tbilisi, Warsaw, Venice, Thessalonica, and Dushanbe...Humphrey and Skvirskaja take the deeper, anthropological, microscopic view of the everyday experiences of people. And in this they do an excellent job. * Slavic Review
Taken together, these [chapters] individually offer valuable insights into the dynamics of urban co-existence (or lack thereof)...[and] reveal that cosmopolitanism's definitions and meanings only exist in the plural, that the formation of cosmopolitan ideas and communities is inevitably contingent and place-specific, and that the forces preaching exclusion and intolerance are often at least as powerful as those promoting cultural acceptance in a rapidly globalising world... a useful text for courses concerned with globalisation and urbanism. * Urban Studies
This volume captures the spirit [of the renewed interest in the city] well and delivers a lively set of essays. Here, the shift away from the usual story about immigration and how to cope with it takes us, instead, to a widely shared perception of the loss of diversity and shared lifestyle, often without regard for actual statistics on multi-ethnic urban populations. * Bruce Grant, New York University
