Practice,Narrative and the`Multicultural City'

Abstract

Cities can basically be conceived of as encounters, as spatial formations resulting from dense networks of interaction, and as places of meeting with `the stranger'. In European cities these encounters, due to increased mobility and immigration, have increasingly taken the form of meetings between different cultures and modes of life. This article is concerned with the understanding of the `multicultural city'. It approaches the problem from the perspective of everyday life, from the popular construction of the city in practice and narrative. Urban everyday life, it assumes, is increasingly influenced by transnational relations, in the form of multiscalar practices and experiences, encounters between different cultures and different imaginations of the `multicultural' city. The article starts from a case-study in the city of Copenhagen, using qualitative in-depth interviews with different occupational groups to collect narratives on practices and imaginations of the contemporary city.Theoretically, the interpretation draws upon two streams of literature, on postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism respectively, and in particular two concepts — of `practical orientalism' and `affective cosmopolitanism' — are developed to grasp the everyday, banal and embodied character of the construction of the city.The article concludes on the different spatialities produced in these constructions.