Abstract
What is it about the city of New York that makes it New York? Every city is constantly becoming, a combination of people, practices, and environments. May Joseph’s early 21st century New York is constituted through the ‘fluid urbanism’ of water, immigrants, and street culture. ‘Water, as a literal and metaphorical principle, is influencing how New York harnesses its maritime pasts to a once neglected, now persistent, reassessment of its water-bound boroughs.’ These flows extend throughout New York City’s archipelagic geography, with roots in the Dutch Empire, immigrant subjectivities, and streets of conflict and festival.
This is more than a general heterogeneity, it involves ‘metropolitanism’ in situated negotiation with a particular cosmopolitan citizenship. Joseph articulates metropolitanism as a sort of macro scale sense of the city to describe the infrastructural networks and practices of everyday life in today’s megacities. Yet anywhere metropolitanism exists its actual lived experience must involve a variety of different cultures within a single city. Life in multicultural New York entails cosmopolitan subject formation that Joseph describes as ‘at once a collision, a pragmatic transaction, and a performance of misreadings that together create a distinctive, evolving vernacular of living in a dense, urban environment.’ Though there are currently vast economic disparities, the politics of cosmopolitanism is ultimately a utopian project. It allows a sense of belonging and opens possibilities for ‘mutual respect and coexistence.’
New York is a particular combination of metropolitanism and cosmopolitanism, shaped by its geography of islands and continuing history of migration, cultures, and ecologies. The substantive portions of the book explore New York and its subject formations through the culture of the Lenape Native Americans, New Amsterdam’s minor role for the Dutch East India company, frugality as an aesthetic of everyday life, the Brooklyn [street] Carnival, river-swimming events, the highly classist development policies of Mayor Bloomberg, and the impact of Hurricane Sandy. Emphasized throughout are the geographical imaginations of migrants, ‘. . . the New York of a Gambian or Pakistani cabbie who has traversed the entrails of the city for two decades.’ Joseph herself was originally a migrant to New York, and her personal description of becoming a New Yorker rings true.
The book also offers two further points to human geographers. First, it reflects recent arguments about geographic scale as practice. Scale is not explicitly discussed, but the concept informs the interplay of metropolitanism and cosmopolitanism throughout. Second, the theoretical combination of metropolitan infrastructure and cosmopolitan culture Joseph develops may be useful to approaching cities less central to the cultural and urban geography literatures. This book focuses on New York, but Joseph’s fluid urbanism would be a powerful way to understand Singapore or Mumbai or Hong Kong.