Rezensionen 375 Günther H. Lenz, Friedrich Ulfers and Antje Dallmann (eds.), Toward a New Metropolitanism. Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginary in New York and Berlin (American Studies - A Monograph Series 142). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006. Petra Eckhard New York is and is not America. Berlin is and is not Germany. The city of (post-)modernity, so it seems, can only be defined in highly ambivalent terms, especially when it comes to its relation to the nation state. Due to recent processes of transformation, evoked by greater phenomena such as globalization and postfordism, the “world city” (13) has become a much contested space in terms of citizenship, social relations and the cultural imagination. These issues have prompted Lenz, Ulfers, and Dallman to investigate and compare two metropolitan cityscapes - New York and Berlin - which share the aspects of transnationality and cultural plurality on the one hand but which are, at the same time, highly distinct in terms of political and economic power structures. Many of the essays in Toward a New Metropolitanism originated in two multidisciplinary conferences which took place in New York and Berlin in 2000. Although the volume clearly shows that it is a product of the currently dominant ‘Berlin School’, the editors, by using international voices from various academic fields, succeed in presenting a multilayered account of two “exemplary loc[i] of cosmopolitanism” (18), thus echoing the variety of the debate. Using Thomas Bender’s concept of a “new metropolitanism” (53), the study approaches the two cities by analyzing what takes place within them at the turn of the millennium. The main argument centers on the emergence of a translocal form of urbanity that neglects homogenous urban communities (as brought forth, for example, by the principles of New Urbanism) and instead embraces a “new politics of difference” (15) that has the potential to recreate cultural and social heterogeneity. According to the editors, this new tendency, heavily discussed in European and American urban studies, calls for a “semantic reconfiguration of urban space” (23). At this point, it has to be noted, however, that Bender’s notion of a ‘metropolitanism’ is not totally new. Already at the beginning of the 20 th century sociologists such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel approached the (European) metropolis as a place of social differentiation and individual freedom. Two decades later, the ethnographic studies of Robert E. Park and Louis Wirth, both representatives of the famous Chicago School of Urban Sociology, also looked at the metropolis as a culturally heterogeneous space in which the self-conception of the urban individual represented a vital component for any objective sociological analysis. So what is it that constitutes the ‘newness’ of the contemporary metropolitan discussion? Bender’s programmatic essay “The New Metropolitanism and a Pluralized Public” provides us with an answer. Whereas in the early 20 th century the city was investigated sociologically as a definite and aggregate structure, divided into a city centre and its periphery, Bender advocates a “metropolitan regionalism” (54) that lies AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 376 beyond any social or spatial boundaries. Shifting the attention away from dichotomous understandings of the city, away from “the binary language of center/ periphery, city/ suburb, rich/ poor” (59), Bender envisions a city consisting of many different local publics which could make the metropolitan experience “far more cosmopolitan, even more egalitarian” (ibid.). However, Bender’s optimistic vision of a democratic life enabled by local public spaces is highly endangered by the effects that capitalism has had on the contemporary city. In the first essay of the volume, Richard Sennett convincingly illustrates that our flexible postfordist economy is gradually producing superficiality, not only in the city’s visual appearance but also in the urbanites themselves. The standardized and soulless architecture of office buildings and high-street chain stores, such as Niketown or Starbucks, as well as short-term labor conditions make it difficult and sometimes even impossible for urban subjects to get personally involved with the public sphere, and thus “creat[e] a regime of superficial and disengaged relations in the city” (46). Unfortunately, in his broad sketch of problems Sennett refrains from proposing possible solutions and merely concludes with the fact that capitalism “imposes on us a specific task: creating complexity and mutual attachment in a city […] in which people withdraw behind the walls of difference” (51). The contribution by Margit Mayer is also an attempt to highlight the difficulties of realizing a democratic urban landscape in socioeconomic terms. Looking at the cityscape of Berlin, Mayer argues that even so many years after the fall of the Wall, the city is still strongly marked by social dividing lines and therefore can no longer be seen as an antithesis to the polarized American metropolis. The fact that East and West are only unified in spatial terms does not only become evident in demographic statistics but also in the mental distance that especially Westerners have maintained. “What begins behind Alexanderplatz”, Mayer writes, “for them is not Friedrichshain, but terra incognita” (172). Another “line of division” (171) is one of socioeconomic interest. By creating new centers of tourist attraction and wealth in close proximity to low-income neighborhoods, for example, the public domain becomes more and more restricted to financially strong customers, thus antagonizing any form of a pluralized public. Ironically, the attempts of German politicians and urban planners to stop the “creeping Americanization” (179) are not expected to lead to an attractive inner city along the lines of a “new metropolitanism” (53). For example, the Planwerk Berlin was supposed to upgrade the inner city; but instead of raising the social housing funds the project realized the building of unaffordable luxury apartments that do not even attract high-income city-dwellers. Thus, concentrations of poverty are enforced and new social barriers implemented. The third part of the volume, opening with Rolf Linder’s “The Imaginary of the City”, radically shifts attention away from a political and socio-economic discussion and opens up the less rigid dimension of the city of the mind(s). Drawing on Henry Lefebvre’s point of view, namely that “space is lived and experienced by way of the accompanying pictures and symbols” (210), Lindner argues that a city’s character should be determined along the lines of its cultural representations and their meanings: A city is not a neutral container which can be arbitrarily filled, but a historically saturated, culturally coded space already stuffed with meanings and mental images. It is these meanings and images which determine what is ‘thinkable’ Rezensionen 377 and ‘unthinkable’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’, ‘possible and impossible.’ (ibid.) Thus, for Lindner urban space is first and foremost anthropological space, space created, experienced and imagined by urbanites. In this context, Friedrich Ulfers’ essay deals with maybe the most visual of New York’s “culturally [en]coded” (210) places: Times Square. Although some readers might at first gain the impression of being swamped with postmodern theory, Ulfers’ deconstructive approach leads to an interesting perspective. Following Derrida, he argues that the transformation of Times Square from a theatre district (i.e. a local public) into a chaotic neon landscape of illusion (i.e. a simulacrum) produced a certain “spectrality” (255). The spectral quality that is attached to Times Square, Ulfers argues, lies in the “the scrambling [of] the clear-cut opposition of sign and message” (256). Ulfers connects the Derridean logic of spectrality to the postmodern urban condition which, echoing Edward Soja’s idea of a “Thirdspace” (254), is one “that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances and meanings” (253). A similar thematic territory, one that is by all means easier to approach, is entered by Wolfgang Kaschuba. In “Nowherelands and Residences: Recodifying Public Space in Berlin,” he reasons that due to recent political and social transformations, many public spaces of Berlin have extended and/ or changed their symbolic content. “Berlin today”, Kaschuba writes, “can be read as a spatial ‘disorder,’ confined in different texts with different meanings, coexisting without clear hierarchy” (237). The Brandenburger Tor, for example, has become a site that today fuses many different meanings. No longer only a national symbol of division and reunification, the gate has been transformed into a highly diverse platform for various urbanite interests. It is the dance floor for thousands of techno-fans during the Love Parade, the colorful market place of souvenir vendors, the venue of the central Millennium party but also the meeting point for hundreds of neo-Nazis demonstrating against the Holocaust memorial. According to Kaschuba, this “re-writ[ing]” (237) of public space shows that the city is lacking “a nucleus of shared interpretations and legitimizations of urban and local identity” (237). The city has not established a cultural consensus yet; however, Kaschuba argues that despite - or because of - this fact there is much potential to “recodify” (241) Berlin’s public landscape and infuse it with new symbolic meanings. The last focus of the volume lies on the “re-imagining [of] the cultural Metropolis” (269) and, in particular, on how the idea of cultural hybridity in the metropolis has been translated into the literary discourse. Günther H. Lenz’ essay, for example, deals with migratory fiction of the 1990s and thus provides insight into contemporary literary representations of “ethniCities” (399). The works he discusses differ considerably from traditional immigrant fiction because they “have asserted their own ‘agency’ and ‘voice’ in new modes of intercultural translations of a ‘(post-)metropolitan imagination’” (405). Iva Pekárková’s Gimme the Money (1996), for example, centers on the life of a young Czechoslovakian woman who, working as a cab driver in New York, struggles to come to terms with “manifold contacts, clashes, miscommunications, and exchanges between migrants” (424) and at the same time tries to develop her own “hybrid identit[y]” (425). Lenz’ convincing examples extend the traditional minority discourse of separation and assimilation because they annihilate fixed categories of Rezensionen 378 race and thus “pursue the ever new processes of intercultural, transnational interactions as radical divisions of the meaning(s) of America” (448). All in all, this collection of papers gives new impetus and enriches the field of contemporary urban studies as it investigates two cities from the viewpoint of social sciences, including (cultural) history, sociology, politics, literature and other media. Due to the volume’s pluralistic character, the methodological and thematic focusing has been neglected; however, the (post-)metropolis seems to reveal most of its secrets when being discussed in a disparate manner. By surmounting the aglossia between New York and Berlin, the editors have succeeded in presenting a valuable study that, also on a meta-level, contributes to Bender’s optimistic vision of a “new metropolitanism.” (53) Petra Eckhard Department of American Studies Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria