Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities (Volume 2) (Culture of Cities)

The practice of comparison is implicit in every act of imagining, representing, and studying urban experience. Urban Enigmas contributes to recent interdisciplinary interest in cities by introducing comparison as a key methodology for urban cultural analysis. Cover Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Preface Introduction Part One: Practising Comparison 1 Comparing Cities: On the Mutual Honouring of Peculiarities 2 Comparing the Cultures of Cities: Epistemological Perspectives on the Concept of Metropolis from the Cultural Sciences 3 “To Squeeze a Single Sentence Out”: Estrangement and Disenchantment in Benjamin’s “Marseilles” Part Two: Fragmented Cities 4 The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi: Staging Polyphony in Montreal and Toronto 5 Imagine-Nation in the City: Seriocomedy and Local Democracy 6 Ethnicity, Social Organization, and Urban Space: A Comparison of Italians in Toronto and Montreal 7 At Home on the Street: Public Art in Montreal and Toronto Part Three: Global Narratives 8 Divergent Diversities: Pluralizing Toronto and Montreal 9 Reflexive Theorizing while Travelling through Montreal and Toronto: The Global Cities Discourse, New Urbanism, and the Travel Essays of Jan Morris Contributors, part of the collaborative research project The Culture of Cities: Montreal, Toronto, Dublin, and Berlin, address theoretical and methodological aspects of comparison, while case-studies examine the mutually constituted identities of Montreal and Toronto through examples of travel writing, public art, film festivals, theatrical performances, diasporic communities, ethnic festivals, and urban media. Comparison is shown to be not only something performed by experts but a deeply embedded, everyday social practice that contributes to the mutable identities of cities. Urban Enigmas demonstrates that the accumulation of urban actions, encounters, experiences, and relationships create distinctive patterns that make it possible to recognize the particularity of cities.