Paper short abstract:

What makes a city cosmopolitan? This question is explored here in the very specific field of urban landscapes: I am documenting signs - from explicit icons to unintentional traces - that are visible in public spaces and that convey the feeling of a multicultural or cosmopolitan neighborhood.

Paper long abstract:

What makes a city cosmopolitan? I am exploring this question in the very specific field of urban landscapes: I am documenting signs - from explicit icons to unintentional traces - that are visible in public spaces and that convey the feeling of a multicultural or cosmopolitan neighborhood.

This empirical survey - an "excavation" of signs - is currently taking place in Brussels, but it is meant to be extended to other European cities. It is a spatial-based research, confined to small areas of the city: just a few streets in a transitional position between two neighborhoods with different socioeconomic and/or cultural profiles.

How are these territories marked? A graffiti, the unusual utilization made of a place, the board of an ethnic restaurant, what do they tell about their environment? And backwards: how do different aesthetics and lifestyles - namely the "ephemeral character of metropolitan life" - react and contribute to building the landscape of a city?

While inquiring on how the collected signs where produced and how they are now perceived, I am tackling several processes of identity production and (inter)cultural interaction; what can these processes reveal about urban creativity? Which is the link between cultural diversity, urban creativity and cosmopolitanism? And how are we to understand the difference between the folkloric "otherness" and the "cosmopolitan" one?

These fundamental issues are pointed out by the "archeological finds" themselves, the signs which I collected during the presented fieldwork.