Laboratories of Cultural Space: An Essay on Urban Multiculturalism

Joanna HAŃDEREK

Abstract

The present article is an attempt to analyze the space of culture characteristic of the modern city with the focus on the pressing issues related to its growing multiculturalism and interculturalism. The references to the past and presence of Amsterdam and New York, the cities that function as urban metaphors today, demonstrate that numerous phenomena experienced as generating social problems in modern cities are by no means new and may be actually traced back to their past: they result from the fact that the city is, and has always been, a space of social interactions and cultural transformations.

The mark of the contemporary situation is that many of the problems in question have become intensified, contributing to the opinion that we are witnessing either a cultural chaos or the advent of new cultural formations. Thus urban space, construed as a ‘laboratory of culture,’ whether in the literal or in the metaphorical sense of this phrase, provides a very good opportunity to analyze the current cultural and social transformations together with the attempts to control them on the part of both native inhabitants of big cities and immigrants.

Translated by Dorota Chabrajska