Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait. John Western.

Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Foreword by L. Wacquant. xviii and 277 pp., map, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $119.95 cloth (ISBN 9781409443711); $70.49 electronic (ISBN 9781409443728).

John Western's opus weaves together a rich trove of 160 in-depth interviews, conducted over seven years, of Strasburgers of all ages, origins, and classes, to offer a view of what has happened in Europe over the last, troubled century, through the lens of the emblematic city that is Strasbourg and through the lens of its people's words. Western has gathered many stories, from the earliest memories of a German-born Alsatian of Strasbourg under Wilhelmine rule in 1909, to the most recent conversation, in 2011, with a local couple, respectively of Turkish and Moroccan origins. This ample time span, combined with a place-centered approach, allows Western to take us along on many personal wandering paths through social change and economic opportunities or difficulties, and chiefly through the vagaries of nationalism, binationalism, supranationalism, and transnationalism. Colorful, almost epic tales of Alsatian warriors (from opposing sides on European or colonial battlefields); silences; simple although often poignant stories of daily toil and social progress; joyful recollections of childhoods, travels, and homecomings, all weave together everyday life and paroxysmal events.

The book is ethnographic in method and profoundly empathetic by choice. Its tone is marked by a deep honesty, and sometimes more than a hint of mischievousness—on both interviewer and interviewees' sides. Through Western's use of open-ended questions, Strasburgers speak of what they deem important about their city and living in it, and of what they care about. The author rigorously and seamlessly structures the variegated stories, partly chronologically, partly by focusing on specific groups of individuals (e.g., ERASMUS students, Eurocrats, “invisible” or postcolonial migrants). We learn how these individuals relate to Strasbourg, and how other Strasburgers see them.

The richness of the material makes it difficult to summarize such a book. Suffice to say that it touches many different themes: the raw Alsatian trauma of nationalistic and linguistic polarization between France and Germany over the first half of the century (the past here is up close and personal, as well as infused with ambivalence); the economic growth of the Trente Glorieuses, once again understood through people's trajectories, their sojourning or settling in a city undergoing bourgeoi-ification, beautification, and Frenchification; the opening up of Strasbourg to a postcolonial, multicultural, even cosmopolitan way of being, be it in elite neighborhoods such as La Robertsau or in the banlieues of Neuhof and Hautepierre, as told by Pieds-Noirs evacuated from Algeria, by White missionaries, Afghan refugees, Turkish businessmen, or North African pioneering figures in local politics. Underlying all these themes is a constant interrogation of what it means to be a Strasburger, an Alsatian, French, or European—to be all, some, even none of the above; of who identifies and is identified as such. The tapestry of narratives shows these shifting scales of identities at play, a deck of cards (often happily) mixed and constantly reordered.

This rather optimistic story, tinged with ambivalence and by the ghosts of tragedies past, constitutes a book of, by, and for the people of Strasbourg. Here is a book in which I, a French woman from a Germanophile family, could recognize not only the astonishing achievements of the European project that has built a solid peace over ruins, but also its current inability to address racial and social inequalities.

John Western's book Cosmopolitan Europe is a wonderfully rich empirical investigation of the city of Strasbourg, which simultaneously attempts to draw larger linkages to the transformations occurring in Europe as a whole. In this work he embraces a refreshing and unusual scholarly style based on the quotations and anecdotes drawn from 160 interviews with Strasbourg residents. The interview format, noted as “leaving the door ajar,” enabled informants to talk about anything that drew their attention or that they felt was important; as a result, the book covers a lot of territory and moves at an unhurried pace and in a seamless fashion through many of the critical issues and dilemmas facing modern Europe today.

The warmth and informality of the style is a benefit but in some ways also a limitation. It enables the author to indicate his connectedness to his informants, as well as directly showing both his and their emotional responses to various issues, including humor, rage, passion, and a deep, abiding love of the city. All too often these are exactly the kinds of feelings that exceed normative social science categories and are therefore carefully excised out of the finished scholarly product. In contrast, this book comes alive with the cacophony of everyday life; it embraces the antagonisms and contradictions of the city's inhabitants and their viewpoints, and it presents them as the compositional elements of a flawed but vital “self-portrait.” It is both a compelling and a comprehensive narrative. Yet the informality and self-deprecating nature of the author also constrains the narrative in some ways; for example, it is hard to bring an erudite quote or dense scholarly debate into a discussion when it is premised on “just” letting the people speak. Hence a lot of important critical scholarship that might shed light on similar themes and issues remains largely unaddressed. Further, the author's clear role in filtering and organizing the material is somewhat underplayed.

Two themes that are effectively deployed throughout the text are those of nationalism (as well as binationalism and transnationalism) and citizenship. Western examines the geographical location of Alsace, balanced perilously between two national powers with global ambitions, with a sensitive eye to the strains this has caused for many of the residents of the region. In a nuanced chapter, “War and Remembrance,” he solicits the multiple narratives of Alsatians through both world wars. This is where his technique of drawing forth the stories of the Strasburgers to paint a larger portrait of Europe works so well. The lived experiences and situated practices of these residents lets us know how place-making works through the actual presence and suffering of bodies in space—people who have friendships and enmities, and who “suffer for territory” in the words of Moore (2005). Western describes this territory from the bottom up in the sense of looking at how the meanings behind boundaries and borders are inscribed not just through political machinations and military maneuvers, but also through the lived experiences of those caught in between or on the wrong side of the tracks, the malgré-nous in earlier periods, or possibly the German-born or immigrants in later eras.

One of the most interesting findings here is the ways in which a particular kind of urban citizenship is formed for many diverse Strasbourg residents, even those caught “outside” the norm, through the cultural meanings that make sense and give pleasure to them. As Western notes, there is the “eminent Strasburger of Jewish extraction” who feels anchored to his Strasbourg identity by the beautiful cathedral, the “Muslim Strasburger” who is immensely proud of the Christkindelsmarik (Christmas Market) at the cathedral's edge, and many others who herald the sports teams, or an efficient transportation system such as the tram (p. 15). As with other distinctive cities with long histories and stunning architecture or geographical settings, many residents pledge allegiance not to the national or regional or even supranational scale, but rather to the city itself. Ultimately they are urban citizens—vastly differentiated in their origins, economic positions, and political views, but held together through a ferocious pride in their city.

Western pointedly pushes the themes of nationalism and citizenship forward to a contemporary look at transnationalism, especially the lives and lifestyles of immigrants and second-generation residents from North Africa and Turkey. His emphasis on the current issues affecting the city are most welcome, as he once again allows people to speak whatever is on their mind, and thus engages some of the critical but often silenced topics of race, employment, segregation, and religion that are of utmost importance in most European cities today. There are many wonderful nuggets of knowledge and opinion here, rendered vibrant through carefully selected quotes, and reflecting the views of diverse members of the urban population. Here I would have liked some more discussion of the specific ways in which immigrants have been incorporated into the economic life of the city. Although individuals are described with respect to their employment (or lack thereof), it is sometimes hard to get a sense of the larger political economy in which they are imbricated. For example, are there ethnic networks through which specific kinds of jobs are found or along which certain kinds of commodities travel? By way of comparison, in the case of Marseille, particularist ethnic ties to the greater Mediterranean regional economies have been important for both the urban economy and the formation of a kind of cosmopolitan tolerance that has positively affected ethnic relations in recent years (Mitchell 2011).

A final area that was touched on but might be developed further is the role of youth in the city's “self-portrait.” In most cases here, young people are narrated through the words of the older generations but rarely get to tell their own stories. The depiction of the city, and what gives it its strong and idiosyncratic identity, is told by adults, for adults. There's clearly a growing generational divide that Western gently probes, but because of the focus on the stories of adult informants, it is hard to grasp exactly what constitutes it. There is more here worth pursuing, encompassing the lives and urban imaginings of the young. Given the fabulous information that is incorporated in this book, coupled with Western's clear love of the city, perhaps he could be persuaded to write a companion volume for his next chef-d'œuvre!

Cosmopolitan Europe is a rich and original piece of work in that it offers a narrative of the city. By way of various portraits of individuals, places, and personal trajectories, the author is not only able to evoke individual realities, but he also gives us a general overview of the city as a total experience, as a society, and as an urban organization. The portrait of the city emerges over the course of these accounts that little by little give solid substance to this unique city.

The structure of the book is stimulating. It differs from classic works of social science whereby a casual reading normally carries you from introduction to conclusion and sometimes allows the lazy reader to go straight to what is most important. If you want to have a thorough grasp of this particular book, however, you have to take the time to plunge into the story and into the various complex life trajectories that make up Strasbourg. The city is thus built up via the kind of sedimentation that is illustrated by French geographer-historian Roncayolo's (1990) axiom: “the city, like time crystallized.”

With Strasbourg as a starting point, John Western speaks to us about French cities and about French society in particular, especially in relation to immigration, which is, as Western demonstrates, one of the major dynamics contributing to the transformation of the big cities within the hexagon over the past twenty years. He is also speaking in a more fundamental way about other European cities. One of the main purposes of this book is to deliver an understanding of this particular city through the depth of its European history, situated as it is at the frontier of two national territories and also within the dynamics of the European structure. Strasbourg from this point of view is a city that is representative but at the same time is very specific because the transnational elite—specifically the Eurocrats—and the transnational working class all come together there, all of them coming from various horizons. This explains why this book is likewise a book about identity—identities inherited as well as identities under construction.

Western is thus describing a cosmopolitan city, if one sees cosmopolitan as being a mixture of multiple identities along with the feeling of being a citizen of the world beyond borders. He also reveals a multicultural city where various cultures live side by side, and one of the questions raised by this book concerns the give and take between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in a French society, which has also been strongly marked by a culture of republicanism.

From this perspective, the question of language perhaps should have been explored further: Alsatian, the local language, as a point of attachment and often one of closing off with regard to outsiders; French, the national language; English, the language of the Eurocrats; Turkish as a language of transmission and community affirmation; and so on, so many identity models, both opening and closing off.

Furthermore, if we change the level of the analysis, and if we turn our attention to Strasbourg as a central city that dominates a much larger territory, what we see is that the Front National party won about 23 percent of the vote during the presidential elections of 2012 all across the departments of Haut Rhin, whereas the party only took in 11.86 percent in Strasbourg itself. The central city is seen both as a privileged and inaccessible area that certain working classes are forced to leave because real estate prices are so high and at the same time is seen as a threat to the “old” Alsatians living in rural villages. A cosmopolitan and inclusive city, perhaps, but on what level?

The author has made the commitment to not—or nearly not—turn to academic references. By doing it this way he allows us, for example, to see that the center of the city has undergone a process of gentrification without exploring the concept, as an urban sociologist would do while walking through the city. This decision would be completely defensible because the categories, if we can take them beyond the singular, can also be traps that tend to impose frameworks of thought by way of generalizations. Western, however, does manage to lessen his commitment in the final chapter when, by calling on the works of Loïc Wacquant, he takes the position that French distressed neighborhoods cannot be likened to American ghettos, or when he refers only to the works of American researchers like Elijah Anderson on Philadelphia or William Julius Wilson. Certainly working-class areas in Strasbourg are not black ghettos in the United States, but that is a statement that is a long way from really addressing or exhausting a complex and contradictory reality. Using analyses developed by young French researchers who, coming along after the work of Sayad (1999), have been working on the place and role of immigration in France, on racial discrimination, and on postcolonialism—questions that are major issues in French “suburbs” and metropolitan areas—would have helped to go beyond this evidence. Even if, as demonstrated by Western, the trajectories of young people coming from immigrant families confirm the idea that although it might be possible to escape French social housing areas, the existence of the glass ceiling for “visible minorities” and the rise of Islamophobia nonetheless contribute to shoring up opposition that is racial and cultural at the same time. It helps to understand how Strasbourg can be an inclusive city where cars are so often burnt. Works on the working classes, like the work of Schwartz (2011), further go to show that French popular classes are caught in a dual mechanism of societal openings and closings that cannot be easily ignored in their urban day-to-day lives.

So we come to an understanding that the narrative that Western proposes is also the narrative of a personal journey and hence the ambiguity of the title itself: “A Strasbourg Self-Portrait”—self-portrait of the city or of the author? The way he looks at this city, which is related to the different voices collected here, offers greater sensitivity to the narrative and lets us discover the multitude of corresponding aspects of the city. Clearly, then, it is the author who is master of the narrative, in what he chooses to tell or not to tell, the collections he proposes, and the comparisons he evokes. From this perspective we would have liked to have known more about how he put it all together, because no point of view comes totally without any preconceptions, theoretical concepts, or social and urban experiences. This Anglo-Saxon look at a European city is so rich in fact precisely because it comes from the “eyes of the stranger.”

In conclusion, Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait is a great book. Let's hope it will soon be translated into French and that this narrative will therefore be made available for those who are the principal characters in it, for social science offers an interpretation of the world that cannot fully attain any sort of its efficiency unless it enters into the deliberations of precisely those who make the world go round.

John Western is a writer of books about places and the people who shape them. Outcast Cape Town (1981), A Passage to England: Barbadian Londoners Speak of Home (1992), and now, Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait, share some common characteristics. They are grounded and deeply field-centered, they are dialogical in the sense of being conversational with a sense of ongoing discovery in exchanges between the author and participants, they engage moral-cum-ethical issues around place and race, and they are profoundly, even viscerally, geographical. Locale is sensuous: sounds, sights, smells, emotions, and memory all matter and are part of the portrait being assembled. The books articulate a human geography as an accumulated everyday experience of place through time; they represent a genre of work that is sadly underdeveloped today.

They also have certain particularities. These research projects are deeply personal, and emotional struggles as well as intellectual undertakings. We sense the act of authorial labor in Western's books. We can imagine the emotional exhaustion of working with 160 individual respondents, some of them interviewed multiple times, with interviews largely in a second language. This is indeed a magnum opus. Western is also a visible author—even his young daughter makes a cameo appearance—and the reader knows he is invested in this project as a story that must be told, with ethical conundrums that are not easily resolved but must be engaged. The place, the people, and their interactions matter, and we are not surprised to learn that some of them are in transition from respondents to friends. Western is our visible companion on this journey of discovery through the social strata of Strasbourg. We might ask, on occasion, if this project is too personal. Do we see too much of the author? Or is the transparency of his presence simply making explicit what most other authors leave as implicit?

This is not a book that is naively empirical, depicting the minute details of so many biographies and everyday lives. Its conceptual framing, its “exoskeleton,” is apparent and consistently followed. Rather like Barbadian Londoners, identity, belonging, memory, and migration are important concepts shaping a grounded narrative. In an earlier outline, the text was to emphasize the status of neighbors, both historically on the Franco-German shatterbelt of Europe, and currently in terms of the juxtaposition of peoples and cultures in Strasbourg's neighborhoods and public spaces. I regret that the seminal heuristic of neighbors was not maintained in the final version, but this is a portrait, not an encyclopedia, and tough organizational decisions must be made. Western writes that he is quite deliberately writing from “the particular to the general” (p. 5). So what is the general? Here we find the truly big question that defines the widest parameter of this ambitious book: “is Europe melting or melding” (p. 3) in its social and cultural diversity? The pursuit of the big question in geographical research should always be encouraged, and there is an important lesson here for less ambitious authors, as the text is not satisfied to be a microstudy that does not contribute to broader themes, but rather projects “private troubles to public issues” as C. Wright Mills once wrote.

Western's books reveal a steady progression toward separation from other toilers in the professional discipline. So although this is a profoundly geographical text, it is a work that rarely engages professional geographers per se. The virtual absence of academic references is an author's choice, not a publisher's requirement. On the one hand this omission provides a creative and unencumbered space for reflection on the problem at hand, a countercurrent against an all-too-frequent tendency to overload research with very heavy citations, until the weight of these intellectual intermediaries closes down rather than opens up a research problem. On the other hand, there are lost opportunities in the decision not to seek other researchers to share the load. Western acknowledges, for example, the missing voices of the young minority men of the banlieues, the suburban housing estates, in his portrait. This surely provides an opening for other authors to assist. He does briefly acknowledge one contribution (p. 195), but more strategic use could have been made of other research to round out his own discussion.

One of the author's major achievements is his success in interviewing and giving voice to so many of Strasbourg's social strata, from old warriors, veterans from the 1914–1918 War, to younger Alsatians, Erasmus students, Eurocrats, and immigrants from outside Europe. We see in this strategy the incredible social and cultural complexity of many contemporary European and North American cities. We recognize, too, the multiple meanings of a city among such a diverse population. But a formidable challenge now appears. Is the book just the sum of its parts, or is there a leitmotif that will bring coherence and a higher level intellectual achievement to this giddy differentiation? In Western's books, the final chapter becomes very important in this regard—in passing I must acknowledge that the last chapter of Barbadian Londoners, “Islands and Insularities,” is one of the most evocative pieces of geographical writing I have read.

The management of cultural diversity, with Strasbourg now standing in as an exemplar of the new Europe, is one of the demanding challenges of urban policymakers this century, but it is an intellectual challenge as well. How does one bring so much diversity into a common intellectual project? That diversity, as this book shows so well, includes incomplete tasks of nation-building encompassing old minorities such as the Alsatians, as well as immigrants from inside and outside Europe. Then there are the separations of class and gender. A further division about which more might be said is the segmentation of the generations, emerging with such dire effects among youth in Europe today. One means to achieve intellectual coherence is to emphasize failures of integration in terms of social exclusion and racism, and the author's interviews effectively explore the complexity of these issues on the ground as they intersect with class, gender, and cultural characteristics—for example, the case of the Muslim councilor who describes himself as racist (p. 195); now there's an unexpected self-identification! Another path, less traveled in the book, is to consider what makes society possible, this “unstable alloy” as Loic Wacquant describes it in his foreword (p. xv), in the context of such diverse geographical experiences. Is peaceful coexistence (to take the most limited definition of society) achieved through the hopes in the labor market, through an educational meritocracy, through multicultural respect or at least tolerance, or through what Australians might call “a fair go” as an ideological commitment? Perhaps, moving forward, we might pay as much attention to what makes a diverse society functional and empowering as what makes it dysfunctional and sometimes fearful. But in the meanwhile we have Cosmopolitan Europe as a brilliant reflection on the reflections of Strasbourg residents of the geographical partialities that complicate any putative cosmopolitan project.

Capturing the essence of a city in words is no easy task. Descriptive histories can be informative, as can analyses of changes in the arrangement of people, places, and things. But cities are defined by more than events and patterns; as John Western's book attests, the attitudes, ideas, and experiences of urban dwellers matter as well. Grounded in an extraordinary range of interviews conducted over many years, Cosmopolitan Europe provides a remarkable portrayal of the city—one that offers nuance and insights that go well beyond the typical urban monograph.

The genius of the book lies not just in the range and depth of the interviews conducted by its author, but in the way Western tells the stories of his interviewees. He interweaves their stories with thoughtful observations of his own—extrapolating from his own background and experiences in a way that makes the book eminently readable. He also uses the stories of his interviewees to reflect on some of the major issues facing Europe today. In the process, the reader comes to understand not just how Strasbourg has developed over time, but what Strasbourg's story suggests for a Europe that has become increasingly multicultural, globalized, and politically integrated over the past half-century.

As a self-proclaimed portrait of Strasbourg (see the subtitle), it is not surprising that the book's greatest strength does not lie in any individual story or theme, but in the ensemble of elements that Western masterfully knits together. In my view one particular element, however, merits special attention: Western's repeated emphasis on the material character of the city. In the wake of intellectual trends that have fostered a growing emphasis on sociocultural understandings and political practices, the nature and importance of the tangible environment can easily be underplayed. Cosmopolitan Europe demonstrates what is lost in the process. The stories Western recounts show that Strasbourg's landscape plays a fundamental role in shaping the sense of place and civic pride of the city's inhabitants.

For all the positives, while reading the book I found myself wondering at times exactly what Cosmopolitan Europe was trying to convey. The prologue, for example, weaves between presenting Strasbourg as a city that is representative of the region in which it is situated—“an exemplar of Western European urban centers” (p. 6)—and as an exceptional case because of its location along the French-German border, its particular mix of inhabitants, and its international vocation within the European Union. The point, I suppose, is that it is in some respects representative and in others exceptional. Because Western often uses observations about Strasbourg to make grander statements about the larger European scene, however, some greater clarity on this point would have been useful.

The foregoing example is suggestive of Western's general tendency to avoid synthetic statements. Cosmopolitan Europe is full of insights and observations, but there is little effort to juxtapose one observation against another. As a result, it is difficult to distill from the study many take points beyond the few very general statements made in the last chapter of the book. A checklist of findings is clearly not warranted for a book that is more in the vein of an impressionist painting than an agency report. Yet as I read along I sometimes found myself thinking, “that's an interesting point,” and then “that's an interesting point,” and then “that's an interesting point”—but periodically wondering what I was to make of it all.

I would hope that those who are in a position to shape Strasbourg's development will read Cosmopolitan Europe and learn from it. The lessons they might learn, however, are not particularly clear. Even though a city like Strasbourg cannot, and should not, be reduced to a handful of easily digestible findings, what are some key insights that emerge from the study that could help those in a position to influence the city's development address some of the challenges suggested by Western's opus? Or to frame the issue in more conceptual terms, what key insights does the book provide that could be helpful in understanding the evolution of cities more generally? The purpose of the study is clearly not to provide policy prescriptions, but a greater emphasis on synthesis could have widened the volume's tangible and conceptual impact.

Reading Cosmopolitan Europe also raised methodological questions in my mind. The book is not a classic social science study, and a typical methods section could easily have derailed the tone Western adopts in the volume. But the reader is given little sense of how Western went about identifying his interviewees. In telling the stories of his interlocutors, Western sometimes explains how individual interviews came about, but I would have enjoyed learning more about the overall approach he took to identifying interview subjects, including why he could not or did not reach certain segments of the population (a point discussed briefly on p. 251).

Although one can always ask more of a book such as Cosmopolitan Europe, I want to conclude on a positive note, for I am convinced that readers of the volume will find it engaging and enlightening. By weaving together the words of the city's inhabitants with his own insights and experiences, Western has managed to produce a wonderfully readable account that will give readers a greater appreciation of the city of Strasbourg itself, and of the larger European context within which it is embedded. He has also crafted a methodologically interesting work—one that charts a new path for geographic research even as it raises questions about the role of the personality and demeanor of the researcher in the research process. Research methods courses usually focus on question development, survey strategies, and the like. Many of Cosmopolitan Europe's insights have less to do with the careful implementation of a particular research design, however, than with the exceptionally open, gentle, thoughtful, and undogmatic approach its author evidently took when interacting with research subjects. The book could be read, then, not just as a portrait of a city, but as an implicit challenge to the way we teach research methods.

There is a lot to like about this book. The materials reflecting on the specificity of Strasbourg and the surrounding region of Alsace, a region whose experience has obviously left an indelible imprint on the city, are fascinating. Of any French city Strasbourg is the one with the highest percentage Protestant, the highest percentage Jewish (after Paris) and—this was a surprise—the highest percentage Muslim populations. Based on what is said in the book, one suspects that the proportion of the population that is Turkish is also a record for a French city. Apart from that, and in virtue of periods when it was part of Germany, Alsace has always seemed less than French. It is the one part of the country where the state supports the teaching of religion in the schools. Alsatian was once common currency, although the language is now dying out. A sense of being neither French nor German along with the Frenchification policies of the French government during the 1930s nurtured a separatist movement. Regional tensions, albeit of a sharply weakened form, persist.

The other thing that particularly attracted my attention was the ethnographic materials on North Africans in the city. The impression one gets is that most of them are in Strasbourg but not of it. Ghettoization is not surprising. More surprising are the satellite dishes turned in the direction of the Middle East and the Maghreb, the annual trek home, typically to Morocco for this group, and marrying people from the particular areas from which they originally came. The ties are seemingly very strong.

The approach adopted by the author, however, is to try to keep social theory at a distance. This is a shame because the relevance to the thinking of people like Massey was very clear. Obviously one can't do without concepts, but some foregrounding of them would have been useful. The book addresses the question of particularity but one wonders what gets constructed as “particular” and why? And what gets filtered out? In addressing social division in Strasbourg there is a tendency to reduce it to race and the French–immigrant divide, which seemed to me a bit limiting. Strasbourg means many different things to many different people and one wonders if the theoretical grille the author had imposed, albeit without announcing it, did it justice.

More specifically, though, I was left to decipher what was meant by that key word in the title of the book, cosmopolitan. It is never unearthed, although there is a lot in the book that is suggestive. On the other hand, the book made me think about the issue, and that was a major provocation for which I am grateful. Again, the materials assembled here were extraordinarily useful in trying to think through this question.

Some of them imply that the cosmopolitan condition results from a simple juxtaposition of influences and peoples from around the world, although without some sort of melting pot effect, I think that that is a view, implicit as it might be, that one should reject. Strasbourg has also become much more open to influences from the rest of France: not just the homogenizing role of the French government, but also the effect of the evacuations to the rest of France subsequent to the outbreak of war in 1939—not least the subsequent effects of intermarriage. I think that this gets a bit closer to a defensible notion of cosmopolitanism, for it has always been in part a question of geographic scale: emancipation from the local however the latter might be defined. Subsequent to the establishment of the Council of Europe in the city, a group of people from diverse other countries have taken up residence in the city. These are the Eurocrats who form the basis for one of the chapters in the book and who, according to this definition, would be the most cosmopolitan of all the people interviewed.

In the Manifesto Marx connects the idea and practice of cosmopolitanism to the rise of capitalism and the creation of a world market; there is much in Western's study that confirms this claim. But, and without stepping outside a Marxist frame of analysis, more can be said. In particular I think that we need to see cosmopolitanism forming with reference to provinciality and vice versa; and both with respect to the social stratification that capitalism entails—a stratification based not merely on the distribution of a material product, but also a moral one: Who has distinction and who doesn't? If you don't, what do you do about it? Both, I would argue, are closely connected: Those who take the lion's share of the product also take the lion's share of what respect and recognition there is. Emphatically this is a social stratification that can't be reduced to questions of race or geographic origin.

In short, cosmopolitanism–provinciality is a false dichotomy but we need to show how and why that is. The Front National is provinciality incarnate, but isn't it in part a response to the liberal Paris media as well as to the struggles of the lower strata for a bigger share of the material and moral pie: a struggle that, given the structural barriers for mass upward mobility entailed by capital's social structure, turns cannibalistically into one for redistribution among the lower strata themselves? In this regard and to return to the immigrants: Coming from somewhere else does not mean that one is cosmopolitan. I was struck by Western's discussion of just what a segmented, turned-in-on-themselves existence the North Africans lead. But given their rejection by the host society, how surprising should that be? Likewise the cosmopolitanism of the Eurocrats forms itself with reference to the provincials of Strasbourg. Their isolation is not merely a result of the fact that they will soon be moving elsewhere. It is also a matter of identities formed in relation to others. They would not be seen dead mixing with the locals, who are, for them, provincial by definition.

More could be said on this, but I am grateful to Western for posing the question, if only implicitly. This, it seems to me, illustrates a major value of the book. It is chock full of all manner of observations and cross-referencing that, through the questions that they imply, open up rich possibilities for further inquiry. Books are always what you make of them, and there is a lot to be made of this one.

A word of thanks, first, to my five colleagues from three countries who voluntarily shouldered this work of critique, and especial thanks to Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, who brought us all together.

Katharyne Mitchell seems to speak for all the five reviewers when she writes that this book “comes alive with the cacophony of everyday life.” The liveliness springs from the ethnographic method that, although demanding, is a tremendously enjoyable mode of research. What you can get is rich, grounded, empirical stuff, so rich that Marie-Hélène Bacque offers that, unlike most scholarly studies, any perceptive-but-lazy reader can't skim the introduction plus the conclusion and then get an adequate handle on what the book is about. Rich, however, does not mean comprehensive; not all bases have been covered. I will have to return in a moment to try to address the absences in this work that she and the other reviewers tax me with.

“Locale is sensuous,” asserts David Ley. I could not agree more, and so would many of my Strasbourg informants: “I have the impression of making a journey into the centre of myself when I go into the Old City and see the cathedral and the riverfronts [quais]” (p. 88). Place, history, are indeed “upfront and personal” for the Alsatian who confided that contemplative thought to me. By contrast, other Strasburgers reveal rage, or passion, or distress—but then again, humor and joy—all adding up to, somehow, for most, a love of this fine city, an attachment that frequently seems stronger than that to their region or to their nation. The last, especially to older generations, can be a most ambivalent and fraught matter: France, or Germany?

All the reviewers note the intended paucity of academic apparatus in this study: just four footnotes, and just forty-five entries in the bibliography (and not all of these are scholarly). What are they to make of this? David Ley muses that although the author is so evidently one who loves being a geographer, has he not been easing away from academic geography per se for some while? I would choose not to push the point as strongly as that, and instead offer that I really wished to address an audience broader than that of my professional colleagues. I was trying to produce a refreshing and lively and accessible book, a city portrait that would be enjoyable for Strasburgers. They, as much as those who read this journal, are the intended audience—and thus it pleases me that the hope for a French translation is expressed in these critiques.

It's not just a question of style, however. All these reviewers note that I have chosen to keep “theory” at a distance. It is true I don't explicitly “do” theory. Or should I say, I'm not generally drawn to an engagement with theoretical debates. The reviewers point out that of course there is theory in here, and it's not particularly deeply buried. “Is Europe melting or melding?” is the fundamental question I pose—so, clearly, in this Strasbourg crucible, there has to be some weighing of the claims of French Republican assimilation and integration versus multiculturalism versus cosmopolitanism (interrogate that last word, demands Kevin Cox), and some attention to the complex imbrications of “identities inherited” with “identities under construction” (as Marie-Hélène Bacque so neatly phrases it).

Yet there is a bullet here that I cannot dodge. All five reviewers in their different ways tell me, simply put, there's stuff missing. This author, they complain, does not, for example, give us enough on the disaffected young men, mainly of recent immigrant and Islamic origin, who live lives of un- or underemployment in the stigmatized banlieues. Not surprisingly, in that she is a French urbanist, it is Bacque who can specifically point me to sources I have not read (Sayad, Schwartz) and tells me of debates of which I am unaware, debates that could go a little further toward any explanation of the paradox “how Strasbourg can be an inclusive city where cars are so often burnt.” It is evident that Mitchell also stands very ready, with her deep association with Marseille, to send me to much illuminating critical scholarship on French urbanism—and to send me back to do more ethnography with those young men! Still, Professor Bacque does get what I'm up to in this study in that she notes that this portrait has citizens telling me about central-city gentrification although I choose not to really explore the concept itself; and then she says she finds this “completely defensible” in that I am trying to escape scholarly frameworks that might be limiting.

Yet again, the “portrait” mode can nevertheless be a little frustrating. I'm trying to be comprehensive, yet practical constraints mean that between 2004 and 2011 I was able to choose just eighty men and eighty women to tell me of a very complex (and ever-changing, over those eight years) city of let's say 400,000 souls. Furthermore, this is not exactly a contemporary portrait, but one that through the memory of the oldest interviewees reaches back a hundred years. As William Faulkner said of the South, “The past is never dead. It isn't even past.” This is reverberatingly true in Strasbourg, where too much has happened over the last century.

Because there is so much variation in information and among informants, there's a strong tendency—which I as author tried hard to keep in check—toward the kaleidoscopic. Thus Alec Murphy encounters one interesting point after another, but wonders exactly where it is leading him. Kevin Cox hones in on one of the fundamental terms of this study—the first word of the title—and requests some analysis of what this word might portend. He is particularly concerned, in parallel with others, of the Islamic persons of recent immigrant origin who have turned in on themselves culturally in the suburban cités. What kind of “cosmopolitanism” could this possibly be? Yet Cox, as with all the other reviewers with their various critiques, is nevertheless sympathetic to this study, as his final sentence reveals: “Books are always what you make of them, and there is a lot to be made of this one.”

Now I believe I am permitted to change gears, and move to rather a wider canvas. The discipline of geography is a big and capacious tent. I am exceedingly grateful for the liberty it, in its North American incarnation, has given me to pursue my own path at my own pace. (A close British university colleague told me that these days I would have been “dead in the water” there if, as with this book, I had published only one article after already doing three years' work on the topic.) Clearly my kind of human geography is about place and emotions, or let us say affect. I get at this through face-to-face encounters. “How has the city changed since you first knew it?”—that open-ended question is the basis of my ethnographic method. You could say that my first book, Outcast Cape Town (1981), was perhaps one third based on ethnographic responses; my second, A Passage to England (1992) about the Barbadian migrants to London, was shall we say two thirds so based. This one, at least ostensibly, is almost fully based on ethnographic responses. This is the way I love to do “scholarly research.” But why do I love this method so?

Were you to ask me to name my ten most admired scholarly works, some would possess what we used to take for granted as the academic virtues: clarity, reliability, lack of triviality, “unbiased” weighing of information, and a nonhyperbolic tone. You might imagine that, as I embarked as a doctoral student on human geographical research in apartheid South Africa, there were too many studies—this is a direct quote, but I shall not be so churlish as to specify which famous social scientist wrote these words—that shouted “White supremacy is busily digging its own grave.” I might be in political sympathy with those sentiments, but, come on, I thought, how could the rulers of South Africa be that stupid? And then, just before heading there for the first time, in May 1974 I read Modernizing Racial Domination by Adam (1971). He coolly peeled off layers of explanation—“So that's what they're up to,” I said to myself—and although, as revealed in his book's last sentence, it is clear where Adam stands on the beloved country's liberation, his voice is always calm and temperate. In the United States context, I think I would put Wilson's (1978) The Declining Significance of Race in a similar box: a work delivered in a well-modulated voice that changed the way I thought about these issues. Likewise that very finest of works, which held these two countries in the mirror to each other: Fredrickson's (1981) White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History.

My personality inclines me to, however, wear my heart a little more on my sleeve. As a beginner on the academic ladder from 1978 on, I tried to keep this properly in check with the Cape Town work; nevertheless Outcast did get termed “a factual sermon!” With tenure, I felt more free, and thus expressed myself quite feelingly in that final chapter of the London book to which David Ley alludes in his critique earlier. Now near the end of my career, I feel yet fewer constraints. Fortunately for me, the conventional wisdom of what social geographical research should look like has also changed over the elapsed decades. Expectations are less confined to a single, accepted, “proper” mode—we can be more catholic about what is acceptable and appropriate. Thereby, in Cosmopolitan Europe, as an author with emotions, I can choose to be pretty revealing of myself as I interact with fellow Strasburgers in their city with which I am more than a little smitten.

May I point out that I do not stand alone in this? The previous issue of the AAG Review of Books includes Anderson's (2012) The Cosmopolitan Canopy. Here is another urban ethnographer who loves a city—Philadelphia—and who is not afraid in his scholarly work to be up front about it. Or, consider one of those top ten scholarly books of mine, Passing the Time in Ballymenone by Glassie (1995). This is rural ethnography, in a world that has now disappeared in Northern Ireland. If, unlike me, Glassie the academic provides a mountain of footnotes and references, then like me he is profoundly invested in this work. If you wish to know my feelings about how one should conduct person-with-person research, read the last paragraph of Glassie's book: You will receive a blow to the heart.

One cannot be sure where the deepest foundation of a scholarly life might lie, although to deny family or home place or nation of origin would be idiotic. But I do know where this path of mine into ethnography began, and whom in particular I acknowledge. Robert Coles came to speak on the evening of 8 November 1973, in UCLA's Royce Hall. David Stea's graduate seminar had us reading Coles's (1971) The South Goes North, part three of the Children of Crisis (1967–1977) studies that had just won Coles the Pulitzer Prize. There on the podium Coles inspired, convincing me of what I already suspected: There was joy in person-to-person interviewing. He also insisted that the emotion, and sometimes poetry, that charges words and gestures might properly find itself onto the academic's printed page, and not be summarily dismissed as lacking in professional objectivity or as “journalistic.” Thus he propelled me toward the method I have used in all my major studies: Talk with the people about the places in which they live.

For a historian like Fussell (1975) in The Great War and Modern Memory (another of my top ten), for Glassie in Ballymenone (1995), and for Coles in so many fine and beautiful works, it's about the human condition. It's about pathos. That's what ethnographic human geography is about for me.