Re-Working Cosmopolis in Post-Colonial Cities: The Cases of Kolkata and Buenos Aires

The paper questions how memories are re-signified through the making of space. However, we adopt a specular (yet not incompatible) approach to the usual concern with the construction of space through memories. The question concerns both the process of remaking space trough the elaboration of collective memories; and how places came to be a relevant part of cosmopolitan memories (Barthel-Bouchier and Min Hui 2007). Nobody questions in fact the powerful contribution that symbolic place gives to the construction of collective memory since Halbwachs. However, the re-imagining of an urban space through global concerns, and the rise of a cosmopolitan, collective memory of place is another matter. Whether this is the case or not, is matter of a broad investigation. Citizens deal with their built environment, and national history in many different ways. There are times and opportunities when the elaboration process coalesce. The pages that follow offer an initial exploration of the fate of two rather different cities (Calcutta, former capital of the British Raj in India; and Buenos Aires in Argentina). The cities share a contested colonial past, that produced in both cases a peculiar modernist lay-out; and a troubled development in the last decades. These cities were chosen because they have some features in common in the context of social and political changes brought about by globalization. The aim is to discuss a few general warnings about the hybrid nature of postcolonial cities  (Harris 2008), which are inspirational cases for reconsidering hybridity among the general qualities of the present era (Canclini 1989). Asian and South American cities do are often considered precisely because they do not fit into the role model of capital accumulation in the process of modernization, and even less so in neoliberal times.