Cosmopolitan Identity and Individual Identity in Multicultural Cities

A resident of Bengaluru might start the morning with filter coffee bought from a Tamil-speaking vendor, take a cab driven by someone from Bihar, and end the evening at a restaurant run by a Coorgi family. None of these interactions connect to any single inherited identity, yet together they shape how that person experiences the city. Anthropologists call this layered, borrowed, constantly shifting sense of self a cosmopolitan identity. Understanding how individuals negotiate it within multi-ethnic and multicultural cities reveals as much about power, inequality, and exclusion as it does about connection and diversity.

What makes an identity cosmopolitan 🔗

Global cities give their inhabitants room to negotiate identities that go beyond national character. This cosmopolitan identity is not inherited or fixed. It is experiential, built through direct exposure to alternative lifestyles inside multicultural, multi-ethnic territories. Sociologist Peter Berger used New York City as the clearest example of this kind of global city, describing it as a place whose sheer diversity and universalism let people feel a genuine sense of freedom that transcends narrower, bounded identities.

This cosmopolitan disposition is not just about exposure to difference. It carries a value system, one built around peace, humanity, freedom, liberty, justice, equality, and rights. Cities that cultivate this disposition tend to see a stronger commitment to building bonds between communities usually labelled “majority” and “minority,” grounded in mutual respect for each other’s cultural practices, festivals, and everyday ways of living.

World culture: the organisation of diversity 🔗

Anthropologist Ulf Hannerz offered a useful reframing of cosmopolitanism. Rather than describing it as a force that flattens cultures into sameness, he called it a form of world culture, one built on the organisation of diversity rather than the replication of uniformity. This world culture increases the interconnectedness of local cultures without erasing what makes them distinct, and it also includes cultural forms that are not anchored to any single territory at all, such as diasporic cuisines, transnational fashion, or online subcultures.

Belonging without inheritance 🔗

World culture lets people relate to this web of interconnected diversity in different ways. A young professional in Mumbai with no personal connection to Korean culture can still build a genuine sense of belonging within a local K-pop fan community. This is different from how global multiculturalism is often imagined, where distinct ethnic boundaries are emphasised and defended. World culture, by contrast, leans into fluid interconnectedness across territories and communities rather than boundary-keeping.

Negotiating the personal and the social self 🔗

Individual identity inside a global city is rarely settled. It is the product of a regular, almost daily negotiation between one’s ethnic, racial, and gendered identity and the cosmopolitan identity shared with wider social groups in the city. For immigrant populations, this negotiation carries an added layer, a constant back-and-forth between the imprints of a new land and a remembered homeland.

This negotiation is not always gradual. Anthropologist Michel Laguerre observed that during cultural holidays, individuals may step away from their everyday urban identity almost entirely and become exclusively part of their ethnic identity for the duration of the celebration. A Malayali family in Delhi observing Onam, or a Bengali community in Mumbai during Durga Puja, may spend those days deeply immersed in language, ritual, and food specific to their community, only to return to their broader, more cosmopolitan urban routine once the festival ends.

This fluid movement between personal and social identity is exactly what sustains multiculturalism within urban spaces. People are not choosing one identity over another permanently. They are picking up temporary identities as they interact, again and again, with the many communities that share their city.

When pluralism becomes contested 🔗

Multicultural and multi-ethnic societies do not stay conflict-free simply because diverse groups occupy the same city. One recurring challenge comes from how inhabitants get categorised, often into dominant locals, marginalised ethnic communities, and trans-nationals who move through the city without fully settling into any single group. Critics argue that multiculturalism, treated this way, becomes a divisive concept. Instead of easing tension, it can favour one community over another, fuel competition, and harden ethnic differences that might otherwise have stayed fluid, essentialising identities and limiting how individuals define themselves.

Political theorist Will Kymlicka pushed this critique further, arguing that multiculturalism as a term is genuinely ambiguous. He traced it back to two separate ideas, multi-nationalism and poly-ethnicity, which represent very different social realities. One describes immigration and the coexistence of communities that share a political unit without necessarily mingling; the other describes distinct national groups incorporated into a larger state. These are meaningfully different situations, yet minority rights policy frameworks often fail to reflect that nuance, treating all forms of cultural difference as if they were the same problem with the same solution.

The other side of the cosmopolitan city: social and spatial polarisation 🔗

Sociologist Saskia Sassen raised a pointed concern about the underside of global city life: growing social polarisation driven by widening income disparities within urban households. As welfare structures have weakened in many world cities, homelessness among ethnic minorities has climbed in step. Rapid urbanisation, paired with economic development models that favour capital-intensive, high-skill industries, tends to reward one urban class while systematically excluding another, widening the gap between social elites and marginalised ethnic groups.

This is visible in Indian cities too. Premium residential zones in cities like Gurugram and Pune have seen property values climb sharply, while low-income groups nearby face rising rents and housing exclusion. The result is a form of social fragmentation where aesthetically polished, high-rise neighbourhoods sit a short distance from stagnant, poorly serviced urban pockets that house the very workforce keeping the city running.

Urban backwaters and their necessity 🔗

These poorly serviced pockets are not accidental. Urban planning scholar Klaus Kunzmann described them as urban backwaters, established, whether deliberately or through neglect, to meet the needs of urban elites. They exist in substandard conditions because those conditions suit low-cost industrial and service operations that a global city’s economy quietly depends on. Minority communities and working-class residents sustain these backwaters, often at minimum wage, doing the construction, domestic, delivery, and manufacturing work a city cannot function without.

The Kapashera settlement on the Delhi-Gurugram border is a clear illustration. It houses tens of thousands of migrant workers, many from Bihar, who supply low-cost labour to the industrial and service economy of the National Capital Region, while living in conditions that fall well outside the city’s polished, cosmopolitan self-image. Research on Indian cities more broadly shows that a substantial share of the urban population lives in similarly informal, marginalised settlements linked directly to this pattern of labour migration, and that migrant workers themselves face a layered exclusion from welfare protections, stable wages, and political voice even as their labour sustains the city’s growth.

Despite functioning as what Kunzmann called a black spot on a global city’s image, these backwaters are structurally necessary for how such cities operate. The relationship between spatial polarisation and urban backwaters exposes the inequality embedded within multicultural cities and complicates the idealised picture of pluralistic harmony that cosmopolitan branding tends to sell.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Can a city genuinely call itself cosmopolitan while entire communities remain confined to its backwaters, doing the low-wage work that keeps its cosmopolitan image running? And where would you draw the line between celebrating a city’s multiple identities and quietly relying on some of those identities to stay marginal for the city to function at all?

References

1. https://www.commentary.org/articles/peter-berger/in-praise-of-new-york/
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/cosmopolitan-social-group
3. https://uregina.ca/~gingrich/k1.htm
4. https://www.cepal.org/sites/default/files/presentations/ponenciasaskiasassen_0.pdf
5. https://vishnuias.com/urban-inequality-india-urban-rural-disparities/
6. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.13313
7. https://www.theindiaforum.in/economy/indias-migrants-and-exclusion-design