Abstract
This article traces the history of cosmopolitanism in Marseille as well some of the major aesthetic developments in its Vieux Port over the last century. I consider a series of moments from the Vichy government’s destruction of the Vieux Port in an effort to stamp out resistance during WWII, to the transformation of La Criée aux Poissons from a fish market to a theater in the 1970s, to the recent pedestrianization of the shoreline and the construction of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations. The Vieux Port’s aesthetic transformations have reflected prevailing sentiments about the meaning of Marseille’s past and its hope for the future. While the recent prevalence of cosmopolitanism in Marseille’s year as European Capital of Culture and its urban revitalization efforts is striking, the concept has been used as a narrative for the city’s revitalization since at least the 1970s. Whereas some have argued that the spaces of cosmopolitanism are hyper‐mobile, abstract non‐spaces, I argue that Marseille’s cosmopolitanism is historical and linked as much to spaces of immobility as spaces of mobility. Far from distancing itself from history and tradition, Marseille has incorporated its ancient past into a cosmopolitan culture‐led urban renewal project. Ethnographically examining pedestrian traffic around the port reveals that the spaces where people come to rest are as essential as the spaces of constant movement and flow in charting cosmopolitanism in the city.