The term “cosmopolis” refers to a combination of two Greek words, Κόσμος meaning “the world” or “the universe” and Πόλις meaning “city”. Thus, “cosmopolis” is the idea of a city that embodies the world while “cosmopolitan” is an inhabitant of the world city, a world citizen. “Universality” (what in its Latin origin literally means “all turned into one”) and “citizenship” (from Latin, “cives” and “civitas”, member of a state) are two key concepts for further investigation. Universal means to transgress borders and to embrace space, to turn the world into an integrated whole. Citizenship is to belong to a civilised urban space created artificially by humans (as opposed to Nature – is it possible to be a citizen of Nature? On the other hand – as would have been argued around 1700 in the early Enlightenment: Nature has given humans certain inviolable rights). Secondly, this quality implies certain privileges: to belong to a human community sharing and using the space defined – which in the case of the world citizen has to be understood as the planet as a whole. “Police” as a term developed from its Greek origin originally related to good urban governance. In the discourse of the German so-called “low Enlightenment”, “Polizeywissenschaften” were the sciences of how to create a well- ordered urban community, with sanitary rules, fire brigades, streetlights, regulations for trade and commerce. “Police” in our contemporary society is the expression for the resource used when inhabitants of our joint space (attempt to) break against approved rules as codified in law; it is also the body that offers assistance to theexecutive branches ofour juridical bodies. The term “cosmopolis” was first used in Greek philosophy: When the philosopher Diogenes (reportedly living in a barrel) was asked of his origin, he replied “I am a citizen of the world”. One of the most significant features of early Greek culture was independent city- states such as Athens or Sparta. And when imagining space larger than these delimited entities it only seems logical to assume that universal human order in the ideal case should be structured as a city, at least on the metaphorical level. Even to this day the pope salutes his believers with the phrase “Urbi et Orbi” – to the city (Rome) and the world. The utopian city adds another dimension to the idea of world citizenship. Perhaps most influential in a Western context is the idea of Jerusalem as the centre of the world (Ptolemaios’s famous world map vividly mirrors this conception) and the different claims made to represent its successor. Rome,Constantinople,Moscowall built their religious legacy on their presumed inheritance of


Diogene di Sinope


Jerusalem. In the spiritual sense previsions of “The New Jerusalem” are promises of a heavenly city governed by God and open to all mankind. For the development of utopian ideas, the metaphor of the city is a key element of imagination. Campanella’s “The City of the Sun”, Andrae’s Rosicrucian “Christianopolis” and Bacon’s “New Atlantis”: all are representations of an ideal human order with spiritual dimensions. When we look at the


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