Variations on the Virtues of the Nearby City
The goal of this purposely controversial essay is to examine the contemporary metropolis with an eye to reconciling urban fragmentation and social links. In the process, it vigorously defends the nearby city, adopting as a starting point the partnership between proximity and distance so important to Simmel. In fact, cultural differences, which are at the heart of the paradigm of our contemporary society, provide a certain number of challenges that the social transaction theory (an outgrowth of this Simmelian tradition) seems able to address: how to make compromises of coexistence when irreconcilable values are involved? But the nearby city also refers to a strategic scale in the construction of coexistence in the cosmopolitan city, which, in turn, leads to a specific interpretation, most notably as concerns the development of religious premises in the Montreal region.