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Cosmopolitanism is a concept that is commonly attributed frequent travellers. However this concept has received little scrutiny in anthropology. Available literatures have divers opinions on expatriates' openness to cultural diversity (cultural cosmopolitans; soft cosmopolitans and metropolitan locals, etc.), but most of them stay at the conceptual level without ethnographic description to substantiate these claims. This thesis participates in this discussion by providing ethnography on professional expatriates' grounded cosmopolitanism in food consumption in Polanquito, a showcase of global gastronomy in the expatriate community in Mexico City. By bringing to light a slice of cosmopolitanism in expatriates' everyday life, I highlight two mechanisms that are at work—imaginaries and cultural capital accumulation at transnational spaces. I argues that represented foodway (transnational cosmopolitanism) and original ones are two different experiences that are likely to be conflated in the globalization discourse.

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The question which is the core interest of this thesis is how the super-diversity, produced as a result of intense immigration, is influencing the urban environment in terms of aesthetics and symbolics of public space. I try to analyse this issue by taking a closer look at streetscapes of Brussels, and more precisely - one of its most culturally diverse municipalities - Schaarbeek. Do migrants transfer their vernacular landscapes to their new country of residence? What relevance does it have for them and for the host society? Finally, is the presence of foreign cultural manifestations in the public space a measure of success of the politics of multiculturalism? These are the kind of questions that my research is trying to answer.