Summary and Concluding Thoughts

Abstract

The Charismatic City offers a metaphor (name) to emphasize the way the global city signifies through its charisma; through its materiality, eros, multiplicity, plurality, habits, excellences, and dense and pulsating connectivity; and through a contact between the Secular City and the Sacred City. It also suggests the way the global city itself can be multisensorous, as though the city were touching its inhabitants with its own five senses: I term this synaesthetic effervescence. Finally, to think of global city as charismatic acknowledges the effect of a global city as locus for regenerating awe, biophilia, divine-human relationships, the elemental commons of charged social flesh, and the effect of the open-sourced circulation of spiritual energies among its different local communities, all of which mark it with their presence, potentiality, and playfulness. The metaphor (name) is meant to suggest pentecostally (or polemically) that the global city may be thought of as extraordinary, conductive, and capable of mobilizing, exalting, and transmitting emotions to its residents, like charisma or like a congeries of sacred sites of concentrated divine presence.¹