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Intimate Metropolis

122
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Intimate Metropolis
Urban Subjects in the

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Modern City

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Edited by
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton
and Marina Lathouri

First published 2009

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

2009 Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri for selection and
editorial matter; individual chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to
the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any
legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Intimate metropolis: urban subjects in the modern city/edited by Vittoria Di
Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Architecture Human factors. 2. Domestic space. I. Di Palma,
Vittoria. II. Periton, Diana. III. Lathouri, Marina.
NA9053.H76I58 2008
720.1
03 dc22
ISBN 0-203-89005-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0415415063 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0415415071 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0203890051 (ebk)
ISBN13: 9780415415064 (hbk)
ISBN13: 9780415415071 (pbk)
ISBN13: 9780203890059 (ebk)

2008014906

122
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Contents

4
5
6
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10

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

vii
x

Intimate Metropolis: Introduction

Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri

522
6

Heads: Philip-Lorca diCorcia and the Paradox of

Urban Portraiture

20

Hugh Campbell

1
2

So the flneur goes for a walk in his room: Interior,

Arcade, Cinema, Metropolis

Charles Rice

Exhibitionism: John Soanes Model House

90

Private House, Public House: Victor Hortas Ubiquitous

Domesticity

Amy Catania Kulper

72

Helene Furjn

302
1

58

Kathryn Brown

41

A Space for the Imagination: Depicting Women Readers

in the Nineteenth-Century City

3
5

Diana Periton

7
8

Urban Life

Drawing and Dispute: The Strategies of the Berlin Block

110

132

Katharina Borsi

6
7

Collective Intimacies

153

Marina Lathouri

9
40

The necessity of the plan: Visions of Individuality and

City Is House and House Is City: Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom

and the Architecture of Homecoming

Karin Jaschke

175

Contents

10

Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity

195

Roy Kozlovsky
11

Pervasive Intimacy: The Unit dHabitation and Golden

Lane as Instruments of Postwar Domesticity

218

Christopher Hight
12

Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy

239

Vittoria Di Palma
Index

vi

271

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Notes on
Contributors

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Sue Barr (cover image) is a photographer and tutor at the Architectural

Association, London. Her work has been published in a wide variety of

522

books and journals. She is currently working on The Architecture of Transit:

An International History of Motorway Architecture and Engineering. See

www.heathcotebarr.eu.

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9

Katharina Borsi teaches Urban Design at Nottingham University. She has

20

previously taught at Greenwich University, the Architectural Association

Graduate School, London and the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow.

Her research investigates the intersection between architecture and urbanism,

both in its genealogy and in current applications.

4
5

Kathryn Brown is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History,

Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her area

of speciality is nineteenth-century French art and literature and she is currently

working on the themes of reading, privacy and concealment, particularly in the

works of Manet and Degas.

302
1

Hugh Campbell is Professor in Architecture at University College Dublin. His

current projects include a book on the relationship between the self and space

as well as a series of essays on aspects of photography and urban space. He

is editing a collection of essays entitled Defining Space, and has been appointed

editor for the modern architecture volume of the Dictionary of Irish Art and

Architecture.

7
8

Vittoria Di Palma is Assistant Professor of Architectural History in the

Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York.

40

From 1999 to 2003 she taught at the Architectural Association, where she co-

directed the Histories and Theories MA programme. Her current book project

is a cultural history of abandoned and derelict landscapes, entitled Wasteland.

vii

Notes on Contributors

Helene Furjn is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at

PennDesign, University of Pennsylvania. She has had essays and reviews
published in journals including Gray Room, AAFiles, Assemblage, Casabella,

Journal of Architecture, JAE and Interstices. She has recently published Crib
Sheets: Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation, co-edited with
Sylvia Lavin (Monacelli, 2005), and has chapters in Softspace (Routledge,
2006), 306090: Models (2008), the forthcoming Temporalism (PAP) and an

AD Special Issue, Energies: New Material Boundaries. Helene is co-editor

of the PennDesign book series, VIA.
Christopher Hight is Assistant Professor at the Rice School of Architecture,
Houston. He previously taught in the Architectural Associations Design
Research Laboratory, and has worked for the Renzo Piano Building Workshop.
He co-edited AD: Collective Intelligence in Design (2006) and has recently
published a book on cybernetics, post-humanism, formalism and post-World
War Two architectural design, Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics
(Routledge, 2008).
Karin Jaschke is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history and theory at the
University of Brighton. She holds degrees from Technische Universitt Berlin,
the Bartlett School London, and Princeton University and has previously taught
at various schools including the Bauhaus-Universitt Weimar. Her research
interests include modern architectures links to anthropology, entertainment
architecture and ludic environments, and the cultural dimensions of sustainable
building. She is co-editor of Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino

Resort Architecture.
Roy Kozlovsky is an Adjunct Professor at the Pratt Institute School of
Architecture, New York and a PhD candidate at the Princeton University School
of Architecture. His dissertation examines postwar architecture and urbanism
in Great Britain through buildings and environments that were commissioned
specifically for children.
Amy Catania Kulper is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigans
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and recently completed
her doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. Her current research will
culminate in a book with the working title Immanent Natures that examines
the propagation of an interiorized, introverted, and instrumentalized version of
the natural world in architectural discourse within the disparate historical
contexts of the fin-de-sicle, the 1960s and the present.
Marina Lathouri co-directs the Histories and Theories Graduate Programme
at the Architectural Association, London, and teaches history of architecture
viii

Notes on Contributors

122

and urbanism at the University of Cambridge. She has previously taught theory

and design at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania.

Her current research focuses on mid-twentieth-century and contemporary

urban thinking and forms of architectural practice.

5
6

Diana Periton is an architectural historian and critic. Between 2004 and 2007

she was Head of History and Theory at the Mackintosh School of Architecture,

Glasgow. From 1990 to 2004, she taught at the Architectural Association,

London, where she was co-director, first of the undergraduate General Studies

10

Programme, and subsequently of the Histories and Theories MA. She is

currently completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge on Parisian urbanism

in the early twentieth century.

3
4

Charles Rice is Senior Lecturer and MArch course director in the School of

522

Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has also taught in

the Histories and Theories MA programme at the Architectural Association,

London. He is author of The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity,

Domesticity (Routledge, 2007), and is a member of the design research

network OCEAN.

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Acknowledgements

This book originated in a conference, The Intimate Metropolis: Domesticating

the City, Infiltrating the Room, held at the Architectural Association, London,
in October 2003. It contains expanded versions of some of the papers
presented there, and a number of chapters that have been specifically
commissioned.
We would like to thank all of those who gave papers at the
conference and participated in its discussions, as well as those who made the
event possible in other ways: Mohsen Mostafavi, Chairman of the Architectural
Association, Mark Cousins, Director of General Studies, Belinda Flaherty, Micki
Hawkes, Marilyn Dyer, Joel Newman, Nicola Bailey, Stephania Batoeva, Nicola
Quinn and Pascal Babeau. David Terrien meticulously edited a first selection
of conference papers, which was published in AA Files 51 (Spring 2005).
We are also heavily indebted to our editors at Routledge to
Caroline Mallinder, who set the project in motion, as well as Georgina Johnson,
Eleanor Rivers, Kate McDevitt, Jane Wilde and Katy Low.
Considerable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of
images. The authors, editors and publishers apologize for any errors and
omissions and, if notified, will endeavour to correct these at the earliest
possible opportunity.

122
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Intimate Metropolis
Introduction

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Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and

Marina Lathouri

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At first glance, our title Intimate Metropolis may seem a provocation: surely

the modern city has little to do with intimacy. In many ways, our juxtaposition

of terms is intended to challenge a discourse structuring numerous recent

studies of the modern city, one that assumes rigid divisions between public

and private, urban and domestic. Yet, if we consider Benjamin Constants

20

assertion that in the modern polis it is in private, rather than in public that

freedom and fulfilment are to be experienced, or Walter Benjamins declaration

that it is in the 1830s that the private citizen appears, it seems that this

recasting of concepts of public and private is integral to the metropolis itself,

that the modern citys emergence transformed a dichotomous and hierarchical

relationship between public and private into a close and mutually implicating

association between the intimate and the social.1

Public refers to the collective, private to the individual. Our choice

of the word intimate reinforces the extent to which the modern city is

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predicated on the concept of the private individual, and on the sanctity of the
individuals inmost thoughts and feelings. Intimate is a term used in
conjunction with objects or ideas that are held close ones that are worn next
to the skin, or that lie within the recesses of the mind or heart. But it also implies
an unveiling of the self, a sharing of hopes and fears with a selected few.
Something intimate is not restricted to a single person; the word connotes
instead a close community, a republic of initiates who are brought together by
their common participation in rare and selective acts. And whereas the notion
of the metropolis, or mother city dates back to classical times, our interest
is in its specifically modern configuration, in the period from the turn of the
nineteenth century when the city begins to be conceptualized as a continuously
growing agglomeration of people, rather than as an abstract political entity, or
as a static object rigidly demarcated and defined by walls.
1

Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri

The juxtaposition of intimate and metropolis, then, brings the

question of subjectivity to the fore, and with it the way the modern city
establishes relationships between individual and collective, its particular
versions of community. In the chapters that follow, the modern city that is,
its concepts, its citizens, its spaces and its architecture is considered through
the way it shapes, and is shaped by, ideas of the self. Some chapters investigate
identities formed through the imaginative freedoms afforded by the city; others
reveal the ideas of individual well-being that are fundamental to programmes
of urban reform. While assumptions about the reciprocal relationship between
space and identity can be traced back to eighteenth-century concepts of
environmental determinism, several chapters in this volume read these
configurations through a Foucauldian lens, casting a critical eye on Utopian
claims, and keeping clearly in sight the caveat that communities based on
subjective notions of identity internalize, and indeed render intimate, their
mechanisms of control.
The intimate metropolis is thus a place in which boundaries between
public and private, individual and multitude have been blurred. Through a wide
variety of objects and sources houses, apartment blocks, streets and
playgrounds; paintings, photographs, films, plans and sections; cities that
include London and Paris, New York and Berlin this books chapters seek out
the continuities and contingencies, interactions and reciprocities engendered
by the intimate metropolis. Interrogating the categories of urban and domestic,
individual and collective, public and private in both material and conceptual
terms, they investigate how these interactions are structured, and the uses,
benevolent and malign, wittingly and unwittingly, to which they are put.
The first chapter, Diana Peritons Urban Life, focuses directly on
methods by which the modern city came to be constituted by its individual
citizens. Examining the development of the use of statistics in nineteenthcentury Paris, Periton investigates how the aggregation, categorization and
tabulation of individuals were used to assess and to regulate the collective
moral and physical health of the city. By imagining the city as an organism
as an entity in flux, capable of variation, growth and decline, rather than as an
assembly of fixed parts; as a collective made up of subjects whose actions,
needs and proclivities change constantly, rather than following the predictable
dictates of human nature the developing techniques of statistics suggested
the possibility of a fluid model of city planning, in which the general laws
regulating urban life could be ascertained.
Periton shows that the search for statistical laws generated new
kinds of people, new collective urban types, shaped by the city, their typicality
understood as a statistically derived normality. Hugh Campbells Heads: PhilipLorca diCorcia and the Paradox of Urban Portraiture reveals a catalogue of urban
types who stand in for the city in a different way. Focusing on the photographs
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Introduction

122

of diCorcia, Harry Callahan and Walker Evans, Campbell shows how Evans

portraits of anonymous people in the New York subway, captured when the

guard is down and the mask is off, were crucial to the work of later

photographers who sought to convey the energy and vitality of the modern

city through the portrayal of its inhabitants. For a photographer such as diCorcia,

the city is unseen, but registered in terms of its impact on his subjects: his

work chronicles the ways in which its most public of places encourage the

revelation of our most private selves. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel

and Richard Sennett, Campbell shows how, in the context of the modern city,

10

the private self is both protected from the public gaze, and projected theatrically:

the metropolis furnishes anonymity, but that very anonymity is what allows an

individuals interiority to be revealed. In the work of Campbells chosen

photographers, public and private are thus posited as inseparable categories,

and the city as a milieu in which each produces and sustains the other.

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Kathryn Browns A Space for the Imagination: Women Readers in

the Nineteenth-Century City argues that it is the particular nature of what it
means to be in public in the modern city that affords the individual anonymity,
and thus the possibility of something akin to a public privacy. Focusing on
depictions of women reading in the paintings of Edouard Manet and Edgar
Degas, she describes the portable privacy the subjects of these works seem
to create for themselves, and their inhabitation of an intimate world of the
imagination carved out of the public realm of the bustling metropolis, away from
their traditional roles inside the family. But reading in public, Brown suggests,
is not simply a retreat. Rather, it allows these women to be indifferent to the
acquisitive gaze of the male flneur as they browse in their own way through
the citys wares.
The experiences of a recast flneur are central to Charles Rices
chapter So the flneur goes for a walk in his room: Interior, Arcade, Cinema,

302

Metropolis. Rice explores the role of the imagination, of our propensity to

invest material things with our own fantasies and desires, in the constitution

of the intimate metropolitan, a figure he pursues through the urban types of

the rentier, the collector, the flneur himself and, more recently, the cinephile.

Beginning with the imaginary urban perambulations of Xavier de Maistre,

experienced within the bounded confines of a room, Rice identifies a moment

at the end of the eighteenth century when the domestic interior began to

emerge as a specific condition: both a refuge from the city and dependent on

it. In the imaginary excursions of writers such as de Maistre, Baudelaire,

Benjamin and Kierkegaard, the self, the interior and the city interpenetrate, in

40

a kind of mutual appropriation, making the domestic interior a crucial site for

the production of an experience of the city generated in the imagination, and,

with it, of a new kind of citizen.

3

Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri

The way the interior conjures in our minds worlds beyond its walls,
traced by Rice through the inner experiences of its inhabitants, is explored in
specifically architectural terms by Helene Furjn in Exhibitionism: John Soanes
Model House. Furjn posits Soanes London house, built at the turn of the
nineteenth century, as a model of a hybrid architecture: as home, museum,
memorial, architects office and teaching studio, it synthesized a range of roles.
With its collections of architectural fragments, framed views, surprising
juxtapositions, and play of shadows and coloured light, the houses interior was
conceived as a variegated environment through which to travel, explicitly
designed to evoke aesthetic experiences similar to those of the Grand Tour. In
this interior landscape, public and private, past and present, real and imagined
conflate and commingle. Even as it came to be identified as a distinct category,
the domestic interior was characterized by its struggle to contain the fantasies
it generated, or to keep the city at bay. Soanes hybrid house was a model that
actively deployed this condition, using processes of subjective engagement to
generate new architectural ideas.
For Benjamin, as Rice explains, it is Art Nouveau architecture, such
as that of Victor Horta, that ultimately brings about the liquidation of the interior
at the end of the nineteenth century. Amy Catania Kulper describes the result
of this liquidation as a ubiquitous domesticity, in which the interior, rather than
providing a refuge from the city, fully appropriates the external world of
spectacle. Her Private House, Public House studies Hortas 1897 Htel Tassel,
home for a university professor, and his 1899 Maison du Peuple, headquarters
for Belgiums nascent socialist party, both in Brussels. Kulper proposes that
Hortas architecture, like Soanes, relies on programmatic amalgamations, on
the use of elements like the salon and the caf that are simultaneously
public and private. She shows how the professors home subsumes the
department store, the public garden, the exhibition and the theatre to portray
its owner as Hannah Arendts social being, neither a fully private, nor a fully
public citizen. At the same time, the house for the people choreographs
theatrical projections of workers and the products of their labour, as if to
reveal them to themselves. Kulper argues that, although intended to lead
to social amelioration, Hortas architecture of ubiquitous domesticity extended
the horizon of domesticity . . . indiscriminately . . . into the public realm,
imposing a single, generic and thus limiting notion of well-being on the subjects
it constructs.
Katharina Borsi does not use the term ubiquitous domesticity, but
its appearance is what she, too, traces in her chapter Drawing and Dispute:
The Strategies of the Berlin Block. Borsi describes the development of the
block from 1860 to 1910, showing how it became both Berlins standard
housing type and its principal urban component the citys ubiquitous typology.
In contrast to earlier historical interpretations, which have declared modernist
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Introduction

122

Siedlungen to be a response to even a rebellion against the density and

supposed rigidity of the nineteenth-century Berlin block, Borsi shows that the

blocks early versions provided generic spaces that blurred distinctions between

public and private, inside and outside, in a typology characterized by flexibility

and permeability. But because the block was also the site across which the

disputes of the city were articulated, as techniques of urban study and

diagnosis were developed in order to define, manage and control the urban

population, it became increasingly codified, its spaces ever more rigidly

differentiated. Borsi links the gradual congealing of the blocks form into

10

regularized domestic spaces both to its repetition in neighbourhoods or districts

and to the emergence of the modern family noted by Foucault and Jacques

Donzelot. This is a family whose autonomy, its freedom to exist in privacy, is

conditioned by the mutual surveillance of the communitys members, in

mechanisms of control that are woven into its social and its physical structure.

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The city Borsi describes is a differentiated spatial field that is also

a field of knowledge knowledge about, and operating on, the citys subjects.
The way the city is configured, conceptually and spatially, objectifies the
practices of its inhabitants, rendering them visible and manipulable. If this
understanding of the city was still largely implicit in late nineteenth-century
Berlin, it was fundamental to the builders of the new postwar society of the
1950s and 1960s, and is central to the arguments of the four chapters that
follow. Marina Lathouris The necessity of the plan: Visions of Individuality and Collective Intimacies looks at forms of subjectivity that emerged in
nineteenth-century modes of organization, and became generalized in arguments about the Functional City. By analysing themes and graphic practices
that prevailed in the Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM)
from 1928 to 1959, this chapter suggests that the realm of the intimate in its
different forms has been an ideal framework for the formalization of con-

302

nections between systems of inhabitation and processes of production of the

urban field. Lathouri discusses how the plans and diagrams of the typical

dwelling unit were primarily used to imagine the links between individual

experience and a general system of spatial organization. Her chapter argues

that registers of experience and concepts of the subject that prevailed after

the Second World War further intensified the theme of inhabitation as an

integrated form of living that always bore a collective dimension. Human

habitat replaced the typical dwelling unit, thus incorporating a wider civic and

governmental imperative and rendering the intimate part of an urban ecology.

For Lathouri, these practices, the questions they introduced regarding how the

40

individual enters into the production of a collective coercion, and the ways in

which dwelling occurs within this field, established a framework fundamental

to the subsequent course of architectural and urban thinking.

5

Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri

Karin Jaschkes City Is House and House Is City: Aldo van Eyck,
Piet Blom and the Architecture of Homecoming studies the way a particular
group of architects associated with Dutch structuralism attempted literally to
reconfigure the relationship between the dwelling unit and the urban plan.
Their critique of CIAMs prewar model of the Functional City became an
investigation of the urban condition in terms of a multiscalar spatiality that
sought to interweave interior and exterior spaces, intimate settings and public
encounters, the domestic and the civic realms. Van Eycks concept of
configurative design depended on a basic figure understood as a Gestalt form
which could be multiplied, extended or contracted in order to address a range
of orders of human association, from house to street to district to city. Elevating
the subjective experiences of encounter and communication, van Eycks
student Blom focused on such elements as doorstep and threshold; he
emphasized components such as semi-open courtyards, open stairs and access
platforms, which he saw as constituent parts of an extended urban plan
conceived as a network, generating a concept of form understood in terms of
pattern and structure rather than as an assembly of isolated objects. The multiscalar basis of configurative design thus recast urban space as an extension
of the domestic, and domestic space as an interiorized urbanity.
Roy Kozlovskys Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar
Subjectivity examines the prominence given to childrens play in postwar city
planning theories. He investigates a discourse that idealized street play as a
spontaneous, identity-forming activity, one that provided a model for a creative
and participatory appropriation of urban space, but that simultaneously
contributed to new forms of surveillance used to scrutinize the child-rearing
practices of the British working classes. While in the interwar years, planners
associated with CIAM used images of children and their play to indict the
unplanned metropolis and advocate urban reform, in postwar debates the figure
of the child at play was used to signify desirable qualities of urban space,
and to propagate social regeneration. The free movement of self-initiated play
(in contrast to more regimented calisthenics) was thought to foster the
development of an individuality fundamental to a democratic model of citizenship. Drawing on the arguments of Nikolas Rose, Kozlovsky suggests that this
focus on play indicates a model of citizenship in which one was, paradoxically,
obliged to be free; playgrounds that fostered childrens agency were but part
of a larger attempt to govern subjects from within, by making their inner
impulses visible and measurable.
Christopher Hights Pervasive Intimacy: The Unit dHabitation
and Golden Lane as Instruments of Postwar Domesticity turns to prototypes
conceived for mass-production housing to identify a new subjective order
sought by planners and architects. Juxtaposing Le Corbusiers Unit dHabitation in Marseille with Alison and Peter Smithsons Golden Lane project for
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Introduction

122

London, Hight shows how Le Corbusier continued to rely on a dichotomy

between domestic interiority and urban exteriority, while the Smithsons, like

van Eyck and Blom, rendered such divisions moot. To Hight, the boundless and

interdependent world sketched out by Le Corbusier in his Modulor books

signals, not only his own Unit, but also, and more strongly, the spatial con-

figuration of Golden Lane, where categories of public and private, interior and

exterior are subsumed in a topological network of relations. Hight describes the

differences between the versions of order intended by the two housing projects

in terms of the way the inhabitant-as-subject sees and is seen. The Smithsons

10

understanding of space as an extended network displaces the subject from

the fixed viewing position established by the Unit, positing instead a complex

web that offers a multitude of viewing positions. With differences in size, loca-

tion and scale made less important than the continuity of a consistent set of

relationships, these non-scalar networks are symptomatic of a radical relativism.

522

For Hight, they indicate the transformation of a Foucauldian model of biopolitics

into one that is closer to Hardt and Negris concept of Empire.2

Our final chapter takes Hights emphasis on the viewing subject in

a network of non-scalar relations to a global level. Vittoria Di Palmas Zoom:

Google Earth and Global Intimacy analyses the techniques of Googles global

20

imaging program in order to consider the implications of its representational

conventions for the structuring of relationships between viewer, community

and planet. The chapter shows how Google Earths reliance on the aerial view

and the zoom creates a new correspondence between the individual and the

cosmos in which everything, from the minuscule to the gigantic, is made

equivalent. The zooms configuration of visual experience replaces a situated

viewer with a disembodied one, generating a perspective that collapses the

global and the local into a non-scalar seamless continuum. Di Palma argues

that the ways in which Google Earth enables its users to manipulate and

configure these flows of images on their own computers restructures concepts

302

of community. The implicit suggestion is that just as our ideas of the modern

metropolis are dependent on the construct of the private citizen, so our

postmodern notions of a global order are based on interactions construed in

intimate terms.

Some years ago, Michael Sorkin identified our era as having

witnessed the end of public space.3 More recently, it has been argued by Paul

Virilio, among others, that the internet and processes of globalization have finally

rendered the dichotomy between concepts of public and private anachronistic.4

The blurring of these categories, addressed in different ways by the chapters

of this book, has resulted in new kinds of interactions, reciprocities and

40

configurations. This collection explores what could be termed the rise of the

intimate, a condition partaking of both the public and the private, the urban and

the domestic, the individual and the collective. But this new era of intimacy,
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Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri

fostered by the internet and a culture of celebrity that encourages individuals

to share the details of their daily lives with an anonymous multitude, though
heralded by some as a step toward a more harmonious, or even democratic,
global condition, leads also to concepts of community in which the individual,
rather than the citizen, reigns supreme. The intimate metropolis shapes, and
is shaped by, our changing hopes, desires and fears. In its elevation of the
personal, its erasure of boundaries, its conflation of categories, its fluid and
multifaceted nature, it is symptomatic of our culture, and of our current
predicament. With this book, we hope not simply to confirm the demise of
older notions of urban life, but also, and more importantly, to provide a
framework for a debate concerning the history of the intimate metropolis, and
its possible futures.
Notes
1

Benjamin Constant, De la libert des anciens compare celle des modernes discours
prononc lAthne Royale de Paris en 1819, in De la libert chez les modernes, ed. Marcel
Gauchet (Paris: Librairie Gnrale Franaise, 1980). Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century, in Peter Demetz (ed.) Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1986),
p. 154. This close association between the intimate and the social is discussed by Hannah
Arendt in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 39 ff., and
developed further by Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, edited by

Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991

Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).

[1984]).

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Chapter 1

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Introduction

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1

In Paris Peasant, published in 1926, Louis Aragon describes a visit he made

with two friends, Andr Breton and Marcel Noll, to the Parc des Buttes-

Chaumont, on the north-eastern fringes of Paris. Chased there by boredom,

they roamed through the park after dark on a spring evening. Both to them and

to its nineteenth-century creators, the park seemed a place of constant

experiment, a place heavy with possibility (see Figure 1.1).1

The park was a major ingredient in Haussmanns transformation

de Paris, built and planted in the 1860s on land next to the hangmans gibbet

that had been extensively quarried for gypsum and used as a dump for night

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soil.2 Haussmann described it as uninhabited wasteland, pervaded principally

by noxious fumes. He proudly records that, once its metamorphosis had taken

place, the 25-hectare site contained 5 kilometres of carriageways and footpaths,

a specially pumped stream and a 32-metre waterfall, a lake with a temple-

topped island reached by 2 bridges, extensive lawns, 3 chalet-restaurants, a

belvedere, and the inevitable grotto. The chemin de fer de ceinture, Paris

orbital railway, ran through a tunnel, then a ravine, across its eastern edge.3

The entry in the Paris Guide of 1867 reinforces and expands Haussmanns facts

and figures 5,940 square metres of path were gravel, 10,000 were sand; one

of the two bridges was a suspension bridge with a span of 63 metres; the cliffs

40

around the lake reached a height of 50 metres. It is also more forthcoming

than Haussmann about the former inhabitants of the site, and the parks

intended effect on them:

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The area known as the Buttes-Chaumont was a place of ill-repute,

home of thieves, bohemians and vagabonds. The City of Paris was
well aware that material improvements have a great influence on
behaviour, and that by cleaning up this domain, its population would
also be transformed, or forced to leave.4
In Aragons account, the area is a test-tube of human chemistry, in which the
precipitates have the power of speech and eyes of a particular colour. Its
thieves, bohemians and vagabonds, or, in his taxonomy, its rag-pickers and
market gardeners (both dealers in human detritus) have mutated to become
postmen and middlemen, the properly municipal subjects of Paris new XIXth

arrondissement, annexed to the city along with the other outer arrondissements
on 31 December 1859.5
Several pages of Aragons account are dedicated to the description
of a bronze column that stood at a high point on the southern edge of the park
(see Figure 1.2).6 By match-light, Aragon and his companions transcribed the
information given on its four faces. Embossed figures declared it had been
unveiled on 14 July 1883 by kind permission of the municipal administration.
An inscription on the base gave the exact location of the column according to
its height above sea level and that of the river Seine. Its cardinal points, the
direction of and distance to the local town hall, as well as to several of Paris
city gates, were also provided. The column recorded the postal addresses of
the arrondissements nursery and elementary schools (and the number of
places in each), of its municipal trade school, its hospital, markets both local
and for the city as a whole, its religious establishments, police stations, post
offices, tax collectors offices, squares and parks, railway stations, and the main
routes (road, rail and canal) connecting it to the exterior.7 It also gave the total
area of the arrondissement (566 hectares), the length of its streets, quays and
boulevards (52.383 kilometres), the size of its population (117,885), and the
number of dwelling houses mostly full of rented rooms it contained (3,162).
Set into the faces of the column were a barometer, a thermometer and a clock.
The column thus acted both as a monument to its new arrondisse-

ment and as a recording device. The figures giving its geographical position in
quasi-absolute terms endowed the more fleeting statistics of population with
the apparent stability of cardinal points. Cast in bronze, the transient was literally
monumentalized, given the fixity of the universal. Yet the very abstraction of
the measurement of location, and its triangulation with the rest of Paris,
simultaneously made the column relative to much larger systems of organization, its calibrations of time, air temperature and pressure further parameters
of its contingent status. The details Aragon transcribed allow us to make conjectures about the population that inhabited this enduring but ever-changing
setting: its potential educational status (through the provision of schools), its
10

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1.1
The Parc des
Buttes-Chaumont,
Paris, XIXth
arrondissement.
Photograph
by Christopher
Schulte, March
2008.

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1.2
La colonne du
Parc des ButtesChaumont,
Paris, XIXth
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c.1910.
Roger-Viollet/Rex
Features.

Diana Periton

morals (through the provision of religious and administrative institutions), its

productive possibilities (through its markets and transport connections), its
leisure activities and its health are hinted at and we can, should we wish,
calculate its density. Aragon saw the column as a cipher for the urban life it
registered, a life that no doubt has the local cinema as its social centre, an
industrious and ill-rewarded [life] . . ., glowing with happiness and drunk with
knowledge acquired at night school.8
My own interest in the columns inscriptions and in Aragons
decision to copy and preserve them is in how these statistical hieroglyphs
could be read as such a cipher. It is in how the collection and display of this
data began to inform and to alter the conceptualization of Paris and Parisians,
becoming not only a record but also a tool for the transformation of the city
and its citizens. The range of countings carved and cast into the column could
be found, amplified, in the Annuaires Statistiques de la Ville de Paris, published
from 1880 onwards.9 These large volumes printed annual information on the
state and distribution of Paris population (marital status, births, deaths,
employment, etc., listed by arrondissement or quartier), on their economic and
cultural activity (import and export of goods, taxes, savings accounts, municipal
credit, the numbers of pupils at schools, colleges, etc.), and on their health
(hospital admissions, distribution of poor relief). They also documented the citys
meteorological and geological conditions and its infrastructural systems. If the
effect of the column was to still the data it displayed by gathering them to the
hillside in the Buttes-Chaumont, once those data were understood as part of
the constantly multiplied municipal statistics they became no more than a
momentary reading of a fragment of the city, useful only insofar as they could
be related to other information. Over time, the sheer quantity of readings
collected, categorized and collated could be used to suggest relationships of
cause and effect, to establish norms and to identify trends. Information
concerning people could be juxtaposed with that on the properties of place,
the fleeting with the long-lasting, until patterns of the citys flux could be
revealed.
In 1919, five years before Aragons excursion to the park, a
government edict required all French towns and cities to draw up plans for their
development and growth;10 in Paris, the cole des Hautes tudes Urbaines
was founded, a municipal laboratory of research whose remit was the
methodical study of the factors influencing the formation and transformation
of the metropolis.11 Through the standardization of the way information concerning the social, demographic, topographic and climatic state of cities was
gathered and displayed, and the consequent accumulation of comparative
studies, the members of the new school hoped that the general laws of an
incipient urban science might emerge.12

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1.3
Louis Bonnier,
La Population
de Paris en
mouvement,
La Vie Urbaine,
nos. 12, 1919.
From first series:
Paris, maps
showing population
density in 1841,
1881, 1906 and
1911 (by
permission of Avery
Architectural and
Fine Arts Library,
Columbia
University).

1.4
Louis Bonnier, La Population de Paris en mouvement, La Vie Urbaine, nos. 12, 1919.
From second series: LAgglomration parisienne, maps showing population density in 1841 and 1911
(by permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University).

Urban Life

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The inaugural article of the institutes journal, La Vie Urbaine,

indicated the kind of study proposed. Architect Louis Bonniers La Population

de Paris en mouvement consisted of two series of maps that chronicled

the citys growth from 1800 to 1911. The 16 images of the first series showed

what Bonnier called Paris, an entity constituted by quartiers or communes

containing at least 100 people per hectare (see Figure 1.3). Against a constant

but ghostly background in which the Thiers walls (built outside the city in the

1840s) and the curve of the river are the most prominent features, this Paris

mutated and pulsated, like a cell growing and dividing. Increasing densities were

10

shown in ever darker shades of grey. Although not officially part of the city

until 1860, the commune of Belleville, which contained the future Parc des

Buttes-Chaumont, was by 1841 already an excrescence of Bonniers Paris.

The annexation by the city of the ring of territory between the eighteenth-

century tax walls and Thiers fortifications altered the administrative boundaries,

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splitting Belleville in two, literally dividing and subdividing it into new quartiers.13

By 1881, all of the new XIXth arrondissement except for the zone of La Villettes

livestock market and abattoirs had been absorbed into Bonniers voracious

Paris, dissipating the cancerous blackness of high density as it spread

outwards from the original nucleus. By 1911, Paris had ingested La Villette,

20

and grown considerably beyond its new official boundary. Bonniers second

series plotted the development of the agglomration parisienne, created by

lower densities of 10 to 100 people per hectare (see Figure 1.4), its final map

a projection of the extent of this agglomeration in 1961.

Both series of maps were made into films, in order to convey more

strikingly the sensation of our Parisian population in motion, and to reinforce

the vision of the city as an organism as powerful as it is fragile.14 For the

members of the cole des Hautes tudes Urbaines, this identification of the

city with an organism was no isolated analogy: the school and its journal had

been explicitly established to study the urban agglomeration, seen as a living

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organism that evolves both in time and in space.15 Statistical data provided

the primary tools for analysing the city thus conceptualized, and for attempting

to discover the general laws of its urban life, of its processes of transform-

ation. In Bonniers opening article, Paris inhabitants, aggregated to produce

the statistical unit of density, were subsumed within this mutating creature.16

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The anatomy of the urban organism17

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To describe the city as an organism was not new, but the way in which that

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organism was understood and what was seen to constitute it was constantly

altered and refined, and the rigour with which the identification was pursued

varied. It might be a metaphor or a model, a rhetorical device or a concept used

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to support a specific method of reasoning. By the late eighteenth century, the

Renaissance emphasis on the harmonious formal arrangement of the body of
the city had given way to a concern for its ability to function as an organic entity,
albeit not yet the all-embracing, self-generating, powerful but fragile being of
Bonnier and his colleagues.18
Pierre Pattes Mmoires sur les objets les plus importans de

larchitecture of 1769, addressed to the Parisian governing elite, was the first
architectural treatise perhaps better described as a Utopian critique to focus
on the city as a malfunctioning entity whose operations should be analysed
and improved.19 Like many of his contemporaries, whether writers of popular
or of technical literature, Patte personified the city and its constituent parts: its
streets and houses breathe the unclean air exhaled by its cemeteries and
hospitals, it is teeming with impurities; but its defective . . . constitution can
be rectified it can be purged.20 After advocating that the major sources of
infection should be expelled to the suburbs or beyond (as was already the case
with Paris night soil, removed to the foot of the Buttes-Chaumont), Pattes
primary purging strategy was the construction of the ideal city street, which
he showed as a section, drawn with the precision of an anatomical cut (see
Figure 1.5).21
Following the techniques of eighteenth-century anatomists, Patte
used this cut to study the relationship between the streets structure and the
function of each distinct part; his street optimizes the construction of the parts,
and reassembles them in a coherent organization. Thus it is framed by buildings
no more than three storeys high, the same height as its width, in order to allow
the free passage of air; waxed canvas awnings attached to the buildings can
be pulled out to protect the pavement from rain and other abuses.22 Paving is
laid to prevent stagnant puddles from forming, and to allow for the easy and
separate passage of pedestrians and vehicles. Various channels and openings
connect both the buildings and the street surface to a stoutly built subterranean
duct into which street filth can be swept and household effluent flushed the
duct also carries pipes that deliver an abundant supply of fresh water.23
Again like the eighteenth-century anatomist, Pattes model for
analysing the city-as-organism was that of the machine; its inert structure must
be animated if its functions are to be demonstrated. Pattes city street must
be brought to life by the people whose well-being it is intended to serve. It is
their circulation, and the movement of water, air and waste that they rely on,
that the street facilitates but it is their evacuation that the act of dissection
has brought about, rendering the organs of the street we see lifeless.
As eighteenth-century scientists were increasingly aware, the
limitation of the mechanical model is that, unlike a genuine living being, it is
incapable of spontaneous action, let alone self-generation. The machine analogy
posits a fixed relationship between an organ and the functions it enables;
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1.5
Pierre Patte,
Profil dune rue,
Mmoires sur les
objets les plus
importans de
larchitecture,
1769.
The British
Library. All Rights
Reserved. Shelf
mark 61.f.7.

it assumes that functions are repetitive, rather than evolutionary.24 In Pattes

street, the people who will stimulate its functions are themselves viewed as
unchanging, undifferentiated and machine-like, their well-being reduced to the
optimum accommodation of a number of involuntary reflexes: they all urinate
and defecate, avoid vehicular traffic, and do not like to get wet. They have no
reciprocal effect on the environment they activate. Unable to transform itself
from within, the mechanical model relies on external additions if it is to grow,
additions that must be suitably synthesized to become part of a reconfigured,
larger whole. So Pattes composite of devices that constitutes the city, although

coherent in itself, is merely the sum of its parts, and these address only the

problems Patte identified. He acknowledged that he lacked the general and

adequately detailed plan that would be necessary properly to understand Paris

as a totality in both its extent and its complexity, and thus to rectify its

constitution in a holistic way.25

This lack was satisfied by the comprehensive vision that Hauss-

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manns methodical topographic surveys of the city made possible in the 1850s

and 1860s. His Service du plan produced a fully triangulated 1:500 map of the

entire city, and the Service des eaux refined the organization of sewers, drains
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and water supply, so that a more sophisticated version of Pattes technique of

surgery could be implemented on a vast scale. In Haussmanns language, the
congested city was cut and pierced, even disembowelled where necessary,
in order to ensure free-flowing circulatory and respiratory systems.26 The
metamorphosis of the Buttes-Chaumont (the cesspools that once occupied its
lower reaches now moved yet further out of Paris, to the fort de Bondy)
allowed it to become an organ in the remodelled body of Paris whose function
was to be a dispenser of salubrity, connected to other organs via newly
opened tree-lined arteries, Haussmanns own version of the ideal city street.27
Like Patte, Haussmann understood the city as an entity that acted

on its citizens, rather than being constituted by them. In his Mmoires,

Haussmanns analogy between city and body was restricted to ideas about
organs, circulation and flow in descriptions of the citys physical structures
of parks, streets and sewers. Other commentators on the new Paris pursued
the organic analogy further, allowing it to permeate the city more thoroughly.
Writer Maxime du Camps Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions, sa vie, for
instance, provided a detailed documentary of Paris administrative organs, the
bureaucratic systems introduced or extended and refined under the Second
Empire.28 Du Camp included both infrastructure and people; his account is not
only of the sewerage, water and transport systems, but also of the system of
markets, abattoirs and associated taxes, the criminal justice system, the
systems of welfare and education, etc. all of them interrelated. Unlike Pattes
or Haussmanns descriptions of physical mechanisms, awaiting activation,
these administrative organs are understood to be inseparable from their
function. Paris population its fonctionnaires and those on whom they acted
are incorporated as purveyors of a vital force within the body of the city.29
Closer to Pattes street, but indicative of the pervasiveness of the
city-as-organism revealed by Du Camp, is an illustration entitled lectricit
chez soi, published in the Magasin Pittoresque in 1891 (see Figure 1.6).
It is part of the ubiquitous, didactic popular literature that explained the postHaussmannian city to its citizens. A celebrated French surgeon of the
eighteenth century had commented we anatomists are like the deliverymen
of Paris, who know even the smallest, most out-of-the-way streets but have
no idea what goes on inside peoples homes.30 In lectricit chez soi, that
domestic interior is exactly what the brightly lit sectional drawing has allowed
the anatomist of the city to investigate. A network of subterranean cables now
supplements gas and water supplies, so that businessmen can hold a late board
meeting on the mezzanine, and on the tage noble a bourgeois family can host
a sparkling soire. On the upper floors, reached by electrically operated lift,
electric light allows students to study, and piece workers to make dresses and
fake flowers. Incorporated into the citys mechanisms, these people and their
ongoing tasks imply that its structures are animated from within.
18