The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and WomenUniversity of California Press, 1992 M03 10 - 191 pages Elizabeth Wilson's elegant, provocative, and scholarly study uses fiction, essays, film, and art, as well as history and sociology, to look at some of the world's greatest cities—London, Paris, Moscow, New York, Chicago, Lusaka, and São Paulo—and presents a powerful critique of utopian planning, anti-urbanism, postmodernism, and traditional architecture. For women the city offers freedom, including sexual freedom, but also new dangers. Planners and reformers have repeatedly attempted to regulate women—and the working class and ethnic minorities—by means of grandiose, utopian plans, nearly destroying the richness of urban culture. City centers have become uninhabited business districts, the countryside suburbanized. There is danger without pleasure, consumerism without choice, safety without stimulation. What is needed is a new understanding of city life and Wilson gives us an intriguing introduction to what this might be. |
Contents
Into the Labyrinth | 1 |
From Kitsch City to the City Sublime | 12 |
London | 26 |
Paris | 47 |
Cities of the American Dream | 65 |
Architecture and Consciousness in Central Europe | 84 |
The Lost Metropolis | 100 |
World Cities | 121 |
Beyond Good and Evil | 135 |
References and Notes | 160 |
170 | |
183 | |
Other editions - View all
The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women Elizabeth Wilson Limited preview - 1992 |
The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women Elizabeth Wilson No preview available - 1992 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African American appeared architects architecture areas artists Bauhaus became become Berlin bohemian bourgeois Britain buildings built cafés capital centre Chicago City Beautiful movement civilisation colonial contrast Corbusier countryside created crowd culture described districts domestic Ebenezer Howard environment estates example experience factory female feminine feminist flâneur garden city Glasgow Gorbals Harlem heroine housing Hull House ibid ideal ideas Jane Addams labour lady Le Corbusier lesbian Letchworth living London male metropolis middle-class modern modernist moral movement nature nineteenth nineteenth-century novel Octavia Hill organised Paris Penguin planners pleasure political population postmodern city poverty prostitution reformers role rural Saltaire São Paulo Second Empire seemed sexual shanty towns Siegfried Kracauer slums social socialist society space spectacle streets style sublime suburbs town planning traditional twentieth century urban urbanisation utopian Victorian Village woman workers working-class women writers wrote York zoning