From Body Without Organs to City Without Streets

Abstract

This chapter shows how masculine features came to dominate city-form from late antiquity to the present day. The dawn of modernity could be said to have been marked by the appeal for automation, uniformity and superscale. With admiration to these attributes in an ideal city resonates Thomas More’s Utopia, the early sixteenth-century bestselling fantasy novel on voyage to the southern hemisphere. Meantime, in the real environment of urban Europe, the feminine open space in the city, the market square, or the space adjacent to the city’s gate, had deteriorated onto becoming the site of public torture and spectacular executions of human beings, criminals and real or imagined enemies of the authority. The desecration of public space started probably in the Roman Republic but intensified during modernity. Special urban squares were designated for public beheadings by guillotine during the French Revolution, and public hangings ceased in Britain only in the second half of the nineteenth century. The masculine domination of urban space was accomplished during late modernity by less brutal but more prevalent, repeating attempts to impose automation, uniformity and superscale upon city-form, an architectural and urban-planning feat that Simone de Beauvoir had dubbed as the city without streets.