The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women

This study use 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 Sao Paulo - and presents a 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 miniroties - by means of grandiose, utopian plans, nearly destroying the richness of urban culture. City centres 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 the reader an introduction to what this might be.