Elizabeth Wilson
The Sphinx in the City
Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women
$26.95, £18.95 paperback
9780520078642
Available Now
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.
"She argues persuasively that the revival of cities depends on our looking at them in a fresh and sympathetic way. . . . Along the way, Ms. Wilson also offers a number of shrewd insights into what makes cities magical and fun, despite their vulgarity, rabble, vice and empty corporate plazas."—Karal Ann Marling, New York Times Book Review
"Wilson's The Sphinx in the City is a delightful ramble through the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century streets of cities such as Paris, Vienna, Chicago and London. Well-written and engaging, it will easily appeal to urban specialists and casual browsers alike."—Joni Seager, Women's Review of Books
"[A] brilliant book . . . The Sphinx in the City challenges assumptions and presumptions and is a significant contribution to urban literature."—Voice
"Wilson's fascinating and invigorating book uses literature to trace the character, life, development, and erosion of urbanism; she elegantly argues her premise that planners, politicians, developers—male predominantly—continue to direct the growth of cities and control women, ethnic minorities, and the working class by implementing grandiose and utopian plans resulting in the destruction of the urban fabric."—Bloomsbury Review
"What sets Wilson's book apart from others I have read about planning theory and history is the elegant way in which literature, social history and sociology are used to demonstrate the link between urban life and urban theory and women and their status in society."—Book News
"[Wilson's] freewheeling exploration of the 'urban scene' is provocative, unpredictable, and colorful."—Sharon M. Keigher, Contemporary Sociology
"Reading this book is as much of an experience as wandering through the urban venues that it describes. In short, Wilson is provocative and fun to read."—Mabel Berezin, American Journal of Sociology
"Wilson's The Sphinx in the City is a delightful ramble through the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century streets of cities such as Paris, Vienna, Chicago and London. Well-written and engaging, it will easily appeal to urban specialists and casual browsers alike."—Joni Seager, Women's Review of Books
"[A] brilliant book . . . The Sphinx in the City challenges assumptions and presumptions and is a significant contribution to urban literature."—Voice
"Wilson's fascinating and invigorating book uses literature to trace the character, life, development, and erosion of urbanism; she elegantly argues her premise that planners, politicians, developers—male predominantly—continue to direct the growth of cities and control women, ethnic minorities, and the working class by implementing grandiose and utopian plans resulting in the destruction of the urban fabric."—Bloomsbury Review
"What sets Wilson's book apart from others I have read about planning theory and history is the elegant way in which literature, social history and sociology are used to demonstrate the link between urban life and urban theory and women and their status in society."—Book News
"[Wilson's] freewheeling exploration of the 'urban scene' is provocative, unpredictable, and colorful."—Sharon M. Keigher, Contemporary Sociology
"Reading this book is as much of an experience as wandering through the urban venues that it describes. In short, Wilson is provocative and fun to read."—Mabel Berezin, American Journal of Sociology
"Adopting the guise of a flaneur, Wilson reconsiders the classical imagery of the city from the viewpoints of diverse groups of women: bourgeois wives, prostitutes, transvestite writers, and others. Its originality resides in its deft, consistently provocative interweaving of underground feminist discourses with the familiar, male-infected rhetorics of urban experience."—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
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