1st Edition

Embodied Utopias Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis

Edited By Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, Rebecca Zorach Copyright 2002
    334 Pages
    by Routledge

    336 Pages
    by Routledge

    Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in Embodied Utopias argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.

    Section 1. Introduction. Section 2. Civilization/Degeneration: Desire and Repulsion in the Modern City. Section 3. At Home in Public. Section 4. Esprit de Corps and Esprit Decor: Domesticity, Community and Creative Autonomy in the Building of Female Public Identity. Section 5. Embodying Urban Design. Section 6. Haunting the City. Section 7. The Time of Architecture. Index.

    Biography

    Rebecca Zorach, Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders

    'Stimulating ... breaks new ground in trying to draw together themes of space, gender and utopia.' - Ruth Levitas, Urban Studies, 2003