Emancipating Space: Geography, Architecture, and Urban Design

by Ross King

A sweeping historical analysis of the complex relationship between social criticism and built form, Emancipating Space examines the interconnections of architecture and social climate. Including 45 black-and-white illustrations of buildings and public spaces, the book argues that those concerned with urban design and social change should make their contribution to bringing about a better world by designing spaces based in utopian or emancipatory theories. Author Ross King presents theories of social improvement and architecture since the enlightenment with an eye toward developing new urban design ideas for the postmodern era.


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1. Introduction: The Design of the City, The Progress of Modernity, and the Crisis of Postmodernity
2. Space and Power:The Enlightenment
3. Space and the Commodity: The Nineteenth Century and the Rise of Modernity
4. The Space of Revolution: 1900 and the Maelstrom
5. The 1920s as Crucible: Translation, Vkhutemas, and the Bauhaus
6. The Universal Space of the Twentieth Century: Voyages Against the Ebb
7. The Space of Signs: 1968, Modernity, and Postmodernity
8. "Postmodern"
9. Space and Deconstruction: Map as Myth
10. Conclusion: New Geography
11. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity versus Postmodernity
12. Conclusion: New Architecture, New Urban Design

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture

300 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 1996

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Ross King is a professorial fellow (and former Dean) at Melbourne University's Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. Educated as an architect and urban planner, he also studied under Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, sitting at the feet of such modernist luminaries as Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, and Arnold Toynbee. He has practiced as an architect, planner and policy analyst, taught at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and researched (among other things) the complexities of urban housing markets, the cultural contexts and economic effects of urban and landscape design, and theories of design.