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

by Elizabeth Wilson

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.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Cities, Theory, Academia, Criticism

191 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 1992

About the author

Elizabeth Wilson, born 1936, is Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion. She has written for The Guardian and New Statesman and is a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio 4.

Reviews

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which women have benefited from urbanization, even while utopian planning initiatives exert control over populations, fearing the disorder posed by women's independence from the nuclear family. It's an ambitious critique, and brings an important gendered analysis to larger critiques of utopian urban planning and neoliberalism, but fails to offer solutions (or even potential solutions) to the problems it raises.

Additionally, Wilson's arguments have aged inconsistently. An interesting chapter about the role global urbanization plays in catalyzing climate change bears an open-ended and optimistic treatment that, in light of recent developments in the field of climate science, demands revisitation. Nevertheless, this is a book I'll be thinking about for some time.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I’d had access to this book when I was writing my undergraduate dissertation, seven years ago. It has very interesting things to say about utopianism within planning and the model industrial town movement, which was my dissertation topic. Better late than never, though. ‘Sphinx in the City’ is a wide-ranging and accessibly written study of women’s place in the city over time and in different countries. Of particular note, it conveys an intersectional feminism. Women are not considered to be an undifferentiated mass, rather the differing experiences between, for example, rich, middle class, and poverty-stricken women are compared. Moreover, a chapter is devoted to the cities of the developing world, the legacy that colonialism has left them, and how their urbanisation differs from that of the Western world.

I enjoyed the fact that this study drew from diverse, interdisciplinary sources. I would tend to situate it within the discipline of planning, but planning itself has ever been a battleground or site of co-operation between architecture, economics, history, geography, ecology, politics, and anthropology. It certainly borrows theory and practise from all those disciplines and others. The tone of the book is perhaps most akin to cultural history, however. Novels, poetry, and reportage are all quoted. I particularly liked the pair of chapters that compared London and Paris in the 19th century. The description of Paris fitted well with other accounts I’ve come across, such as Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune.

Although this book was written in 1991, I think the critique in the final chapter is still very relevant. As Wilson predicted, the redevelopments of King’s Cross and the Docklands in London have displaced poorer people and, in my view, created a bland, corporate, heavily controlled and surveyed built environment. Although Wilson doesn’t claim to know the answers to the current structural challenges to the liveability of cities, she does provide a thoughtful and incisive analysis. Which is a lot more useful than a lot of planning literature that descends into a the tedious and oversimplistic markets vs public intervention debate. Wilson acknowledges that the two ‘sides’ are in fact interdependent and can both be autocratic. For the city to become a friendlier place for all women (and indeed men), inequalities that go beyond the remit of planning need to be addressed.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilson argues through case studies of individual or related cities, argues that cities were deeply bound as symbolically female, with temptations, vice, and pockets of pleasure, which, in the 19th – 20th century, men sought to regulate, control, temper, and remake for the perceived safety of women. Women in cities were at once seen as temptress prostitutes, lesbians, and fallen heroines, or virtuous women in danger who successfully triumphed over temptation. As cities ballooned, the working class and minorities were depicted as metaphoric women, hysterical, prone to emotion, and could not be trusted to be in charge of their own lives. Wilson argued against feminist discourse that said that cities are naturally bad for women, instead arguing that cities historically were shaped by women and men planned them instead to control the femaleness of cities, especially in the false nuclear family structure. Henceforth, city controllers worked to exclude women in both decision making process and visibility, for their perceived own protection.

She breaks down the book looking at historic cities. After introducing her argument, in chapter two, she looks to the ancient to medieval cities histories, until the 19th century. In chapter three, she looks to London, the first industrial city where zoning separated people from workplaces in order to reform behavior. Chapter four moves to Paris, described as a decidedly female charactered city, a floating world. Chapter five moves to the American Dream anti-urban impulses, with the depiction of both Chicago and New York as the babylons, even as both experienced their so-called golden ages. Chapter six moves back to Europe, looking to Central European cities such as Vienna and Berlin, in both the socialist activist, thriving democratic impulses, and finally terrifyingly orderly fascist realities, in which Hitler made architecture among his top priorities. Chapter seven returns to ideas of cities, from garden cities to the city beautiful movement, both founded upon anti-urban impulses to control the worst aspects of cities, according to male planners. Chapter eight refreshingly moves to cities in the third world, noting at the beginning that there are sharp differences between cities of Latin America and Africa and that the temptation of lumping all into one category is not useful. For instance, Latin American cities were shaped by industrialization while African cities mostly were shaped by the colonial experience, and African cities mostly have family bonds extending to the rural countryside while Latin American cities more typically fall into the separation between the two. Chapter nine wraps the book by looking at how postmodern impulses have blurred the lines between country and city, structural changes to the perceived nuclear family have again put women into central roles of cities, and defended spaces are largely breaking down. Wilson argues strongly for moving past the good city, bad city duality.

Key Themes and Concepts
-Men plan cities, women experience cities.
-Cities as culture are fundamentally female, and the city is often seen as organic and feminine, wild and emotional.
-The city reformers promoted cleanliness, sanitation, and crackdown on prostitution and other women dominated vices.
-The same reformers on paper supported individualism and democracy, yet feared the urban mob which was a revolutionary danger.

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book to be tedious in both its too-often told history of town planning and in its conventional feminist leftism. Here's an example taken from the last chapter of the book, one that sums up rather well the narrative as a whole:

Critical of the disasters of utopian planning, we are in danger of forgetting that the unplanned city still is planned, equally undemocratically, by big business and the multinational corporation. Women, ethnic minorities and the working class in general have been caught between a paternalistic form of planning in which surveillance and regulation played a key role, and a profit-driven capital development that has been unbelievably destructive of urban space, and thus of supportive communities, killing whole cultures as the loved and familiar buildings and streets were bulldozed away.

Mike Davis writes on the back cover that it's a perfect book for undergraduates. That may be right. Books like The Sphinx in the City may also be one small reason why the profession of planning is so dominated by leftist sympathies.

The best chapter of Wilson's book is the fourth, on 19th century Paris. The final chapter, on postmodern urbanism, isn't bad either. The chapter on Central Europe, though, is baggy. In general, even when she turns her gaze to cities in the developing world, there is a strongly Anglo-centric perspective throughout. That said, Wilson has a literary sensibility that is hard not to appreciate. Jeffrey L. Otto (c) February 20, 2021

[Killian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wilson offers some keen insight into the character and design of urban spaces, but she too often digresses into polemic, or allows her subject matter to be overrun with hyperbole and a generally reductive feminist extremism. This oftentimes startling change of gears hampers an otherwise compelling look into the role of women in urban development, and forces the work to become little more than a biased rant.

[Magdalena O! · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth Wilson has written many books and this is one of her most popular works. I appreciated some of the ideas of re-thinking the male flaneur, but reads too dated. I assigned one of the chapters for my students as an exercise to think about the city and space in a creative way within academic scholarship. The book has a flowy stream-of-consciousness writing style, which some students enjoyed as a reprieve from straight academic writing.

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a fairly short book, this took me an age to read.

I don't know whether my mood wasn't quite right for this but I found it incredibly hard going. It felt like reading an academic textbook at times.

Certain parts of the subject matter have been covered in other books on urban planning and city architecture so some of this felt not so new and fresh.

I'm giving a 3 star rating as the writing wasn't bad or poor. My enjoyment of the book was limited and I think that's probably shared fault between me and the author, me for my mood and the author for the lack of verve in the writing.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Paperback)
by Elizabeth Wilson

note the publishing date, cities' downtown have become the hip places to live

[Casey Browne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wilson argues through case studies of individual or related cities, argues that cities were deeply bound as symbolically female, with temptations, vice, and pockets of pleasure, which, in the 19th – 20th century, men sought to regulate, control, temper, and remake for the perceived safety of women. Women in cities were at once seen as temptress prostitutes, lesbians, and fallen heroines, or virtuous women in danger who successfully triumphed over temptation. As cities ballooned, the working class and minorities were depicted as metaphoric women, hysterical, prone to emotion, and could not be trusted to be in charge of their own lives. Wilson argued against feminist discourse that said that cities are naturally bad for women, instead of arguing that cities historically were shaped by women and men planned them instead to control the femaleness of cities, especially in the false nuclear family structure. Henceforth, city controllers worked to exclude women in both decisions making process and visibility, for their perceived own protection.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm having a hard time coming up with a concise review of this book. Mostly I see this as a starting point - thanks to this book I now have a bunch of little scribbled notes with quotes I like, concepts to investigate further, other authors and books to read. One of those quotes from the concluding chapter, which gives an idea of the author's viewpoint:

"We will never solve the problems of cities unless we like the urban-ness of urban life. Cities aren't villages; they aren't machines; they aren't works of art; and they aren't telecommunications stations. They are spaces for face to face contact of amazing variety and richness. They are spectacle - and what is wrong with that?"

[Candy Wood]

Elizabeth Wilson's city is London, but she also considers other major Western cities and some in Latin America and Africa as well. She notes that modernist women writers like Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson liked cities, not finding them as threatening and alienating as many of their male contemporaries. She concludes that cities should celebrate diversity "for all, not just the few."