ABSTRACT
The previous chapter concerned the fragmentation of the modern city and the separation of concept and form. This chapter considers Henri Lefebvre’s complementary formulation of the ‘representations of space’ and ‘representational spaces’ in The Production of Space, and the relation of ‘representations of space’ to the interiority of Reason; and issues of gender in relation to public space and public art, with reference to the work of geographer Doreen Massey, and through a provocative image given by Luce Irigaray as a point of departure for a resistance to the exclusion of women from the public realm. But it begins with a return to the problem of representation-noted in the previous chapter’s discussion of viewpoints from which a city can be experienced or observed-through Barthes’ Empire of Signs, which refuses a transparent relation between a text and its referents.
