ABSTRACT
Applying the three scopic regimes to different urban visual cultures may provide a useful way to discriminate among the varieties that are often conflated into one version of 'the modern city'. Cartesian perspectivalism best corresponds to the model of the rationally planned city, whose origins go as far back as Rome. Here the ideal of a geometric, isotropic, rectilinear, abstract, and uniform space meant the imposition of regular patterns, usually grids or radical concentric circles, on the more casual meanderings of earlier human settlements. More could obviously be said to flesh out the linkages between the scopic regimes of modernity and its urban styles. Thus, for example, the geometricalized regularities of French classicism at the height of the ancien regime were sometimes softened by baroque effects. Similarly, the Dutch cityscape has been interpreted as covertly baroque because of the individuality of the houses lining its canals.
