ABSTRACT

This chapter is concerned with everyday life in cities. Thus, the city is experienced in radically different ways by different groups of people. However, recent work from within cultural geography has refocused attention on the embodied nature of the urban experience, albeit more broadly than the behaviourists' interests in the senses. One of the most mundane and undervalued landscapes in urban areas is the rural-urban fringe. The ordering and purification of urban space, though, goes beyond its design and regulation and can be seen to permeate it entirely. Some recent work has tried to highlight the phantasmagoric or ghostly qualities of mundane, everyday spaces and landscapes. The landscapes of the city can be read as expressions of the attempts of planners, architects and urban designers to control bodies and bodies of people. Many mundane, everyday, bodily acts that take place in the public realm, such as walking, cycling, driving, eating, drinking and smoking.