ABSTRACT
In order to identify some of the problems and themes that emerge from the conception of the city as text, it may be fruitful to review a number of the ways in which the city as text has been discussed. The examples chosen are all associated with writers who are also concerned with the delineation of features of modernity. This is not a fortuitous connection. Rather, a case can be made for assuming that the activity of reading the city as text itself emerges out of a desire to know and to analyse that which is new in the modern metropolis. The metropolis since the mid-nineteenth century at least has been one of the crucial sites of modernity – to be explored as a result of its quantitative and qualitative transformation. The interest in reading the metropolis may be documentary, poetic, political, social, etc.
