ABSTRACT
The relationship between the body and the city might appear to be a natural focus for urban analysis and debate, yet the “body/city” nexus has tended to be refracted through a series of theoretical discourses within which the body itself plays only a tangential role. Even within Foucauldian-inspired readings of the “bio-political” impulse behind modernity, the physicality of the body retains a somewhat ambiguous position within the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state: the emphasis on the discursive production of the body has tended to occlude any clear engagement with the lived experience of space. 1 There is, therefore, a tension running through Foucault's writings between materialist and idealist interpretations of urban change in which the analysis of discursive responses to material developments has tended to take precedence over the physical realm of the body itself. Yet if we are to make sense of the modern city—and its post-industrial, late-modern and post-modern permutations—we need to engage with the body both as a site of corporeal interaction with the physical spaces of the city and as a symbolic field within which different aspects to the legitimation of modern societies are played out.
