ABSTRACT
At first glance, our title Intimate Metropolis may seem a provocation: surely
the modern city has little to do with intimacy. In many ways, our juxtaposition
of terms is intended to challenge a discourse structuring numerous recent
studies of the modern city, one that assumes rigid divisions between public
and private, urban and domestic. Yet, if we consider Benjamin Constant’s
assertion that in the modern polis it is in private, rather than in public that
freedom and fulfilment are to be experienced, or Walter Benjamin’s declaration
that it is in the 1830s that the ‘private citizen’ appears, it seems that this
recasting of concepts of public and private is integral to the metropolis itself,
that the modern city’s emergence transformed a dichotomous and hierarchical
relationship between public and private into a close and mutually implicating
association between the intimate and the social.1
