ABSTRACT
This chapter continues to draw on Freud’s work on the uncanny in relation to the urban underside as a fascinating and horrifying place. Walter Benjamin’s writings on the city, including the Berlin of his childhood and Paris, a city founded in marshes, is also considered. This chapter diagnoses the symptoms, and engage in a talking cure, of the psychogeopathology of discriminating against uncanny urban places. Placial discrimination and placism operate like racial discrimination and racism. Not only is there a hierarchy of places and races in which one race and place is privileged over all others, but also the ‘superior’ race figures the ‘inferior’ race and place in pejorative terms, for example, the slum as swamp, the ‘native’ as ‘primitive.’
