Geography Reference
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became the model of urban renovation throughout the Western world.
Caught in the collision of two time-space structures, medieval and modern,
Paris's inhabitants negotiated the transformation in a variety of ways contin-
gent on their class and gender. Berman (1982), drawing on Baudelaire, cap-
tures the sense during this period in which the old medieval quarters were
being obliterated and the new Paris—the city of lovers, of boulevards on which
to promenade, of streetlights and department stores and electric lighting—
was coming into being. The street, for example, became a scene of theatre as
the social disruptions brought on by this wave of time-space compression
manifested themselves. Thus, as two lovers in a café “sit gazing happily into
each other's eyes, suddenly they are confronted by other people's eyes. A
poor family dressed in rags—a graybearded father, a young son, and a baby—
come to a stop directly in front of them and gaze raptly at the bright new
world that is just inside” (p. 149). Both the joys and pains of modernism and
modernization are evident here in highly poignant human terms. In unifying
Parisian space through a comprehensive system of planning, Haussmann
transformed the city into the prototype of modernist urban planning dupli-
cated in dozens of other locales, including Vienna, Buenos Aires, Santiago,
and Rio de Janeiro. Similarly, Harvey (1985a) and Pred (1990b) portray “two
nineteenth-century European cities (Paris and Stockholm) torn apart by the
convulsions of modernity” (Gregory 1994:217) as their restless geographies
and the everyday lives of their inhabitants were subsumed by the disciplinary
logics of commodity production and consumption. From the structural
Marxist perspective, all of these changes are re
fl
ective of a broader impera-
tive to speed up the production and
flow of goods and people, to monetize
and commodify time and space, to escape one spatial
fl
fi
fix in exchange for
another, often at horrendous human costs.
The crisis of modernity during the collapse of the Victorian social order,
with all of its numerous ambiguities and contradictions, was also exempli
fi
ed
by
fin-de-siècle
Vienna during the waning days of the Habsburg Empire
(Schorske 1961; Janik and Toulmin 1973). In Vienna, the rising bourgeoisie
confronted the very last of feudal social relations, and the resulting collision
set o
fi
massive cultural sparks. Vienna, like Paris, had undergone a massive
reconstruction giving birth to the modern city, as exempli
ff
ed in the celebrated
Ringstrasse as well as the city's new boulevards and apartment buildings.
With the empire breaking up around the city, the broadly based social and
political crisis gave rise to an exceptionally fecund intellectual environment
comparable to
fi
Athens or Paris in the 1960s, in which arose,
to name a few, both Zionism (i.e., Theodor Herzl) and proto-fascism (i.e., Karl
Lueger and Georg von Schönerer, who inspired Hitler); Freudian psychology;
the Secession movement art of Gustav Klimt, which “confronted the culture
of scienti
fi
fth-century-
bc
c progress with an alien and shocking vision” (Schorske 1961:240);
the disconcerting music of Arnold Schoenberg; the positivism of the Vienna
Circle; and, understandably, given the numerous tongues spoken throughout
the Austro-Hungarian realm, Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy. Indeed,
fi
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