Introduction

The city speaks of intimacy and isolation; of crowded tenements, teeming streets and dingy alleyways; of jostling commerce, civic grandeur and genteel elegance. Street hawkers, opportunistic musicians and prostitutes mix with labourers, bustling servants and sharp-eyed shopkeepers, while the fashionable pass by in carriages or stroll in parks and public gardens. Paths cross and intersect, multi-layered, sometimes touching, yet often uniquely separate. The city speaks of opportunity and oppression, of a physical topography mapped into imagined neighbourhoods with invisible boundaries, stratified by gender, class, race and ethnicity. Where place has multiple meanings according to time and circumstance, and where space – licit or illicit, respectable or disreputable, public or private, to name only a few – is produced and reproduced by users through their social relations and their interactions with both the landscape and the changing built environment. ¹