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The Social Construction of Public Locations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Lennard J. Davis
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Extract

Locations, particularly public, popular locations, are constructed ideologically. By that I mean that places, like other artifacts in culture, accrete meaning and are in effect created by that meaning. The Haussmanization of Paris provides a particularly good instance of the way that the nineteenth-century city was newly conceived of as an organized, ideological system with a shape – a logic and a uniformity. When Baron Haussman attempted to impose the boulevard and sweeping avenues over the crazy quilt of the old quartiers, he was investing public place with public meaning. The nineteenth century particularly saw the rise of the concept of the public place. As the Goncourts noted in 1860, “The interior is passing away. Life turns back to become public” (Clark 34).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 17 , Spring 1989 , pp. 23 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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