In this book I have been preoccupied with the question of modernity, with the challenges Western modernity poses to the subject's sense of their place in the world, and to the expression of these challenges in relation to the great capitals of the modern era, London and New York. Taylor tells us that ‘from the beginning, the number one problem of modern social science has been modernity itself: that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality); and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution)’ (Taylor 2004, 1). In analysing the travel writing of authors as far apart in time as Jules Janin and Jean Baudrillard we have seen that despite – or rather because of – the vastly different senses which they lend to modernity, travel writing engages us with all of the problems Taylor identifies through its activation of a differential space, wherein the understanding of the self as an agent in relation to others emerges with intensity. More than this, however, it is not only the self but also social, national and transnational identities that are challenged by the encounter with difference in the modern Western city.

We began by asking the question: ‘What is a city?’ and, through our reading of French travel accounts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have sought to show how the answer to this question is necessarily multiple, wrought anew time and again by the spatial practices of travellers across urban space and time. In this, the idea of space as an empty container or ‘neutral medium into which disjointed things, people and habitats might be introduced’ (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 308) is necessarily renounced. The traveller, as a practitioner of space, demonstrates very clearly the extent to which the figured city is always under pressure from the representational spaces of those who walk its streets and formulate meaning for their experiences through the nexus of alterity.

Taking the long view, we identified a shift in the material and poetic frameworks for obtaining to meaning, referring to a movement from legislative to interpretive modes of travel. As we have seen, travellers often attempt to articulate the city's difference by constructing oppositional poles: self/other, home/abroad, past/future, history/experience, sign/object and Europe/America.