The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

A Spatial Story of Exchange
and nineteenth centuries, it was “applied to prostitutes.” 55 In the rambling
tales, the term was used to describe upper-class courtesans, ladies of fashion
or “lady-birds,” as well as prostitutes of a lower class: “nymphs of the pavé,”
mollishers, mots, or doxies. But what defines the cyprian is not her class, for
many cyprians mixing in aristocratic circles came originally from lower- or
middle-class families, but her spatial position. The cyprian’s occupation of
public space defines her sexual identity—she is a public woman, a woman
of the town, a prostitute.
Together with the prostitute (the only female among the social characters—including
the collector, ragpicker, detective, flâneur, and gambler—
that Walter Benjamin named as allegories of modern urban life), the cyprian
is the only female who figures in the ramble. Texts about London in the early
decades of the nineteenth century are populated by many males—ramblers,
corinthians, bruisers, dandies—but the cyprian is the only female to move
through the streets and public spaces of London. Since walking is an integral
part of the definition of the cyprian, she could be described as a female rambler.
The cyprian is an urban peripatetic, but her body is also the site of the
ramblers’ desire and gaze, and these contain her. While the rambler is celebrated
as an urban explorer, actively engaged in the constant pursuit of pleasure,
the figure of the mobile cyprian is a cause of concern. Her movement
represents the blurring of public and private boundaries, the uncontrollability
of women in the city. Her mobility, her link to the street, to the public
places of the city, is represented as the cause of her eventual destruction. 56
The ramble serves to confine, both spatially and temporally, women’s
use and experience of the urban realm. Females who strolled through the
streets, parks, and shopping arcades at the time of the ramble were considered
to be of loose morals and so were discouraged from occupying urban
space. To represent women as cyprians, as sexual and exchangeable commodities
in the rambling narratives, articulates male fear concerning female
sexuality and works morally and ideologically to control women’s movement
in the city.
KNOWING THE CITY/SELF
In this spatial story, I have told you of the exchange of women, of the
ramble, of men’s pursuit of pleasure and their fear of women’s mobility in the
city. In telling you this story, in representing the gendering of space through
the activities of the rambler, my story may work against me; it may serve to
define and confine our conception of the urban movement of women. But
this is not the whole story. I have also told you of my own pursuit of knowledge
through the exchange of ideas—of the fluid relation between the the-