Afterword

Urban Formalism has examined what it historically meant to “read” the mid-nineteenth-century city, in the broadest sense of that term. I’ve placed forms at the heart of this study in the belief that the work of urban interpretation ultimately requires us to attend to the representative patterns of the city’s cultural formations. These days, such formations are increasingly recognized as “forms.” This study accordingly sits at the semantic intersection of some of the historical city’s most readable (which is not to say most easily apprehensible) formal “texts.” Among these last I have included the literary city, the material city, the political city, and the visual city. My argument, throughout, has been that the often-contradictory ways by which our predecessors interpreted the forms of the modern city at once made the metropolis more and less readable.