Ideals of the Body (Hardback)
Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris
Series: Culture Politics & the Built Environment
Pages: 352
Illustrations: 109 b&w images, 11 color plates
ISBN: 9780822945284
Published: 31st May 2018
Casemate UK Academic
(click here for international delivery rates)
Order within the next 3 hours, 18 minutes to get your order processed the next working day!
Need a currency converter? Check XE.com for live rates
Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.