The Life of the City Space, Humour, and the Experience of Truth in Fin-de-siècle Montmartre

The Life of the City is a bold and innovative reassessment of the early urban avant-garde movements that sought to re-imagine and reinvent the experiential life of the city. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical analysis of the relationships between biological life, urban culture, and modern forms of biopolitical ‘experiential authority’, Julian Brigstocke traces the failed attempts of Parisian radicals to turn the ‘crisis of authority’ in late nineteenth century Paris into an opportunity to invent new forms of urban commons.