Humanities 254: Modern Cities (McCole)
Reading Questions: Olsen, “The City as Home”
Chapter 7, “The Building and the Dwelling”
1. The central idea of this chapter is the importance of the nineteenth-century
ideal of domesticity. What was it?
2. Work out the different attitudes toward how living in flats, apartments,
or apartment blocks corresponded to the ideal of domesticity among the middle
classes
in London, Paris, and Vienna.
Chapter 8, “Inside the Dwelling”
1. How did the arrangement of the interiors of houses or flats reflect the
values of the classes that inhabited them?
2. Why were the English so scandalized by the French on this issue?
3. The Viennese were “seeking representation rather than comfort” (126).
Explain.
Chapter 9, “Social Geography”
1. How, and to what extent, did the changes in the nineteenth century segregate
social classes from one another in London, Paris, and Vienna? What were the
big trends?
2. “The splendid blocks that came to line all of the new streets in favored
districts, by concentrating the affluent under one roof, worked to destroy whatever
social mixture had earlier existed within the same building,” but “behind
every boulevard, with its elegant façades and middle-class residents,
lay intact an older, working-class Paris” (146-147). What does Olsen mean?
What verdict about Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris does he reach
as a result?
Chapter 10, “Villa Suburbia”
1. “London is unique among the great cities of Europe in the extent and
ubiquity of its districts of detached and semidetached houses…however much
the fashionable might sneer…it provided for the great majority of the middle
classes the ideal answer to their housing needs” (160-161). In light
of this, how does Olsen respond to serious critics of suburbia (not just snobs),
who include our friend Lewis Mumford (163)?
2. How were the new suburbs of Paris and Vienna different from those of London?