Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, Marina Lathouri -- Urban life / Diana Periton -- Heads: Philip-Lorca di Corcia and the paradox of urban portraiture / Hugh Campbell -- A space for the imagination: depicting women readers in the nineteenth-century city / Kathryn Brown -- "So the flâneur goes for a walk in his room": interior, arcade, cinema, metropolis / Charles Rice -- Exhibitionism: John Soane's "model house" / Helene Furján -- Private house, public house: Victor Horta's ubiquitous domesticity / Amy Catania Kulper -- Drawing and dispute: the strategies of the Berlin block / Katharina Borsi -- "The necessity of the plan": visions of individuality and collective intimacies / Marina Lathouri -- City is house and house is city: Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom, and the architecture of homecoming / Karin Jaschke -- Urban play: intimate space and postwar subjectivity / Roy Kozlovsky -- Pervasive intimacy: the Unité d'habitation and Golden Lane as instruments of postwar domesticity / Christopher Hight -- Zoom: Google Earth and global intimacy / Vittoria Di Palma.

Questions traditional conceptualizations of 'public' and 'private,' and illuminates the ways in which the modern metropolis can be seen as a peculiarly intimate construction, with its notion of the public predicated ultimately on a concept of the private individual or autonomous self.