Health and beauty in the body politic: Subjectivity and urban space

Space is an important category of analysis for political theorists interested in studying power and subjectivity As the work of Michel Foucault illustrates, spatial practices are crucial for the operation of disciplinary power and help to produce the conditions and limits of subjectivity In this article, I use the insights of Foucault, as well as Henri Lefebvre and Julia Kristeva, to examine the production of urban subjects in turn-of-the-century Washington. Specifically I compare the Senate Park Commission Plan of 1902 for the Washington Mall with the alley and tenement reform movement that took hold around the same period. The contrast between these two kinds of spatial practice serves to illustrate two very different-but by no means opposed-modes of deploying power in the city. Both of these forms of power operated to establish and police the parameters of the proper citizen body.