The Sociality of Form: Camillo Sitte's Urban Morphologies

This article examines a text by a lesser-known figure of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Camillo Sitte's Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1889), tracing the relationship between urban form and social structure in Sitte's treatise. It identifies the key points of this relationship in terms of causality: the form of public spaces can determine the form of social life; surrogacy: the throngs of the places' inanimate inhabitants, the statues and monuments, are placeholders for the missing human gatherings; and finally displacement: the thick sociality of community life is transferred onto a heightened relationality with urban forms. Sitte's text sublimates the social; it diffuses abstract social structures—density, relationality, connection—onto the spatial morphologies of the city. Ultimately, this diffusion results in a capacious yet weakened model of sociality.