Questions of the panicked structures and spaces of the city are at the center of intellectual investigation across a variety of fields from cultural politics and architecture to cultural geography and literature. The extract and three articles collected here differ in the positions they represent, the intent behind their texts, and their emphasis. These texts relate to such issues as the importance of democratic city formations and political associations, the sensation of urban fear and esthetic spaces of catastrophe, including their function in our increasingly technologized everyday life and moods. But for whom has the contemporary city been devised?The typical modern city of Paris, for example, was that imagined in and realized through the application of the plans of a number of extremely powerful architects and town planners. The most well-known and powerful of these was the French town planner, Baron George-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91). Haussmann drew up guidelines and was responsible for envisaging, developing, and achieving the extensive rebuilding of the modern city of Paris under Napoléon III (1808–73), Emperor of the French (1852–71). The most completely accomplished of Haussmann's renovations were the extended boulevards and spectacular vistas branching out from the Arc de Triomphe, the ceremonial arch standing at the heart of the Place de l'Etoile at the pinnacle of the Champs Elysées, and which even today form much of the city's character. Haussmann was personally associated with a public and rather bureaucratic architectural idea of the modern movement of town planning, distinguished by his audacious transformation of the layout of Paris. His was a modern line of attack on architecture and town planning that stressed the guiding principles of movement, broadening, and laceration rooted in a forcefully centralized and circular plan, and the building of wide approaches to France's capital city. A critical account of Haussmann's appliance of his ideas can be found in Jules Ferry's scathing descriptions of “Haussmannization,” Les Comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann (2000 [1868]).Haussmann's methods strengthened an important alteration of the mid-nineteenth-century city environment of Paris as his notions were taken up and enacted by a multitude of Parisian architects and planners under his direction. Essentially, the entire city was reconstructed according to Haussmann's policies, with the most famed examples arguably being the open spaces he engineered, such as the Place de l'Opéra and the Place de la Nation. Still, Haussmann's conceptions are recognizable in the majority of mid-nineteenth-century European cities in the shape of, for instance, the great railway station projects that additional architects and planners believed fulfilled the need to transport rising mid-nineteenth-century metropolitan residents economically. In terms of sheer numbers of people the huge railway stations of Paris such as the Gare du Nord at Place Napoléon III have clearly transported hundreds of thousands of French and other citizens from every corner of France and beyond. However, many French people protested at the time that Haussmannization and the erecting of such public utilities also ruined the only remaining remnants of the medieval town. Haussmann has thus become either one of the most disdained or one of the most distinguished figures in the annals of French architecture and town planning, dependent on whether one considers him as the man who wrecked premodern Paris or as the man who shaped modern Paris (Carmona 2002). Critiques of Haussmann more often than not entail pointing out the immense cost of his scheme and the fact that his plan led not just to the physical demolition of pre-modern Paris but also that its implementation led to the social alienation felt everywhere in modern Paris. Robert Herbert (1998) presents an art historical examination of the impressionist movements' representation of this decline in social relations, particularly amongst the leisured classes of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian society and in the paintings of Manet.In numerous respects the contemporary adversary of Haussmann's modernist dream is the French “urbanist” Paul Virilio (1932–), an unqualified yet practicing architect and “critic of the art of technology” (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 172) rather than a qualified town planner. Yet Virilio's nonqualified standing has by no means prohibited his books, most notably his latest volume, City of Panic: Elsewhere Begins Here (2005), an extract from which features in this special section of Cultural Politics, from having a deep influence upon conceptions of the metropolis. These ideas range from the electronic architecture of “The Overexposed City” (Virilio 1991b: 9–29) and urban planning as a “Critical Space” (Virilio 1991a: 119–41) to countless insights into inner-city living in the age of new information and communications technologies and real-time action at a distance (Virilio 1997; 2000a).Influenced by Walter Benjamin (2002), Virilio's major hypotheses in City of Panic's “Tabula rasa,” for example, arise from his affection for particular areas of Paris like Clichy and its recurrent popular protest marches, and the Beaujon Hospital, where he first stumbled upon modern architecture. Virilio contends that Haussmann's Parisian forms and spaces present much more than just a number of visible axes through the nameless accumulation of quartiers, a multiplication in the amount of avenues, and the creation of a huge sewer system. For such axes, quartiers, avenues, and sewer systems, Virilio suggests, have led to the dominance of modern architecture and town planning by fear with problematical political and militarized consequences. Haussmann's Paris is then for Virilio not so much an “aerated” city as a “zinc envelope” shaped by generations of roofers. Similarly, Haussmann's “hygienism” or his attempt to “aerate” Paris by providing it with plazas necessary for the relaxation of the circulating crowds also let loose equivalent schemes such as the construction of the Sainte-Anne asylum in addition to the remand centre of la Santé. What Virilio is exploring at this juncture is of course the emergence of the ideologies of hygiene, aeration, and, significantly, security that developed into critical components of the modernization and development of Paris from the 1860s onwards, and which were the inventions of men such as Haussmann. Virilio's discussion of these ideologies also acts as an important reminder of the connections between his writings and those of Michel Foucault on hospital architecture and the organization of the medical gaze in urban and social space over and above the issues of the visibility of bodies and centralized surveillance. Certainly, both for Virilio and for Foucault, in early modern hospitals it wasBut, according to Virilio, for a few people, even today, Haussmann did not flatten Paris anywhere near sufficiently. In fact, such individuals would like to ensure that the city becomes not an autodrome but an aerodrome. This is a desire that Virilio describes as a yearning to return to the desert, to “Tabula rasa.” Further afield, and in the real desert during the Iraq War of 2003, Virilio argues that the Anglo-American Coalition took advantage of the “Haussmannesque-Stalinesque” urbanization of Baghdad. For the Coalition's armed processions not only captured the broad streets of the Iraqi capital but also slashed its way through the foundations of the city to attack its core. In this way, it is reasonable to contend that Haussmann's design of Paris and its ensuing “Stalinization” in Baghdad not only assisted the flow of people and vehicles through the French and Iraqi capitals but also, almost a century and a half later, facilitated the Anglo-American Coalition's armed forces and its M1A1 Abrams tanks in their assault on and occupation of Baghdad (Murray and Scales 2003: 209–18). Virilio's city of panic, be it Paris or Baghdad, is thus extraordinarily dissimilar to that of Haussmann and his supporters in the hygiene and aeration, auto, and aero industries because it concentrates on the importance and meaning of the securitization and militarization of the modern city.Many of what Virilio considers important characteristics of the districts and localities of the metropolis of fear are delineated in the extract from City of Panic, “Democracy of Emotion,” which is introduced by the book's translator, Julie Rose, in this special section. Topmost of these characteristics is “media conformism” and the “standardization of opinion” that ensues. In truth, these are the characteristics he believes to have been commandeered from celebrity to such a degree that the phrase to “create an event” no longer symbolizes the realities of the city streets. Rather, such realities are stage-managed by a whole host of urban and audiovisual supports typical of hypermodern cities of dread. Virilio's extract also discusses how media conformism and the synchronization of opinion generate an “exemplariness” in which to be exemplary denotes a kind of creative destruction that involves both the appropriation and obliteration of the work of others, as evidenced by contemporary art outrages and political assaults. Whilst Virilio's comments can seem rather exaggerated at times, they do have to be understood as components of a diversity of important observations drawn together in City of Panic that interrogate the basic beliefs of modern architecture and town planning. Virilio does this in “Democracy of Emotion” by, for instance, comparing the “event” of the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001 with the “anti-event” of the “pathetic” attack by a suicidal teenage boy crashing a Cessna 142 into the twenty-eighth floor of the Bank of America tower in Tampa on January 5, 2002. All the same, for Virilio, what is of supreme importance today is not the risk of a democracy of opinion that seeks to substitute itself for representative democracy. To be more precise, it is the contemptible menace of a democracy of collective emotion, a democracy that is simultaneously informationalized and harmonized, interconnected, globalized, and technologized, the prototype for which, says Virilio, is a sort of “postpolitical tele-evangelism.”Virilio's City of Panic consequently denotes something of a decisive moment in how the metropolis may be perceived, and it is probable that it will have numerous effects in a diversity of fields. Over and above being a contribution to the mounting realization that is enlightening the architecture and planning professions of the catastrophe of modern town planning, City of Panic is also liable to be an important contribution to the formulation of contemporary cultural and political attitudes. Partially due to City of Panic we can, for example, conceivably anticipate that the peace movement may well advocate more forcefully that architects and planners must abandon what the “anarchitect” Lebbeus Woods (1995: 46–53) has labeled their “everyday war” on the city and instead embrace a nonviolent urbanism. In the same way, City of Panic can possibly be appreciated as a forerunner to a rethinking of the global city completely reliant on informationalized systems that is at present being established and ever more condemned by what Virilio (1997: 58–68) has identified as “urban” or “grey” ecologists. Grey ecologists are not merely involved with inner-city air and noise pollution but also with the “sudden pollution of distances and lengths of time that is degrading the expanse of our habitat” (ibid.: 58; original emphasis). As a consequence, in these and other respects, Virilio's City of Panic connects with the other recent books of note he has written such as The Information Bomb (2000b) and Art and Fear (2003).Even so, Virilio's tirade against the modern city is not tolerated by everyone, as illustrated by Nigel Thrift's article in this special section, “Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster.” Thrift argues that the city is a space where social scientists listen in on other people's talk. And so, starting from his assertion that philosophers and architects tend not to be susceptible to prying into their fellow passengers' conversations, Thrift links the railway station and the airport with the distinction between a social scientist, such as himself, and Virilio, whom Thrift portrays as a “philosopher-architect.” Thrift further connects his argument to Virilio's stance on the city, society, and dialog, and to how Virilio writes, to his concepts, and, critically, to the absence in Virilio's City of Panic of what social scientists regard as hard evidence concerning what people believe and act upon. From Thrift's standpoint, as a result, Virilio is both an inspiring philosopher-architect and an urbanist who describes and examines not so much the reality as the idea of people. In this way, he casts considerable doubt on Virilio's hypotheses concerning the nature of humanity and philosophy, technology and everyday life. Thrift's reading of City of Panic accordingly critically evaluates Virilio's mania with catastrophic urbanism, with acceleration, sensation, and politics, and, by this means, reasons that, on the evidence of his latest book, Virilio is perhaps no longer the inspirational critic he once was.Finally in this special section, the general meaning of Virilio's City of Panic and its spaces of fear are deliberated. Verena Andermatt Conley, in her book review essay, “Virilio's Electronic Dérive,” presents an analysis centered on Virilio's interventions into the speed-spaces of new information and communications technologies. Andermatt Conley begins by highlighting the spatiotemporal transformations associated with the unfavorable influence of speed on humankind in a range of cultural and political spaces reaching from aerial warfare to democratic organization and citizenship. In a contribution that to some extent concurs with the apprehensions emphasized by Thrift, Andermatt Conley regrets the intensified pace of Virilio's writing in City of Panic, his random collections of speedily written comments interspersed by excerpts from newspapers. It is useful to compare Andermatt Conley's article with the complexities of acceleration and its spaces in Thrift's contribution, which maintains that the influence of ever-increasing speed on society shows that its effect is more multihued than perhaps Virilio allows. Yet Andermatt Conley's article on the manifold implications of Virilian temporal compression, whereby the acceleration to the utmost speed alters what Fredric Jameson (1991: 44) has described as our capacity to “cognitively map” the vastness of globalization, does connect powerfully with Virilio and Lotringer's (2002) concerns in Crepuscular Dawn. Consequently, Andermatt Conley's, like Virilio and Lotringer's, is an attempt to comprehend both our individual and social disorientation in the contemporary speed-spaces of the city.I want to close by contesting the domination of the supposition, chiefly existing within present-day architecture and town planning, that the city is an entity to be incessantly experimented upon, above all with regard to vision technologies. In City of Panic's “Tabula rasa,” for instance, Virilio tells the story of the setting up at the exits of specified Paris Metro stations of video display units intended to supplant the erstwhile quartier maps. Given the title of “IN SITU,” the video screens presented scenes of the nearby quartier, with the option of pinpointing the adjacent roads by means of a roving camera. Nonetheless, this experiment was canceled, regardless of its financial importance to advertisers, because the video surveillance of adjoining boulevards merely intensified the already high level of unease experienced by the harassed commuters of Paris. Furthermore, when Metro users resurfaced onto the streets, they discovered that, following their electronically guided journey, they once more had to trust in their human cognitive maps of the city. But, given that most commuters' cognitive maps were at odds with the IN SITU network's, large numbers of them became disoriented, as they were unable to locate their personal spatial and temporal indicators. In other words, Parisian Metro users' cognitive maps could not handle being filled beyond capacity with the virtual space of the IN SITU video screens. Similar to their counterpart, the Parisian motorist, these commuters' cognitive maps were obstructed by the virtual congestion of the once sweeping and real spaces of Haussmann's vistas. Yet, if nothing else, the malfunctioning of the IN SITU experiment did expose the ignorance of today's architects and town planners regarding the importance of the cognitive map to the typical Parisian Metro user.My hope is that this special section on the cultural politics of Virilio's City of Panic will persuade readers that their encounter with the urban can be both more undisturbed and more fertile than the one sketched directly above in a variety of ways. Amongst such alternative urban encounters are the often overlooked cognitive and corporeal experiences of the city of panic, as the IN SITU example demonstrated, by experimentally and technologically fixated architects and urban planners. Others concerned with cognition and corporeality when considering our encounters with the city have, of course, long underscored the importance of the psychological and bodily experience of the metropolis. One landmark article is the Situationist Chtcheglov's (1981 [1953]: 1–4) “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” which called attention to the significance of the place of the human face and to the space of the imagination, of natural light, love, and, crucially, passion for any genuine appreciation of the city. A more recent offering is Henri Lefebvre's (2004)Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Building on the inheritance of Marxian geography, Lefebvre discusses the cognitive, biological, and social rhythms associated with our encounters in the city, and, like Virilio, shows the relationship between the urban, speed, and ways of life in social space. Consequently, any formulary for what might be termed a “halcyon urbanism,” laboring to revolutionize existing residential and post-industrial environments, must escape from the delusions surrounding privatized electronic barriers and surveillance cameras and from, above all, the sentries, ghettos, and citadels of Alphaville (Godard 1965), the ultimate modern city. In contrast to Virilio, though, I believe that what does bear revealing are the “names” of the people that currently survive in the Brazilian favellas of Sao Paulo and beyond, those accidents in time who currently live and die in a city of panic and whose elsewhere has already begun. For they are also the “Ivan Johnsons” and the “Lemmy Cautions,” the Open Agents of the Outlands, the menace to the security of Alphaville's ALPHA-60, and the enemies of its ordinariness, of its innumerable technocomputations and enigmas, its circuits, its logic, and its judgments.I would like to thank Joanne Roberts and Ryan Bishop for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this introduction.