The passageway linking the road with the little square inside the residential patio under the building where I live has, in addition to the sign that indicates its name, another life. There are often people sleeping there. They lie on sheets of cardboard, their belongings arranged at their heads and their shoes carefully lined up. The city looks on its beggars and homeless with a sense of unease. With paradoxical attitudes, perhaps. The Swedish film-maker Ruben Östlund puts it well in his 2017 film, The Square, where he interlinks this contradiction with the tribulations of the director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Stockholm. In the passageway, despite its tunnel-like sordidness, evening also enfolds adolescent couples as they embrace. They deserve a novel of the same name as the one Virginia Woolf gave her collection of essays, A Room of One’s Own. Two different ways of approaching the network of innocuous routines in the public sphere.

It has never been easy to turn the city into a room of one’s own. Even in 1969, the poet Anne Sexton wrote a line in her book Love Poems that confirms this, claiming we “are not permitted to kiss on the street”. It is an extraordinary line of poetry, allowing us to identify where and when it would scan well when read and capture the zeitgeist of urban thought. In Boston, Massachusetts, where Sexton lived, it obviously did scan. In other places across the world, it continues to do so. A few (but not too many) years ago, a kiss between a couple of twenty-somethings caught on the security camera of an underground station in Shanghai and published on YouTube shook the Chinese public. “In China”, wrote the journalist Jordi Pérez Colomé, “couples do not touch in public. They don’t even hold hands or give each other farewell kisses.” The ability to subvert the social order with a kiss excites us in the West. In the first decade of this century in China, the first photos of a kiss between two men and between two women, under the slightly incredulous gaze of a portrait of Mao, were released with an aura of revolution. The journalist Eugenia Mont adds that, “In the streets and parks (of Beijing), on the underground and in fast-food restaurants, it is possible to see young couples hand in hand, embracing, cuddling up together. They don’t show embarrassment at being in public places, perhaps because they have no private places.”

It is now worth asking oneself when it was that European cities started to contemplate these kisses – either with a sense of scandal or with the vague desire for the new – which suddenly started to break down the strict divisions between public and private. In Franz Hessel (1880–1941), the streets of Berlin had a magnificent navigator and mapmaker during the first decades of the 20th century. He wrote a delightful volume titled Walking in Berlin, published in 1929, which critics have always considered fieldwork for the ideas of his friend Walter Benjamin. No couple of German twenty-somethings could kiss on the streets of Berlin in Chinese style without Hessel noticing. “A Sunday in autumn. Sunset…”, Hessel writes in a description of the Tiergarten, the great park in central Berlin, “The earth breathes out a sigh of vapour, less than the open fields, more than a field of potatoes. On the many, very many benches spread out in the twilight and gloom of the winding paths, pairs of lovers sit. Some, it seems to me, are not well versed in amatory exchanges; they could learn much from a Parisian worker when it comes to caressing their dainty loved ones. Some have managed to get an entire bench for their two-person trysts, but those who are forced to double up do not seem to bother each other.” Hessel harks back to Paris as “the most carnal city ever to have existed”, in the words of one of his novels.

In Paris, urban vitality, movement and colour seduce a young painter in the early years of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso. Dazzled by the daily spectacle before his very eyes, the artist took pains both to experience new forms, influences or styles as well as to capture moments of Parisian life. And, above all, to understand how those who had gone before him had interpreted them. As early as the late 19th century, the Costumbrista artists had been impressed by the new intimacy of lovers on the street. Thus, in 1895, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923) depicted an extraordinary and passionate “Kiss” against a nocturnal, solitary and urban backdrop.

Between 1900 and 1901, Picasso enthusiastically painted multiple aspects of the Parisian life seducing him. These paintings present rapid and imperfect strokes to express this excitement. Of all the Parisian motifs, there is one that Picasso managed to transform into an emblem – like almost everything he created, in fact – capable of generating a new pictorial reality: the carnal embrace. These embraces begin in the outlying districts of Paris, with “Lovers in the Street” (one pastel, one oil and one charcoal sketch exist), and continue with “Embrace in a closed bedroom” (more intimate in appearance, although violence is present in the nocturnal light that illuminates the room, emanating from a window and the city outside the painting, unseen but perceived). This motif is returned to, in sublimated form in a fantastic pastel from the Blue Period, similarly entitled “The Embrace”, which he painted in Barcelona in 1903. But the next year, in Paris once more, Picasso’s embraces recover their violence of carnal portraiture, as evinced by a prolific series of drawings, “The Lovers”, “The Kiss”, or the countless variations of “Couple making love”. Through these works, Picasso discovers and reveals that in Paris amorous passion is a founding theme of the modern city: the intimacy attained by lovers in the street is in direct proportion to the anonymity and heterogeneity offered them by urban life. In Picasso’s Paris of the early 20th century, Anne Sexton’s line of poetry would not scan.

In a review of Walking in Berlin, Walter Benjamin made an interesting observation: “Landscape, that is what [Paris] is in fact for the passer-by. Or, to be more exact: for him [Hessel] the city presents itself in its opposing poles. It opens as a landscape and closes around him like a room.” The city of the flâneur is a landscape – according to Benjamin – which is simultaneously both external and internal. This is a core idea in Benjamin’s thinking, which he may have discovered on his visit to Naples, where he was impressed by the “porousness” of urban life. But he developed it in his study of the Paris of Baudelaire: “The street becomes a living space for the flâneur, who finds himself as at home between the façades of the buildings as the citizen does inside his own four walls.”

Architecture and urban planning at the outset of the 20th century were about to decree (at least as a utopia) an end to the division between what is inside and what is outside. The inside and outside of a building, with architectural rationalism’s new iron and glass structures, ceased to be immoveable concepts. The German Pavilion in Barcelona designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich may stand as the paradigm of this meeting between spheres.

The confusion between internal and external life took root in this period and has reached its conclusion in a present in which public and private have lost their significance as fields of reference. It has one of its clearest origins in the poetics of Charles Baudelaire, for whom there was never any division between inside and outside, between known and unknown. Furthermore, in that crack where internal and external meet, he was able to see how the “most mysterious” part of being human took shape. Consider poems such as “À une passante” or so many of the texts from the Petits poèmes en prose.

Walter Benjamin, perhaps the greatest reader of Baudelaire, named one of his most personal, creative and illuminating books One-way Street. In its pages, he reflects: “Suddenly my gaze was able to take in a completely labyrinthine neighbourhood, a network of streets which I had avoided for years, the day on which a loved one of mine moved there. It was as if they had fitted a reflector on their window which cut off the area with shafts of light.” The social sciences would traditionally have it that urban space is the product of architectural, monumental and planning practices, and social and cultural coding. Henri Lefebvre added a third element, the experiencing of urban space in everyday life; its being lived. This third way of understanding urban space takes solid form in Benjamin’s text. The significance of the avoided and unknown neighbourhood suddenly changes following the moving there of a “loved one”. The city is the place where two people have kissed. That definition may now be put forward with as much authority as any other.

The city turns into the time of experiences, not into what the monuments tell us. And what better to evoke the urban kiss than photography. Photographers of the 20th century have transformed the affectionate and intimate caress between lovers into the seductive symbol of the city. But the optimistic and extraordinarily famous plates of Robert Doisneau (1912-1924), for instance, which are witness to the triumph of the individual over structure, may belie a less harmonious backdrop. At the same time that his Parisian couples prove admirable in the vehemence, splendour and centrality of their kisses, another sexuality removed from urban conventions creates a secret map of cities: filthy backstreets, badly-lit parks, dilapidated buildings, public urinals…

University lecturer Jesús Martínez Oliva has carried out an in-depth study of how the spaces for the relations between homosexuals evolved in the 20th century. He traces out a path from remote, marginal and anonymous locations that were often degraded, via the staking out of their own spaces – bars, saunas, sex clubs – up to the current creation of exclusive areas and neighbourhoods. On this point, Martínez Oliva makes a reflection that also has a bearing on the present: “If the occupation of public space was creative and liberating, or if at least it questioned certain prerogatives and norms, we would need to ask ourselves whether the use of space in gay neighbourhoods is equally liberating, or whether in fact that potential for resistance is lacking. One of the problems lies in whether that visibility interferes, in a real sense, with the rest of city life, or whether it is a mirage, a simple state of freedom contained within the frame of one district. Another problem would be the way these neighbourhoods organise and inhabit space, which seems increasingly regulatory, profit-making and adaptive.”

The incorporation of the term “mirage” into an approach born of the liberating emergence of intimacy in the street raises a new perspective. Will gay neighbourhoods, as well as parks with surveillance where teenagers kiss, or the inoffensive passageway under my building, serve the purpose, as they did 100 years ago, of “blowing up all of that prison-like world”, as Benjamin might wonder?

Increasingly at present – and in the final analysis it may be one of its essential elements – the urban space yearned for as a liberating force tends towards redundancy. Places that are redundant in what they offer in terms of a use chosen a priori; experiences that are redundant due to the incessant multiplication of behaviours designed in advance; experience that is redundant due to its stereotypical nature imposing a constant, almost obscene audio-visual display of the intimate, private and personal spheres. Redundancy is the condition of contemporary space. Redundancy is the death of the space conceived of as a personal liberation in the face of speculative urban planning and a codified society. Redundancy is the name of the concentration camp of today’s cities where even a kiss given in public does not have a liberating capacity. Teenage kisses have become the paradigm of that redundancy: the reason for a competition included in the record books. In 2017, almost 40,000 people kissed each other in Mexico to beat the world record held by London, where shortly before 16,500 couples kissed each other at one single, timed, moment.

*Translated by Dan Whitcombe / KennisTranslations