In Repressed Spaces Paul Carter tours the cultural history of agoraphobia, the fear of open space. There have been many attempts to explain and treat the condition: urban designers have linked it to bad city planning; psychoanalysts, calling it 'street panic', have blamed it on the Oedipus complex; psychiatrists have tied it to existential insecurity; feminists have rooted it in the violence of the male gaze; sociologists have called it a fear of the 'market-place' of late capitalist conspicuous consumption. Starting from the fact that Freud himself was agoraphobic, Paul Carter finds at the heart of psychoanalysis a 'repressed environmental unconscious'. He traces the origins of space fear back to the ambiguous appeal of the Greek agora, and he finds its modern expression in the colonist's mania for clearing the land. He argues that the myriad manifestations of agoraphobia stem from a primary movement inhibition, one created by the physical and emotional obstacles our culture places in the way of ordinary walking and erotic meeting. Since its first modern description in 1871, agoraphobia has become a major creative theme in writing, art and film. Figures as diverse as Rilke, Le Corbusier, Di Chirico and Emmanual Levinas have used it to diagnose Modernity's malaise. In the 1920s the temptations of public spaces inspired an entire genre of German 'street films'. Focusing on the work of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, Carter argues for a 'poetics of agoraphobia', an interpretation of the agoraphobe's experience as a profound response to the dehumanization of the contemporary city. His conclusion is a provocative challenge not only to architects and urban designers, but to anyone interested in the fate of public space.