Shame, guilt, and the production of urban space

Guilt and shame operate in connection with individual and collective forces. This paper explores how space is contingent in psychic processes, and how the generation and negotiation of feelings of guilt and shame develop in the interplay between internal processes of the mind and the worldly ‘outside’. By presenting two examples, precisely commodity consumption and sex, and a set of fictional anecdotes, the article proposes a series of hypotheses concerning distance, proximity and visibility in relation to shame and guilt, and it analyses mechanisms of resistance to guilt and shame, which include spatial architectures of concealment, displacement and mimesis. It is argued that an explicit recognition of the role of guilt and shame in shaping urban spaces may lead to a better understanding of the mechanics of production of space, may contribute to further bridging geographical and psychoanalytical debates, and may have a political and transformative potential, with meaningful geographical implications.