'The city is a poem', writes Roland Barthes, 'but it is not a classical poem, a poem tidily centred on a subject. It is a poem which unfolds the signifier and it is this unfolding that ultimately the semiology of the city should try to grasp and make sing'.1 Writing at the cusp of the intellectual movement that became known as post-structuralism, Barthes anticipated subsequent developments taking place in the interdisciplinary field of urban studies.