The idea of "social space" is a key concept in urban planning and the social sciences today.  While it defies any single definition, it can generally be understood as the notion that the form of the spaces of everyday life reflects the cultural values, social norms, and mode of production of the society that produced it. Flight from Modernity first traces how and why the "social" and the "spatial" came to be conceptually linked in French social scientific research. It then examines the impact of this way of conceptualizing urban space on the problem of housing and the suburbs in postwar France—a political conundrum that has never gone away. Historicizing this discourse, which is now indelible, serves to illuminate the influence of French colonies on the metropole, the application of sociological expertise to the study of the built environment, and the French New Left's spatially oriented critique of capitalism.

Jeanne Haffner's research, writing, and teaching focus on the intersection of visual studies, urban studies, and the history of technology in twentieth-century Europe and the United States.  Although trained as an historian, she writes regularly on contemporary urban issues for the Next American City and other magazines. Haffner has worked at various urban research institutions, including the International Institute for Urban Development, the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, and the ETH Wohnforum/ETH Center for Research on the Built Environment in Zürich, Switzerland. Her publications include Flight from Modernity: Aerial Photography and the Emergence of a Social Conception of Space (MIT Press, forthcoming), Historicizing the View from Below (e-Scholarship, 2010), and Things Visible and Invisible (ArchitectureBoston, 2009). She is a former visiting scholar of Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (GSD) and has taught at the ETH in Zürich and Brown University.