Sometimes the city is seen as the domain of male ordering and control against the hazards of nature, the latter being perceived as female; more often, however, the city is gendered female, as a reality that is unpredictable, chaotic and threatening. Analyzing oppositions such as city/nature, public/private, centre/suburb, Hilde Heynen addresses the different gendered images that are associated with the city. She traces the ways that urban planning, by attempting to discipline the disordered and diseased body of the metropolis, uses the underlying metaphor of the city as a female body that also surfaces in the idea of the city as labyrinth. Hilde Heynen teaches architecture theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.