The contemporary interest in social theory and human geography involves a double movement: both the ‘socialisation’ of geographical analysis and the mapping of human geography into social theory. The second of these tasks is the more important because it adresses a series of strategic weaknesses in modern social theory. Such a reconstructive project also bears directly on the way in which geographies are reconstructed and represented, and the present essay uses this connection to explore the politics and poetics of three interventions in the historical geography of modernity: David Harvey's account of Second Empire Paris, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (which saw Paris as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’), and Allan Pred's reconstruction of fin-de-siècle Stockholm.