Anglais: Through a comparative examination of Montreal and Brussels, this thesis considers the way city dwellers shaped the social and cultural significance of urban space in terms of sensorial experiences and bodily practices. The analysis is based primarily on qualitative sources relating to urban life and to the relationship with the city environment during the period 1880-1914, a time when cities underwent intense transformations associated with modernity and industrialisation. The discourses and representations examined in this study were produced by a wide range of urban actors, including elected officials and municipal bureaucrats, industrialists, urban reformers, factory and housing inspectors, workers, doctors, hygienists, writers, artists and ordinary citizens. This was a period in which the city was increasingly conceptualised as a total, organic object. Consequently, the thesis first examines representations, both critical and celebratory, of these cities in their entirety, showing how the discourse about urban space was constructed through experiences with, and perceptions of, its materiality. The subsequent chapters examine, in turn, spaces of industrial production, homes and the streets. In each of these spaces, representations of these changing environments were produced in marked reference to the body and the senses. In a time marked by the rise of scientific and rational thought, the sources consulted demonstrate the centrality of personal and subjective experiences in the construction of understandings of the city. Analysing these specific milieus also affords the opportunity to consider the cultural significance of the body, as well as its place in the social tensions that characterised the period. The comparative approach through which these cities are analysed illuminates the development of similar processes in analogous, yet discrete, contexts. In this way, certain specificities of Brussels and Montreal, as well the commonalities they shared, are brought to light. The principal objective ...