Asking if Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities can be read as a city novel, this paper links modern concepts of space (from the contexts of philosophical, biological, and psycho-physical theories around 1900) to Musil's prose, which is described as a praxis of "space writing." The author presents this kind of space writing as an attempt to cope with the modern city, going beyond the classical episteme of representation. The paper concludes that modern cities constitute a dispositif for developing new concepts of space and new practices of writing.