Walking in the City Essay - 4064 Words

WALKING IN THE CITY N TH I S R E M A R K A B LE E S S AY, carefully poised between poetry and semiotics, Michel de Certeau analyses an aspect of daily urban life. He presents a theory of the city, or rather an ideal for the city, against the theories and ideals of urban planners and managers, and to do so he does not look down at the city as if from a high-rise building – he walks in it. Walking in the city turns out to have its own logic – or, as de Certeau puts it, its own â€Å"rhetoric.† The walker individuates and makes ambiguous the â€Å"legible† order given to cities by planners, a little in the way that waking life is displaced and ambiguated by dreaming – to take one of de Certeau’s several analogies. This is a utopian essay: it†¦show more content†¦Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below? An Icarian fall. On the 110th flo or, a poster, sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary: It’s hard to be down when you’re up. The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It 128 MICHEL DE CERTEAU created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an ‘all-seeing power’? The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370-foot-high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text. Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artefact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a wayShow MoreRelatedAnalysis of Michel De Certeaus Walking in the City and The Roaring Girl1505 Words   |  6 Pagesï » ¿Topic: Michel de Certeaus Walking in the City Adopt a theoretical framework for understanding cities, personal interactions, or the act of walking from the article, and use it to analyze The Roaring Girl. Michel de Certeaus play Walking in the City paints a lesson that may be applied to personal interactions. 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