‘Practices of Everyday Life’ Walking in the City

‘Practices of Everyday Life’  

Walking in the City 

De Certeau, stands at the top of the world trade centre and stares down on the city and notes with poetic wonder, the imposing buildings and formalised routes, boundaries constructed and administered by an elite:  “The ministers of knowledge ".  Minister, that undertake their duties, from above with deliberate effort, and give the city their name, a proper name.

 

"The city, like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties" 

A proper name, from proper strategies that enforces dominant places on the individual down below. Processes, procedures, systems are the ‘strategies that have been employed and weaved together, by the ‘ministers’ that De Certeau, shows us can be read as a story. An urbanistic story that, like language, has a form, a structure a past, now and a future. A simultaneous existence that is all pervasive on the ordinary persons, physical and psychological existence. By standing high above the city he argues, he is lifted up from its pervasive grasp in a ‘pleasurable ecstasy’.

He looks down and experiences the planner’s ecstasy themselves, on viewing their construction and simultaneously is released from the construction himself. What pleasure? He asks, can be taken in the construction of the city?  Creating tall towers and low roadways, the pleasure of the ‘ministries of knowledge’ of having, an ever-present ‘eye’ on and whispers in the ear of the ordinary person. Watching them from above, warning them down below.  

Walk this way, stay of the grass, and wait till the green light flashes!

A hierarchy, that semantically orders the surface of the city.  Language that directs decides and defines what goes where and who goes there.  A language and power that belongs to the ‘ proper’. The proper people, whose language constructs and  disjoints the ordinary persons living space and in doing so denies the ordinary ‘others’ a self defined identity within.

Language, buildings and symbols are strategies of power that have been localised into their form and version of the story called the; city.  City places are ‘inward turning histories’. The past of the dead, lingering like ghostly presences in old buildings, broken roads and rotted windowsills.  Absent places that hold firm in place, memories, theirs handed down to us.  Memories that developed our own identity, through the pervasiveness of such strategy.

The ordinary people of the city exist in a place of coerced absence from the lofty heights and towers of   ‘ proper’ strategists.  The ordinary people live’ down below’ and have little say in its ‘proper name’.

     

However they  do develop tactics to live amongst them and ...

 “Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. ...They weave places together. They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize. "

Walking, as a tactic, is an act of being and doing and in doing so opens up individual flows of spaces within the physical and symbolic boundaries of the city place. Walking is an act of social appropriation, of the proper.

Walking allows some self recognition, by the people and the way they use and navigate the places that have been pre-set for them. 

‘Walking in the City’ encourages us to imagine that no one person lives in the same space at any one moment but each experience is juxtaposed onto another. A narrative that  attempts to put understanding into a complex system of discourse, negotiation and motivation and upon reading it,  enables us the opportunity to understand how cities maybe re conceptualised, appropriated and or re shaped as new places.  This is because walking is an act of our doing, replacing the ‘proper function’ and ‘proper name’ by allowing us to:

 ‘Fill this great space with a beautiful name’

Our own name.