Walking in the City

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 created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an "all-seeing power"?
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The ordinary practitioners of the city live "down below," below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk--an elementary form of this experience of the city, they are walkers, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it. A migrational, or metaphorical city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.
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The story begins on ground level with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together.
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The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language; it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language).
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We could mention the fleeting images, yellowish-green and metallic blue calligraphies that howl without raising their voices and emblazon themselves on the subterranean passages of the city, "embroideries" composed of letters and numbers, perfect gestures of violence painted with a pistol, Shivas made of written characters, dancing graphics whose fleeting apparitions are accompanied by the rumble of subway trains: New York graffiti.
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The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a "metaphorical" or mobile city.

-- Michel de Certeau, 1984