More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
Michel de CerteauFirst, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.
Michel de CerteauA memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.
Michel de CerteauWhen he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses [โฆ]. โThe more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,โ he said.
Michel de CerteauThey become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.'
Michel de Certeau