ABSTRACT
In his highly inventive work, The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984) proposes a tentative framework for thinking about the experiential dimension of urban life. He suggests that if one adopts a type of distant view of the city – an abstract ‘gaze’ that ‘lifts one out of the city’s grasp’ and transforms one into an isolated observer, a ‘voyeur’ (ibid: 92)1 – it becomes possible, indeed beneficial, to think of the city in terms of a duality. On the one hand, there is the ‘Concept-city’ – a product of what de Certeau calls ‘utopian and urbanistic discourse’. This is the city as seen by planners, developers, statisticians and, all too often, criminologists. Here the pluralistic fabric and contradictions inherent in urban life – the other side of the duality – are distilled to leave only quantitative data, demographics and rational discourse. On the other hand, de Certeau suggests that no city can be thought of in such purely conceptual terms. Importantly, de Certeau argues that one also needs to consider the experiential dimension of urban existence:
The problem, de Certeau finds, is that the life of the city, the constellation of lives that make a city what it is, the actual experience of the city, in other words, is not contained in the concept of the city. Lives cannot be mapped in this way – cannot be read – or even truly rendered readable by maps (though of course it is only through maps that they can be read): something always slips away. (Buchanan 2000: 110)
Any understanding (or ‘mapping’) of urban space must therefore place great store in the multi-layered interactivity that takes place at ‘street level’, the cultural and social dimensions of everyday city-life that enable the formation of a very different interpretative framework: ‘Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer’ (de Certeau 1984: 95). De Certeau was surely correct to suggest that the contemporary city can only really be understood in terms of this duality – not least because that is how it is produced – for the urban experience is a composite of both the formal, rational organising principles of the conceptual ‘planned’ city, and the subjective and mythical dimensions of what one might call the ‘experiential city’.2
