ABSTRACT
To arrive at the ‘purity’ of the gaze is not difficult, it is impossible. Walter Benjamin1
The city, the contemporary metropolis, is for many the chosen metaphor for the experience of the modern world. In its everyday details, its mixed histories, languages and cultures, its elaborate evidence of global tendencies and local distinctions, the figure of the city, as both a real and an imaginary place, apparently provides a ready map for reading, interpretation and comprehension. Yet the very idea of a map, with its implicit dependence upon the survey of a stable terrain, fixed referents and measurement, seems to contradict the palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement. You often need a map to get around a city, its subway system, its streets. Maps are full of references and indications, but they are not peopled. They project the changing disposition of space through historical time in a mixed geometry of political, economic and cultural powers: centre, periphery, suburbia, industrial zone, residential area, public housing, commercial district, railway station, motorway exits, airport. With a map in our hands we can begin to grasp an outline, a shape, some sort of location. But that preliminary orientation hardly exhausts the reality in which we find ourselves. For the city’s denuded streets, buildings, bridges, monuments, squares and roads are also the contested sites of historical memory and provide the contexts, cultures, stories, languages, experiences, desires and hopes that course through the urban body. The fluctuating contexts of languages and desires pierce the logic of cartography and spill over the borders of its tabular, taxonomic, space.
