"Walking in the City" with Michel de Certeau

Hi Everyone,

I am excited to be sharing this piece with the class.

Question: How do I attach the article to this post? I sent the article via ilearn this time, but thought that Christina wanted for us to have everything in one place on this blog.

How does one walk in a city? As de Certeau ‘walks' the city of New York and collapses his view from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center to the ground level, he suggests that the city is unable to see itself. He writes, “The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide—extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space.”

If we follow de Certeau and keep dropping our views below the ground level, what other ‘extremes' will we get into, besides sewage pipes, water lines, etc? What will we see in the earth’s infrastructures, both those mediated by humans (i.e. the underground tunnels at UCI) and those that are not (if such existed)?

Between “Walking in the City" with de Certeau and this week's readings on colonial and imperial technologies, I thought about how seeing the urban space as the meeting ground of ‘extremes of ambition and degradation' - while not an entirely new idea - points to the power structure and struggles that play out in its infrastructural realities. Convergence of ‘extremes' is one lens to read the assemblages in colonial Netherlands East Indies, modern day’s Indonesia: the various modes of transportation, fashion, media/mass communication infrastructures, etc. Last week, I shared my thoughts on how  infrastructure reminds me of ‘contradictions' in the built environments in Vietnam: between the makeshift residential homes and ornate French buildings, between postwar surviving infrastructures and colonial (still well-preserved and functional) architecture. In these spaces, extremes meet contradictions.

We are also reminded that “Technopolitical assemblages are not static" (Hecht 2011). De Certeau asks: “Is the immense texturology spread out before one's eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artifact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer. The panorama-city is a "theoretical" (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.”

In our efforts to engage with the urban space and the anthropological ‘infrastructural turn,’ can we ever able to unpack this oblivion and misunderstanding?

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