from the vexed sexuality her position implies, and from her struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become spectator.

Traditionally, a woman walking the streets is a ‘street walker’ – ‘all body’ – part and symbol of the spectacle and decadence of urban culture. Women have historically been represented as an “interruption in the city, a symptom of disorder, and a problem”

People’s gender, class and racial background, and to what degree their bodies conform to conventions of desire, or movement and anatomy, for example, affect their ability to extricate themselves from the spectacle of the city enough to be its observer

a productive, yet relatively unconscious, speaking/writing of the city.

The first assumes a one-way causal relation: cities are physical entities designed by the minds of people and built by the body. A body is thus a physical tool used in the service of the mind, a disembodied consciousness, to make a physical city. Another common version of this dominant way of seeing bodies and cities is that the city is ‘bad’ for the body, ‘unnatural’ and damaging; this is still, however, very much a one-way relation.

The city is subject to transformation and reinscription by the changing demographic, economic, and psychological needs of the body. Bodies “reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that the environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body”

As a form of enunciation, walking has its own rhetoric. The trajectories, shortcuts, and detours taken by passers-by are turns of phrase and stylistic figures.

cross-dressing for women at certain times and places;

hus, cities become meaningful and habitable through the legends, memories, and dreams that accumulate in and haunt places

Traditionally, a woman walking the streets is a ‘street walker’ – ‘all body’ – part and symbol of the spectacle and decadence of urban culture. Women have historically been represented as an “interruption in the city, a symptom of disorder, and a problem”

the flâneur is traditionally a middle-class, masculine subject of leisure whose privileged position shields him from the curiosity of the crowd

As practitioners and observers, flâneur and detectives are always working at street level, with partial knowledge. They never operate solely from an imaginary position of an all-seeing, penetrative eye hovering ‘above’ the city. They are always also urban bodies.

They are returned from a relatively invisible, dis-embodied position of anonymous observer to their place as a body in the crowd, becoming spectacle for others, an everyday ‘common man’, one of the ‘masses’ once more.

The pedestrian subject reads/writes the city as an everyday user of place, producing space – writing the actual city – in the process.

The city is subject to transformation and reinscription by the changing demographic, economic, and psychological needs of the body. Bodies “reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that the environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body”

Tactical ways of operating appropriate and divert spaces away from administrative strategies designed to create abstract place

It affects the way the subject sees others...as well as the subject’s understanding of, alignment with, and positioning in space...moreover, the city is, of course, also the site for the body’s cultural saturation, its takeover and transformation by images, representational systems, the mass media, and the arts – the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed.

Pedestrians, in effect, tell urban stories through their movements. A multitude of intertwined paths and detours weave the urban fabric. They give their shape to spaces and weave together places in ways that potentially transgress, from within, the abstract map imposed from above by the panoptic gaze and administrative strategies of corporate and government interests

space organised by the spatial order

“produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have into the image of the other

they also produce a pattern of automatic links and inequalities of power between otherwise unrelated bodies.

The gendered pedestrian subject’s point-of-view is drawn ‘down’ to the level of the street by the difference her gendered body makes socio-culturally.

Any particular trajectory or detour composes an unforeseeable path, a “long poem of walking”, out of the formal spatial possibilities at its disposal

The point-of-view of the female reader/writer of the city is thus split between that of a privileged observer (in terms of class and culture, for example) and that of the object and symbol of the degeneration and contamination of urban life as it has been conventionally written.

People’s gender, class and racial background, and to what degree their bodies conform to conventions of desire, or movement and anatomy, for example, affect their ability to extricate themselves from the spectacle of the city enough to be its observer.

a productive, yet relatively unconscious, speaking/writing of the city.

the opacity of the body in movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what indefinitely organises a here in relation to an abroad, a ‘familiarity’ in relation to a ‘foreignness’”

Place enables an institution to delineate itself and its others and to exercise strategies of power using this distinction

Walking is framed as an elementary and embodied form of experiencing urban space – a productive, yet relatively unconscious, speaking/writing of the city.

from the vexed sexuality her position implies, and from her struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become spectator.

He is the subject, rather than the object, of the ‘botanizing’ gaze by virtue of his privileged position as spectator not spectacle.

inequalities of power between otherwise unrelated bodies

anonymous

Maps, on the other hand, function strategically to colonise space, rendering geographical knowledge as an abstract, ahistorical place that erases the spatial practices that are the condition of its possibility.

thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.

writing of the city.

re-use culture and “reappropriate the space organised by techniques of sociocultural production”

es are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pa.sts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unf led but lik7 stones eld in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. "I feel good here":50 the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.

it is a spatial acting-out of th place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); a~ . . It 1mphes relations am on d1tterentiated ositions that is among~ matic "contracts" in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciatiogn is an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker and puts con. tracts between interlocutors into action). 14 It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation

Medieval or Renatssance pa~nters re~e city as seen in a persp~tive that no ey: had yet enJ_oyed.2 ~already made the medieval s ec-tator _mto a celesttal eye. lt created gods

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of ~Th

Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future.

~practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ("ways of operating"), to "another spatiality"6 (an "anthropological," poetic and mythic experience of space),

ro be hfted to the summit of the World Trade Cent . o t f h . ' er ts to be l'f . u o t e City s grasp

World Trade Center

They transmute the misfortune of their theories int theories of misfortune.

hese names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define a""ii_d ;rve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determme for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recogmzed or not by passers-b~

First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possi-~ (e.g., by a place jn which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., ?Y a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actliai-izes 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, trans-form or ab .. andon spatial element,;;.

Today, whatever the avatars of this concept may have been, we have to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded

Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can @hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to ~er.

causes the ;:n triOn o 1 s own possibility-space itself-to be forgotten; space ~ . thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology.

The rdinary prac · · ers f the city live "down below," below the thresholds at which isibiJ'ty egins.

The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.

New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.

Surveys of routes miss what was: the~ of passing by. The ;j,eration of walking, wandering, or "window shopping," that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map.

inally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it graaually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes' State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects-groups, associati<;>ns, or individuals. "The city," like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and coilstructmg space on the basis of a hmte number of stable, tsolatable, and interconnected properties.

he childhood experience that dete · . . . rmmes spatJ 1 practices later develops 1ts effects, proliferates, floods private and pubt spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within th 1 JC c·t .. h. I" . . epanned J Y a metap onca or moblle ctty, like the one Kandinsky dream d " . . . e of-a great ctty bUilt accordmg to all the rules of architecture and the~ suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

Must one finally fall back into the dark s h b k pace w ere crowds ac and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high are them m,ove ~nable to see down below? An Icarian fall

extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already trans-formed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space.

~emories tie us to that pla_se .... It's personal, not interesting to anyone else, but after all that's what gives a neighborhood its char-acter. "48

Perhaps cities are deteriorating along with the procedures that organized them.

These practitioners ake use spaces that can t reseen; their knowledge of them is as 'n as that of lovers in each ~i's arms.-The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecog-~ized ~ in which each body is an element signed by many others, ~e r;gi6it!iiJit is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness.

extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already trans-formed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space.

It is the analogue of t e acstmlle produced, through a projection that~ay of keeping 93 f by the space planner urbanist, cit lanner or carto ra her.

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of ~The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself ~n immense social experience of lacking a place

Or we measure and map space andplace, and acquire spatial laws and resource inventories for ourefforts.

None of this should be changedby the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely

Place is security, space is freedom

He can articulate ideas but he has difficulty expressingwhat he knows through his senses of touch, taste, smell, hear-

To experience in the.active sense re-quires that one venture forth into the unfamiliar and experi-ment with the elusive and the uncertain

Emotion tints all human experience, including the highflights of thought.

People tend to suppress that which they cannot express.

From the security and stability of place we are awareof the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa.

Place is security, space is freedom

"Space" ismore abstract than "place."

Experience has a connotation of passivity; the word suggestswhat a person has undergone or suffered.

Berlin, too, gave Tillich afeeling of openness, infinity, unrestricted space

Moreover, by shifting fromone place to another, a person acquires a sense of direction

What begins as undifferentiatedspace becomes place as we get to know it better and endow itwith value.

Given the human endowment, in what ways do people attachmeaning to and organize space and place?

unrestricted space

From the security and stability of place we are awareof the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa

an olfactory worldwould be one where odors are spatially disposed, not simplyone in which they appear in random succession or as inchoatemixtures. Can senses other than sight and touch provide aspatially organized world? It is possible to argue that taste,odor, and even hearing cannot in themselves give us a sense ofspace.

Experience thus implies theability to learn from what one has undergone.3 To experience isto learn; it means acting on the given and creating out of thegiven. The given cannot be known in itself. What can be knownis a reality that is a construct of experience, a creation of feelingand thought.

9Experiential PerspectiveExperience is directed to the external world. Seeing andthinking clearly reach out beyond the self. Feeling is moreambiguous. As Paul Ricoeur put it, "Feeling is ...withoutdoubt intentional: it is a feeling of 'something'—the lovable,the hateful, [for instance]. But it is a very strange intentionalitywhich on the one hand designates qualities felt on things, onpersons, on the world, and on the other hand manifests andreveals the way in which the self is inwardly affected." In feel-ing "an intention and an affection coincide in the same experi-ence.

How the human person, who isanimal, fantasist, and computer combined, experiences andunderstands the world is the central theme of this book

None of this should be changedby the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely.

What begins as undifferentiatedspace becomes place as we get to know it better and endow itwith value.

Place is security, space is freedom

Long residence enables us to know a place intimately,yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it fromthe outside and reflect upon our experience.

Space is experienced directlyas having room in which to move

openness, freedom, and threat of space

A blind man told William James that "hethought few seeing people could enjoy the view from a moun-tain top more than he."

A longtimeresident of Minneapolis knows the city, a cabdriver learns tofind his way in it, a geographer studies Minneapolis and knowsthe city conceptually. These are three kinds of experiencing.

Recent ethological studies show that nonhuman animals alsohave a sense of territory and of place.

The organization of human space is uniquely dependent onsight. Other senses expand and enrich visual space. Thussound enlarges one's spatial awareness to include areas behindthe head that cannot be seen. More important, sounddramatizes spatial experience. Soundless space feels calm andlifeless despite the visible flow of activity in it, as in watchingevents through binoculars or on the television screen with thesound turned off, or being in a city muffled in a fresh blanket ofsnow.17Human spaces reflect the quality of the human senses andmentality.

Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes throughwhich a person knows and constructs a reality. Thesemodes range from the more direct and passive senses ofsmell, taste, and touch, to active visual perception and theindirect mode of symbolization.

Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines thatHamlet lived here?

It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment.

A beautiful and delightful city environment is an oddity, some would say an impossibility.

But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even ter-ror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being.

Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequen.ces of events leading up to it, the mem-ory. of past experiences

While such devices are extremely useful for providing condensed data on interconnections, they are also precarious, since orientation fails if the device is lost, and the device itself must constantly be referred and fitted to reality.

a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern.

the apparent clarity or "legibility" of the cityscape

Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequen.ces of events leading up to it, the mem-ory. of past experiences.

Only powerful civilizations can begin to act on their total environment at a significant scale. The conscious remold-ing of the large-scale physical environment has b:en poss~b.le ~nly recently, and so the problem of environmental 1mageab1hty is a new one.

two-way process between the observer and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer-with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes-selects, organ-izes, and endows with meaning what he sees

The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual

It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environmen

a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time

Like any good framework, such a structure gives the individual a pos-sibility of choice md a starting-point for the acquisition of fur-ther information.

We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it; on the stage with the other participants.

But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even ter-ror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being

This book will assert that legibility is crucial in the city setting, will analyze it in some detail, and will try to show how this concept might be used today in rebuilding our cities

a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time

There arc:: other basic properties in a beautiful envi-ronment: meaning or expressiveness, sensuous delight, rhythm, stimulus, choice. Our concentration on imageability does not deny their importance. Our purpose is simply to consider the need for identity and structure in our perceptual world, and to illustrate the special relevance of this quality to the particular case of the complex, shifting urban environme

Although clarity or legibility is by no means the only impor-tant property of a beautiful city, it is of special importance when considering environments at the urban scale of size, time, and complexity. To understand this, we must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhab-itants.

here is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases. No wonder, then, that the art of shaping cities for sensuous enjoyment is an art quite separate from architecture or music or literature

Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings

ooking at cities can give a· special pleasure, however commonplace the sight may be.

hey are clear enough about the ugliness of the world they live in, and they are quite vocal about the dirt, the smoke, the heat, and the congestion, the chaos and yet the monot-ony of it. But they are hardly aware of the potential value of harmonious surroundings, a world which they may have briefly glimpsed only as tourists or as escaped vacationers.

While it may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changin~ in detail.

Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and char-acter, but it is the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their ow

To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city.

Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequen.ces of events leading up to it, the mem-ory. of past experiences

In the same way, we must learn to see the hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities. We are not accustomed to organizing and imaging an artificial environment on such a large scale; yet our activities are pushing us toward that end.

ach individual creates and bears. his own image, but there see°:s to be substantial agreement among mem-bers of the same group. It is these group images, exhibiting con-set'l.sus a~ong significant numbers, that interest city planners who aspire to model an environment that will be used by many people.

At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored.

An environmental image may be analyzed into three compo-nents: identity, structure, and meaning. It is useful to abstract these for analysis, if it is remembered that in· reality they always appear together

Moving elements in a city, and in particular the people and their activities, are as important as the stationary physical parts. We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it; on the stage with the other participants.

Fall to your knees and thank New York for making you strong.

Complaining is the natural opera of New York.

New York will briefly study my face and mutter “Who the fuck are you?" 

Hell, maybe your kin will survive the apocalypse and sing mighty ballads of your tragic battles by a roaring bonfire.

New York City doesn’t love you. Why would think you’re in a relationship with New York? It’s not a boyfriend or a parent. New York will never give you its approval because New York City is too busy being New York City to care about you.

Struggle, motherfucker. Hustle. Fail, fail again, fail until you forget what succeeding is, and then, on your deathbed, as you’re full of rotten phlegm and regret, you can look back and crack a smile that you won a couple, and survived everything else.

Struggle, motherfucker. Hustle. Fail, fail again, fail until you forget what succeeding is, and then, on your deathbed, as you’re full of rotten phlegm and regret, you can look back and crack a smile that you won a couple, and survived everything else.

The only personal journey New York is interested in is the one that ends with you paying your yearly city income tax

Winter and New York have been at war for centuries

I love New York. My love is strong. My love is psycho.

Stop whining

one of those “Why I Left New York” essays on the off chance that New York would notice.

5AM

New York will never give you its approval because New York City is too busy being New York City to care about you.

That’s a lie, of course. They were all assholes. Just cranky, angry people.

New York will kick you in the hole, but it will never stab you in the back. It will, however, stab you multiple times right in your face. 

New York will briefly study my face and mutter “Who the fuck are you?" 

Avoid the romantics

that New York is a giant meatgrinder extruding tons of chewed up dreams.

Jay Z and Beyonce are doing okay.

It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysteri-ous nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.

Fair ..

ew York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysteri-ous nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.

ew York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. B

hat it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years wit

ogrammed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In

a bad cold and a high fever.

golden rhythm

a six-month leave of absence

it had counted after all,

that first spring

I stopped believing in new faces

my twenty-eighth,

and none of it would count

and none of it would matter

the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.

They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some · definitely extended. leave from wherever they be-longed, disinclined to consider the future, temporary exiles who al ays knew when the flights left for New Orleans or ' Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California.

I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come-was anyone ever so young?

all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York

I still believed in possi-bilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.

That first night I opened my wi1dow on the bus into town and watched for the sky-line, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and the big sig s that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL IBIS LANE

In these three portraits in villainy-the youth's urban compan-ion, the demagogue, and the gambler/speculator-the writers .of antebellum advice literature expressed a deep disenchantment with the direction of historical change in early nineteenth-century America.

The contaminating powers of / the confidence man sprang from his social formlessness, his mar-. ginality, but his youthful victim was also socially formless, Iiminal.

The confidence man served as a symbolic expression of the dangers of marginality in a society of placeless men.

In these three portraits in villainy-the youth's urban compan-ion, the demagogue, and the gambler/speculator-the writers .of antebellum advice literature expressed a deep disenchantment with the direction of historical change in early nineteenth-century America.

Gambling w ·1 b · d d h' as ev1 ecause t 1t pro uce not mg:

Rather than have a child of mine seduced by the flatteries and black treachery of these foul destroyers I would se h' l. · h d . • e 1m strugg mg w~t eath-~1s ey~ si1:1king, his breast heaving, his heart throbbu~g-throbbmg with its last pulsations .... I would return from his grave thankful that he rests

Popular biographies of self-made men-politicians, businessmen, even artists ~nd int~llectu~ls-proclaimed the faith that, in the boundless American social environ-ment, any man might rise to any position in life

he decline of parental and employer authority, they feared, had given free rein to what later g~n~r~tions wou!d call peer pressure.

By nature, the confidence man defied social definition; he was a man of shifting masks and roles, without fixed status or profession.

The confidence game was not simply a literary device intended to persuade young men not to consort with gamblers and dandies and pimps. It was a symbolic expression of deeper fears about ~~e direction of American society.

Themes of doom and decline and vivid rhetorical images of a violent breakdown of social order began to dominate discussions of the state of the republic.«

America was passing through a critical period when its character was not yet formed,

American Whigs interpreted all events as part of a system-atic plot to corrupt and enslave them.

the confidence man had one ultimate pμrpose: the total enslavement of his victim.

"One of the indige-nous characters who has figured long in our journals, courts and cities, is 'the Confidence Man'; his doings form one of the staJes of villainy, and an element in the romance of roguery. Countless are the dodges att~ibuted to this ubiquitous personage."

Men there are, who, without a pang or gleam of remorse, will coolly wait for character to rot, and health to sink, and means to melt, that they may suck up the last drop of the victim's blood.

common man.'

The growing importance of women's friendships between 1780 and 1835,

their concerns for youthful readers were clearly grounded in reality.

contagion

America was passing through a critical period when its character was not yet formed,

the malleability of the youthful character.

Although the term confidence man does not appear in the advice manuals, it accurately identifies the villain of the piece

he "M-factor" that has shaped the American national character: movement, migration, mobility. He was, first of all, a wanderer, independent of any fixed social nexus of community, family, or permanent friends. His geographical mobility determined a second distinguishing characteristic: his up-ward social mobility.

vertical institutions could not contain the new complexity of national social life, new social organizations emerged that were formed along the horizontal lines of e~onomic class and social status-organizations such as medical societies, mechanics' institu-tions, benevolent fraternities, charitable assoqations, and political clubs. Membership in these new organizations ~snot hereditary or compulsory, but voluntary; the pattern of authority was not one of .,. mastery and deference, but one of equality.