Imagine yourself walking through NYC or another big American city if you have been there. If you have been to Europe, Latin America, or Asia imagine yourself walking in a large city there. Compare and contrast the experiences of both cities.
There would prolly be many extremes of degration in both cities. I feel there's a kind of completion the city is having with itself-build higher, sleeking modern. But leaving other buildings behind, much like Suburban spread. Leave the old and keep building on. I've never been to a really notable city, downtown Tampa is beautiful I think, but they also embraced their old, like the Spanish theater and mixed it with the new. Jacksonville is a good example of a constant spread and shedding of the old.
What is the excessiveness and contradictions of an urban environment? Suburban environment? Rural environment? Think about this from both a physical and philosophical/intellectual perspective.
In cities, they build windows that face brick walls, or other windows-such is a sort of iconic symbol for the suburbs. Traffic flows and streets, like one ways, seem to contradict each other. While suburbs were made to escape the city-they have taken on themselves a lot of the characteristics of a city.
There is the city and the concept of the city. Please define each and describe their relationship to each other.
A city is the actual, the good and the bad all the old and resistive parts mixed up with the new sleek and idealized parts. In a concept of a city, the deterioration is not considered most of the time, the traffic, the sheer mass of people. People seem to always have an idea of something, but it never turns out that way.
Idea of nowhen—what does it mean to flatten out the date of the plane projection? Think of flatten metaphorically.
I think you're referring to the part when he says that memory is a planar projection. The flattened page of a book-the "text" to the city perhaps?
How do the “waste” or non-products of a city make the order of networks denser? Think of concrete examples even from the news headlines of the present.
panotopic-being able to see everything at once.
A city council meeting, any Board meeting type layouts. Images that come up are those of the prisoner's cells all facing eachother-watching eachother.
Why does deCerteau claim that the concept city is dying? Make sure you have a clear ideas what is meant by concept city before you try and answer this question.
Suburbs are draining cities. On a census map, we have something most experts called a Megapolis-its all the major cities so seamlessly strung together, it creates one giant city. WE are ruining our cities with our urban sprawl and our neglect of old architecture and livelihoods.
Return of practices
How can focusing on the negative privilege a discourse?
Does this relate at all to the reference that we're all connected through think soul links that don't control us, but we're on a set path dictated but out secret societal consorts? And that this god eats our string soul for knowledge when we die?
What might de Certeau mean by discipline?
He means "organizing the multiplicity of humans"
How does the organization of details (in say a bureaucracy) manage and discipline human multiplicity?
Through professional, social hierarchy, houses and classifying.
Chorus of idle footsteps
What does the sentence, “It exhibits the voracious property that the geographical system has of being able to transform actions into legibility, but in doing so causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten” mean?
Like the city we discard the old and keep the new and 'perfect.' Our ideal image of a perfect city. Our conceptualized city.
Pedestrian speech acts
How does deCerteau relate the decisions we make when walking to speech acts? You may first have to understand what constitutes a speech act. See bottom of p97.
Simile: Walking is to urban system as speech act is to language.
Think about the routes you travel day in and day out especially when walking. Perhaps even right them down. Then think about how you “do” those routes. Do you walk the exact same way every day? (And I mean exact) What decisions influence you to walk your route the same or differently?
No I don't walk the exact same way to school, I am limited but social constructs given me, doors that open, traffic lights all effect where I go to school. The round abouts dictate my speed and velocity of house I make it to school also.
Why can’t the enunciatory operations of walking be reduced to a graphic trail?
Because human don't function as rigorously as architecture and precise calculation does. We are platonic beings, that fluctuate to our whims and desires.
Walking rhetorics
Make sure you understand the terms, style and use, and their relationship to one another.
Style is a linguistic structure that manifests a symbolic level.
Do you walk in different ways in different situations? How does this come about?
It all depends on the events of your day, if I do well on a test or exam or I get let out of class early, I have a skip in my step. While other times, I trudge along practically dragged by my obligations.
Look up equivocalness.
Open to two or more interpretations and often intended to mislead; ambiguous
If the “proper meaning” of a space is constructed by architect and urban planners, how do people who inhabit the space do “slang” or the vernacular? Think of examples. This notion is particularly important as a potential site for art making.
Proper meaning, are the proper names that places and streets are given, people do slang when they rename the streets themselves or choose to ignore them entirely. For example, Moor St. is the "the street that dead ends into a Walmart"
In a handbook of rhetoric devices, I read that “asyndeton offers the feeling of speed and concision to lists and phrases and clauses”, “gives the effect of unpremeditated multiplicity, of an extemporaneous rather than a labored account”, “spontaneity”, “strong, climatic” emphasis, synonymous-ness, the impression of incompleteness. Think of ways of walking or interacting with a landscape to which the idea of asyndeton could be applied.
The space between skyscrapers, alleys.
How does deCerteau define myth in the context of this chapter?
He defines myth as something that precedes a place, but without that place would not be desirable, or a means of destination.
One definition of trees of gestures--bodies that refuse to stay still for the fixing necessary for the establishing of the proper place, for the creation of intelligibility necessary for the dynamics of institutionalisation and political control--from Andrew Quick’s dissertation. Think of examples the activities/movement of groups of people “make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it form its immobile order.”
New York City graffiti and street art movement- a resistance to society with artist like Bansky.
Myths: what makes things go
Define oneiric and pullulation.
oneiric-Of or relating to dreams or dreaming
pullulation- to breed or produce freely
How is walking like dreaming?
"symbolic order of conscienceness." discourse and dream are similar, they both have a pretense to the proper, same stylistic pattern. And walking produces nowhere behind you-every dreamlike.
Names and symbols
How potentially does a proper naming of a place affect the experience of another place or determine a relationship between a place and its interlocutor? This country is rife with examples of this, but think, too, of how this personally influences or even controls your experience of place. How does an actual place metamorphize into an emblem?
Street names carry over memories and associations. With a particular street name comes particular associations.
Define toponymy.
taxonomic study of place-names, based on etymological, historical, and geographical information
Decisions regarding motility impacted by memory of place
Understand the role of the believable, the memorable, and the primitive. Think of a place you habituate and try and apply these symbolic functions to how you interact with this place.
Link acts and footsteps, I give the name 'home' to my apartment, a word heavy with symbolism as a place of comfort and for the soul. Sometimes I call other places my home too, like my parent's house.
Credible things and memorable things: habitability
univocity
Understand the notion of “local authority”. Examples of local authority?
Officials of the UF remind me of local authority, they have predesignated places for students to join, rally, meet, eat and play, among many other things. Their choices affect our astronomically.
What purpose/s could be served by eradicating stories and legends that inhabit places? What are the consequences of this? How is this related to walking?
Places would no longer be associated with "what they used to be" and would exist in the present without a past or foreseeable future.
Define lacunae.
a missing section of text
Compare and contrast rumors and stories.
rumors stem on their own, while stories rely on rumors to fully form. Both based at least microscopically on a fact, and are spread0 influencing our culture and our choices.
Think of place that you where you have spent a lot of time. “Walk” that place. Pretend that you are describing the landscape to a person you know quite well. As you “walk” and talk differentiate between the parts of the conversation that describe what is currently there now and the parts of the conversation that detail what is not longer present.
"See the police station? It used to be a little 5 room station, with a park behind it. That condo was new, you could see the beach if you stood right here, but not anymore. They just build these medium walkways, before you have to cross your fingers and jay walk."
Is it possible to see memory as negative space?
Since memory is the absence of the thing or place the memory is of, I think it can be. Because it is the lack of space, of occupation.
Think of the last time you visited a “historic place.” Ponder the idea of a historic place. What can we know about such a place and what can we imagine that we do not know?
I visited the Biltmore Hotel and Miami, I was so thrown by the lavishness the people lived and still live in. The ballroom gave me fancies of balls I could never fully imagine.
Childhood and metaphors of places
Define palimpsest.
is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again.
In your own words, what does the practice of space mean?
