Walking in the City
Understand the middle two
paragraphs on p. 93 starting with “The ordinary practitioners…” How is a city or any other landscape a
text? Get an understanding of what might
be meant by the term, operations, and how it relates to the aspect of the city
that is not represented as “geometric” or “geographical.”
A city or any other landscape is a text in this sense that the experience of the place is "written" into the practitioners memory. Operations, coined from "ways of operating," refers to a set of practices that practitioners/city dwellers carry out within the city, but are outside the realm of simply the "geographical" or "geometrical" aspects of said place.
There is the city and the concept
of the city. Please define each and
describe their relationship to each other.
The city is the planned and readable city, whereas the concept of the city is metaphorical and also considered "migrational." The city and the concept of a city are linked; they aren't identical but exist in progressive symbiosis.
Return of practices
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.
The original ideologies that surrounded the inception of the city is morphing and digressing from their original intent and dialogue.
How can focusing on the negative privilege a discourse?
Focusing on the negative allows for a transformation of the nature of an original discourse, from, for instance, a theory to a theory of misfortune, which essentially begs the question and returns them to the "correct" side.
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.
As we walk and essentially are actualizing possibilities of organized spatial order, and we make decisions in paths by inventing some or dismissing others. deCerteau states that in the same way, we transform each spatial signifier into something else; we make selections and choices about signifiers of the spatial "language" in order to actualize or discard them in secret.
Walking rhetorics
How
does deCerteau define myth in the context of this chapter?
Myth is defined in the context of a "discourse relative to the place/nowhere (or origin) of concrete existence" as "a story jerry-built out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolizes.
Credible things and memorable things: habitability
Understand
the notion of “local authority”.
Examples of local authority?
Local authority refers to not the standardized aspects of a city, but rather the qualities, places, or naming conventions that exist only locally. For instance, this one street back home is called and referred to as "the shortcut road," but its real title is Riverside Dr.
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?
Standardization, consistency, and authority can be served by eradicating stories and legends that inhabit a place, but the consequences include making the city "a suspended symbolic order," or rather nothing special, nothing that is marked or opened up by a memory or story. These wordless stories are prevalent and are sometimes noticeable in walks or derives, and only enrich the experience further.
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.
Often times certain aspects that stick out and could be very prominent in your memory, can have little to no significance in the place itself, and therefore may no longer even be present. Whereas the filler details of how the place generally was, is probably still currently there now.
Is it possible to see
memory as negative space?
Memory as negative space could equate to the lack of memory, paralleling negative space in an image, which lacks subject matter.
Childhood and metaphors of places
In
your own words, what does the practice of space mean?
The practice of space reminds me of the experience of a space and how said experience can invent a concept of that space in your mind, which could be considered accurate or not, but nonetheless it is seasoned with your own take away of that space.
