Mapping the City — But Whose?
Navigating urban worlds, New York
According to British novelist Will Self, “people don’t know where they are anymore.” The “student of psycho-geography” was recently chronicled walking from JFK Airport in Queens to his hotel in Lower Manhattan, an apparently perilous journey involving the traversing of a sidewalk-less overpass at night and being tailed by a suspicious black SUV in a rather desolate portion of the outer boroughs. What is Self after? “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left,” he claims. “Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”
I once heard a professor of physics claim that one could not really experience travel unless one’s feet literally hit the pavement and one could stop and observe every little oddity passed or occurrence transpired along the way. For reasons I can’t seem to remember, he also claimed that, setting out from New York, the average pedestrian could get no further than New Haven walking continuously. This, he noted, was the greatest distance within which humans could truly embrace the true nature of the terrain they passed through; longer distances, and swifter conveyances, would ultimately distort one’s impression of passing towns and fields to some degree. Relativity results in blurred and refracted images of passed-through places; their topography cannot be internalised. Self refers to this problem as one of “windscreen-based virtuality.”
Along with Self and the discipline of physics, it has been a number of French thinkers, particularly the existentialists, who have attempted to define what such internalisation means. Michel de Certeau famously wrote of subjective self-impression’s capacity to “appropriate” the city’s terrain for oneself even in the face of the most totalitarian attempts at planning. Memories, he writes, create a sort of personal geography which can be grafted atop the sort Corbusian rationalising schemes imposed from city leaders on high. In this sense, appropriation, and by extension internalisation, becomes a template for personal freedom and agency.
Appropriation, however, holds an inherent double meaning. Where there are no demigods dwelling in the clouds of the city planning office, such rhetoric implies less of an insurgency and necessitates more consideration of its diametric consequence: loss.
