A Walk in the City

         A city does not exist without the aid of the inhabitants. It is through the people who walk through the city that creates a city. Through the perspective of a voyeur, Michel De Certeau implies that the experience of one person creates the space in A Walk in the City. This is reinforced by Italo Cavino's Invisible Cities, in which the short stories Esmeralda and Chloe reinforce this idea that a city cannot be simply just a single description of the space, but in fact a conjunction of many stories that create the overall arching concept of a true city.

         In the city of Esmeralda, a city of trade, the characters in this story never risk a day of boredom, as they are provided with an infinite number of ways to get to wherever they want to be. The transaction taking place is the experience of each trip in nature. When one decides to take the boat as opposed to the road, the transition between space is completely different. This becomes one's sacrifice, although the outcome is not necessarily negative in any aspect. In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes this to Kublai Khan. Although this space may seem entirely nonexistent because of the nature in which the characters interact with the space, the city upholds many similarities to a real city with "a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect [into] each other." It is in these small stories that we are able to decipher Polo's intentions in describing each story to Khan, instead of just factual statements about the city. In the city of Esmeralda, Polo explcitely states that it is, "difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city." This connects to A Walk in the City, in that both texts draws upon the conclusion that an entire city cannot be generalized just like a city simply cannot be mapped out onto one piece of paper. A map does not contain all the pathways that one may take, because it is the characters in the city that create the space. Their pathways cannot be mapped, just like a city cannot be one story. Therefore the experience of the characters are just as important as the intentions of the city.

         In the City of Chloe, another trade city, people exchange moments of superficial encounters, in which it represents the interactions between the people that create a form of space. De Certeau had said that the "practitioners make use of the spaces that cannot be seen." This would be the characters in the city. In which, each person "who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites." These intimate gestures of trade between these strangers become a form of creating space. They create this space through their blindness. Which in literal terms, their intentions to not create any interaction between the strangers become a technique in creating spatial interaction. Although it "elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness." It becomes part of the organization, in which the strangers' lack of interaction "brings the city to life."

         Through Invisible Cities and A Walk in the City, we can come to the conclusion that space is created through the experience. In which, De Certeau reinforces this idea through his text, in which he describes the concept city. This is similar to the cities described in Calvino's work, wherein the cities are each one aspect of a whole city. Each little story paints a part of the city and brings its meaning of "what is a city" into life.