To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City..a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places. Michel De Certeau
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More Quotes By Michel De Certeau
  1. Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and...

  2. Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.

  3. To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience...

  4. When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories, ’ he said.

  5. To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other... Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly...

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