Imagined and Remembered: Inventing Cities

           Michel de Certeau’s Spatial Practices section Walking in the City evoked so many emotions from me, specifically because 1) I couldn't understand shit 2) when I did understand pieces I felt love for language 3) I thought he was ridiculous with his examples 4) I loved how one of his examples used language as a metaphor for being a pedestrian in the city and 5) I couldn't understand shit. 
            As people experience cities, and as they "name" and label their experiences, they create the city. What interests me are the subjective perspectives of each "name," so the city then, is created by metaphors. There is no "original" or "authentic" city. de Certeau states that the "concept of the city is decaying" but really, it is just an imagined or remembered concept in the first place.

          I connect this with the “names [which] make themselves available to the diverse meanings, given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting points on itineraries which, as metaphors they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by”(104). I connected this with my grandfather's memories of being a youth in Los Angeles, and my students' imagined experiences of their Euro trip adventures.

            To begin, de Certeau made me aware of our “memories” of each place we experience, before occupying the space presently . This idea is reminiscent of how lovers, when they meet in their 20s never see the aging 80 year old in front of them, but still see their loved one as the 20 year old they fell in love with. I can’t see West Adams the way my grandfather does, when he rode the trolley down Olympic to dance at the Biltmore in downtown. I can’t “see” the city with trolleys, I see Verizon, Rite Aid and Ross stores. In this example, my grandfather’s meaning of “Los Angeles” is an “imagined” city to me, however, very recognizable to him, as he sees the buildings that have replaced his own “original value” of the city.

            de Certeau  also brought up these same “fictional” cities that tourists invent before they are in the spaces. I brought high school graduating Seniors to Europe for eight consecutive summers. When choosing where they wanted to visit on their six city trip, they had “ideas” of places that they wanted to experience. It was not St. Paul’s Cathedral that they wanted, nor Versailles, nor the Coliseum which connects with Malaparte stating  “The place de la Concorde does not exist,”...“it is an idea.” These young walking visionaries wanted not to “see” the city, but “experience” it by eating at the restaurants, dancing at the clubs and spending money at the Parisian H&M. They had fictionalized London, Paris and Rome, and they had their experience prior to getting on the airplane, so that when actually occupying that foreign space, their fictional perceived planned expectation of the city polluted the true “city”;  they did not let the authentic “city” as it’s own space, unfold before them.

            What I have, hopefully, prepared is an understanding that the subjective “superstitions” of stories and legends of the inhabitants with past experiences of the space they occupied, and a tourists’ imagined “dreamed-of places” both show how the present space of the city cannot be “seen” by the local, nor the tourist. These liberated spaces become occupied by the “meaning” which people give to them.

            By declaring that all cities are imagined spaces, allows me to view Prague, Paris, Los Angeles and Amsterdam by my imagination, not by the reality of the place.

            So, what then differentiates the cities? Language, botany, weather, earth surface and also movement of the city all create a “feeling” of the individual “city” but, again, that feeling becomes subjective. The culture of each city and the symbiotic nature of all of the residences make up a “character” and that takes on a life of it’s own. Ever evolving to match the “make up” of the character, and ever changing to match the economy, these cities although are differentiated to a objective lens, the subjective “experienced” observer cannot see, as a fish cannot see water. They exist in the fiction that the observer has imagined the city to encompass. 

           de Certeau states that “the concept-city is decaying”, but I say the “city” hasn’t decayed, it has just metamorphosed into a fictionalized synecdoche of our imagined spaces and of our memories.