First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.
Interpretation
Walking allows individuals to realize and transform their spatial environment.
In this quote, Michel De Certeau emphasizes the relationship between movement and space, suggesting that walking not only enables individuals to engage with and activate different possibilities within their environment but also allows them to creatively adapt or alter those spaces. By walking, people do not merely traverse space; they actively participate in shaping and reinterpreting it, thus turning potential experiences into actual ones while simultaneously inventing new avenues for exploration.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about urban planning and the significance of pedestrian spaces.
The sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated... He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress.
The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual.
The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two thing being in the same location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error.
Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.
As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.
The rich in spirit help the poor in one grand brotherhood, all having the same Principle, or Father; and blessed is that man who seeth his brother's need and supplieth it, seeking his own in another's good.
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