More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
Interpretation
The complexities and quirks of a city contribute to its livability more than its practical features.
Michel De Certeau highlights that while cities may possess practical advantages and technological transparency, it is often their unique, ambiguous qualities and peculiarities that create a vibrant and livable environment. This speaks to the idea that the charm and character of urban life are found not just in functionality, but in the diverse experiences and stories that arise from its oddities and complexities.
In practice
During a discussion on urban development, one could reference this quote to emphasize the importance of preserving a city's character.
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.
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.
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.
Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.
Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances.
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
I would by all means have men beware, lest Γsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.
What is the sound of one hand?
We cannot afford to spend millions and millions over nuclear arms when there is poverty and unemployment all around us.
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