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.
The day we stop exploring is the day we commit ourselves to live in a stagnant world, devoid of curiosity, empty of dreams.
We have contradictory expectations of police: We want to be perfectly safe and perfectly free. We want total security and total privacy. We want the bad guys stopped and the good guys unmolested. That's great for the consumer; try providing it.
Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.
There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
Monarchy is an outrage which even the blind of an entire people cannot justify... all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy wherever it my be found. No man can reign innocently. The folly is too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. Do kings themselves treat otherwise those who seek to usurp their authority?
We are building together a nation in which there are no second-class Australians.
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