ABSTRACT
In an essay apparently far removed from the concerns of political economy, Michel de Certeau (1984) distinguishes the voyeuristic desire to see the “panorama-city” – the view from the 100th floor of the World Trade Center, the representation created and shared by urban planners and cartographers – from the images produced by “walking in the city,” by those who live “down below.” Each is a viewpoint, a way of looking at and experiencing the city. From the top of the tower, the city is readable and transparent; it becomes a universal and anonymous subject, capable of being ordered and administered by those whose thrill comes from making the various parts and functions conform to its concept. “‘The city,’ like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and inter-connected properties” (de Certeau 1984, 94). Once this city is established, and its rules codified and unified in discourses of geographical and geometrical space, all of the other elements – the fragments and differentiations, movements and redistributions, that do not seemingly fit the order – can be either eliminated or subsumed within the functionalist administration.
