Trying to Understand de Certeau

I'm having some difficulty understanding de Certeau, so forgive me while I vomit some ideas of what I think he's saying onto my keyboard. These are just some basic things I think I picked up from the text.

• People or "walkers" in a city "follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it" (1344). So the people in a city create the text of the city, but without understanding what they are doing or the space they are using.
• They "make use of spaces that cannot be seen" (1344), referring perhaps to spaces so seemingly insignificant they are not generally noticed but becoming meaningful when they are used by the walker. "Time" causes "space itself... to be forgotten" (1345), maybe because the space of the city is being constantly altered and rewritten by the walkers.
• "The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility" (1344). This statement implies what I think may be the meaning  of the article: That in the context of the city one body is insignificant, and only becomes significant through its interactions with other bodies and spaces which create the network of interaction which is the city. One can "think the very plurality of the real" and anticipate this movement and interaction in their planning of the city, but soon time, as mentioned above, alters the organization of the city and "a migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city" (1344). Is it true that the walkers themselves as a collective become the body of the new city, or are they only experiencing? 
 

According to de Certeau, the city is sometimes defined as "a universal and autonomous subject" and "all the functions and predicates that were assigned to many different real subject-- groups, associations, or individuals" become attributed to the city (1345). If I don't understand this article completely in any sort of real-life application, I can still see how these concepts work in distopian fiction (previously and perhaps still one of my favourite genres) where people literally become appendages of the city/state (save, of course, for our rebellious hero/heroine). Then, considering how such distopian fictions are generally allegories for contemporary society, I guess I can start to see what this article means. I think I'm just struggling to find the proper words.