We Built This City on Philosophy

We built this city!  We build this city on philosophies!

I would apply De Certeau to terministic screens, but I don’t know what they are!  I’m just going to see up with what I come…ending a sentence with preposition is something up with which I will not put!

Anyway, I digress.  I want to talk about the difference between space and place because I think it helps me figure Certeau out.  He’s chatting about concept cities—“A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs” (1343).  Places.  What’s a place?  When does a city become a city?  I love these philosophical languages.  I’ve asked similar questions about every one of my other topics.  He defines a concept city as “paroxysmal places.”  A city is a place.

Now let’s look at the video of Rome…or the top of a building looking down at the city.  Those are “places” too right?  WRONG!  At least, I don’t think so.  It’s the difference between place and space.  In places, we assign structure in which we can move.  When Lewis and Clark ventured into the great wilderness of America I’d argue they were in a space.  If we tried to do that now…we hit places (streets, yards, towns, cities-etc).  In spaces, like the untamed America of…whatever year Lewis and Clark played boyscout, those regions absent of assigned structure, they were in a space.  I think the same can be said for when one sits at the top of the building looking into the city. 

The city is the place; the inhabited world below.  The space is above the city.  You’re in the atmosphere—an unclaimed space.  According to Certeau, when someone is on the top of a building, “One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law” (1343). 

Therefore, when inhabiting a space you have power over place.