Scott and the experience of a city
While I enjoyed Scott’s piece and agree that it has brilliant elements, I found some of the passages about the ordered nature of cities to miss some important personal realities those of us who live in such cities experience.
Scott says, “[f]or an outsider – or a policeman – finding an address is comparatively simple matter; no local guides are required.” Given the rest of his thesis about state control it seems odd to say that both an agent of the state and “an outsider” could read a city in the same way. That doesn’t seem likely and I think that discrepancy is worth talking about further.
Another point he makes is that “[t]he knowledge of local citizens is not especially privileged vis-a-vis that of outsiders.” I have lived most of my life in a carefully gridded city (Denver, CO ). And it is because of that highly ordered and organized space that I have significant advantages over outsiders when traveling in the city (really the whole metroplex which covers over 500 square miles). Because the grid has been so easily readable, learnable, and memorable, I can quickly picture in my mind’s eye the multiple choices I have when determining which route to take to an intended destination. If I meet with an obstacle on one path I can easily figure out an alternative route. Because I have been over these routes many times, I know what times of day and under what conditions certain pathways will afford more or less efficient passage. I also have many more choices related to the aesthetics of the city – I can determine my route based on what types of things I want to (or don’t want to) see, hear, and smell. Outsiders are at a significant disadvantage in any of these ways.
In addition, even when I am an “outsider” to a part of the city in which I’ve never been, knowing the numbering and naming schemes of the city plan, I can picture the location of an address, then can imagine the most efficient route to get there. This is true even for the suburban areas that surround Denver proper, some of which have only followed the original grid to a minor degree. For longtime residents, it’s the planned differences created by certain outlying municipalities in the effort toward individualization that gave those regions other identifiable markers for wayfinding.
Of course not all longtime residents of a city like this can “read” it this effectively. I have chosen to know this much about how to get around specifically because it gives me a particular kind of power over the hegemony of city planning (not to mention a way to avoid the masses of people who do not know the city as well). These are clearly tactics, in de Certeau’s term, as tactics depend on time and "must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities."
De Certeau said that “[i]n the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalized space in which the consumers move about, their trajectories form into unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space….the trajectories trace out the ruses of the other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems". For me this describes what humans actually do in these highly ordered spaces. I believe individuals are able to overcome the imposed order partly because in actual human experience, any given city street, quadrant, intersection, or neighborhood is not interchangeable with any other of its same type. All elements of the city have morphology and are “made” through the human trajectories through them and read by their inhabitants in ways separate from uniformity of the urban plan.