Michel de Certeau explores the dialectical interplay between discipline and anti-discipline in urban spaces, contrasting the strategic vision of city planners with the tactical, everyday practices of pedestrians. From the elevated vantage of the World Trade Center, the city becomes a panoramic text, legible yet detached from lived experience, whereas at street level, the walker enacts a blind, embodied knowledge, shaping space through movement. De Certeau likens walking to an act of enunciation, where routes function as speech acts, improvising shortcuts, detours, and spatial “figures” such as synecdoche and ellipsis. These everyday manoeuvres disrupt the totalising order of urban design, creating a “metaphoric city” layered upon the planned one. Names of streets act as semantic magnets, guiding or repelling walkers, opening up alternative geographies charged with memory, symbolism, and personal associations. Such toponymic constellations, like legends, generate habitability by allowing spaces for play, deviation, and local meaning within the rigid framework of functionalist planning. Ultimately, walking is portrayed as a mythic and poetic practice that reclaims the city for its inhabitants, turning it into a living narrative—fragmented, resistive, and continually rewritten through the footsteps of those who traverse it.
