Week 7

Firstly Michel de Certeau differentiates the conduct of the walker and the people who observe the city. The World Trade Center comes after the industrial revolution and is the product of the power ofthe economics that United States has. It was a symbolic monument of the capitalism, and revived the natural desire of “watching” the city from an aerial perspective, that was idealized in medieval orrenaissance painting. De Certeau wants to expose the fact that to observe the city is the theory and to walk is the practice of what is planned and constructed. As he said: “the act of walk is to theurban system as the speech act is to the language”. As a watcher we can see the city from the eyes of a “god omnipresent” and as a walker we create our own rhetoric, and practice “the plan” that isgiven by the urban planner.
There are differences between the “vertical” and “horizontal” in a city that involve economical, political and social issues. Like stratification of people in a pyramiddepending on the economical level.
As said, the verticality of the World Trade center involves the capitalism power (a symbol of capitalism), and it gives at the same time the “power” to watch all the“creation”. People of around the world could go to this building without living in it, but they could go to watch and observe the panorama of New York City.
The “creation” is the city that ishorizontal: streets, plazas, parks, and every space that has growth horizontally. To be in the top of the building gives the idea of be a watcher and have omnipresence, but to be in the bigger places thatare in the lowest part of the city, gives the idea to move everywhere, and to be like a lab mouse in a circuit.

For Michel de Certeau the space is the expression and the exercise of the power,however there is the possibility that the everyday practices of the ones that habit the space transform the meaning of the power given. This means that the citizens transform the space of the city when...