Certain key elements of Michel de Certeau’s work stand out as being of particular interest for architecture: Walking in the City (1984:91–110) and Spatial Stories (1984:115–130). Here, de Certeau discusses the theoretical implications of how we walk around the city, how we engage with it and how we make our way from one place to another. He builds a theory of how we not only understand space, but also mobilize any skill, any set of understandings and set them into practice. This is a theory of practice less specific than the understanding of professional practice in architecture (or any other similarly validated profession).
de Certeau is interested in developing an understanding of the spatial practices we engage with in the city. People engage with different spatial practices according to their circumstances, and each city presents a set of conditions determined by its population, typology and morphology, terrain and climate. This gives rise to secondary conditions, including density, where the interaction between high population and limited terrain makes for a city of towers, with more people housed in less land. This creates a set of conditions which determine the practices required to live and work there.
Rural or wilderness settings also alter our engagement with space fundamentally. The basis of our understanding of the space changes, as does the nature of social life possible in that space. Rather than ironing out the differences, as a map might render the countryside in a continuity with towns, villages and cities, there is a fundamentally altered basis for understanding the countryside which has its roots in the openness of space, the increased exposure to the elements, the life going on around and many more issues. A useful diagram to contrast with the map might be the urbanist and botanist Patrick Geddes’s ‘valley section’ drawing (Figure 5.1) which depicts various practices and how they relate to the landscape: from miners in the hills,
through woodsmen and hunters in forests, and towards shepherds and farmers before arriving at the central market town lower down the valley. The section ends at the coast with fishing activities by the dock.1
There is, of course, no single way of understanding the countryside. A farmer, for example, sees this environment entirely differently to a tourist or a rambler. The farmer sees a landscape which they have stewardship over and for which they are responsible. The farmer is aware of the seasons, the harshness of the winter and the productivity of the land. The tourist and rambler might have similar awareness and some overlapping interest in seeing the country as a landscape, that is to say something distant and unspoilt2: to be appreciated at a distance as something visually pleasing: as something to be preserved.
The city is also subject to alternative spatial practices depending upon one’s reasons for being there. These spatial practices refer to the concrete ways in which people engage with their environment not merely different perceptions;
each habitus constitutes an entirely different way of understanding the city through one’s actions there. de Certeau argues that ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’ (1984:115); he argues that we organize our daily routines into narrative structures when relaying them to others, giving form to the day and organizing our perceptions in retrospect.
We can see here that there is a direct relationship to wayfinding and navigation here,3 but the key thing to understand is the most clearly obvious:
that practices are the things that we do and the way in which they are done.
The spatial practices of a night-shift security guard (and I speak from some experience of this due to a stint when I was a student) are rather different from a regular commuter. The city is understood and enacted differently by this group of people, who sleep at different times, travel at different times and FIGURE 5.1 Author’s redrawing of Patrick Geddes’s drawing ‘The Association of the Valley Plan with the Valley Section’.
inhabit the city in a different manner. de Certeau speaks of geographies as plural here, and this is a good way of understanding the spatial practice: as a geography in process, one under construction.
In simple terms, using the bus or metro is a practice distinct from that of walking around the city. Each comes with a particular understanding of space, a way of interacting and getting practically from one place to another.
In a slight reversal of the language we would conventionally use, de Certeau speaks of ‘space as a practiced place’ (1984:117). Normally in architecture we would speak of place4 as the practised, as the experienced and lived space, which is overly geometric. Restating the idea according to our own conventions that place is a practised space makes a good deal more sense.
de Certeau continues in this vein to develop an example from the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty (1984:117): a distinction between geometric space and anthropological space. This multiplicity of spatiality is of interest architecturally: that our experience, memory, dreams and aspirations as well as more pragmatic factors such as class, occupation, gender identity – all contribute to the space we experience.
The geometric understanding of space does not account for the possibilities of other perspectives and limits the scope of understanding experiential and socially produced spaces. de Certeau critiques this as a ‘univocity’ in the dominant formal and Cartesian readings of space. His point is that such an understanding is too limiting and that there is always a multiplicity at work.
The notion that both space is existential and existence is spatial lies at the heart of de Certeau’s applicability to architecture. If spatiality is elevated to existentialism, then we are speaking of it as nothing less than a mode of Being expressed through spatial practices. These practices operate in groups called habitus. This is fundamental to understand the importance of the wider environment, of context and site. Where we are and how we act there is intertwined with our very core, our existence.
For de Certeau, space has a mobile character and is constituted of movements rather than being static and fixed as in the description of geometrical space given by Merleau-Ponty. This all reads as something of a critique and attack on Cartesian geometry, coordinate systems and the delineation of form: all things which architects employ on a regular basis. The critique is, however, to move away from only understanding space in this way. Purely geometrical understandings of space are too often presented as inherent scientific facts when they are one of many ways to understand the environment we live in.
Architects can continue to use this shared understanding where it is useful, mindful that other spatialities co-exist and can offer just as much to the design process.
For de Certeau, space is constituted of directions, speeds and timeframes.
Space is composed of the practices we engage in there. Environments are
more than merely abstract forms which we negotiate, but are instead co- produced by our socially informed interactions with them: spaces, according to de Certeau, are a bundle or knotting of practices – practices of mining or other material gathering, practices of making, practices of distribution, practices of use, and practices of disposal. Even where an item is at rest, it is only there as a result of practices. As shown later, the marketplace is a rounded example of architecture as practice, with informal arrangements iteratively designed in order to maximize economic benefit for the vendor.