A city, no matter how efficiently planned outor how beautiful, is rendered worthless without people. It cannot exist because it takes people to make a city. It is people who willtake the empty shells of buildings and make them function. It ispeople who take space and turn it into places. It is people who anchorthe city in time, even if only for a fleeting moment. If we examinede Certeau"s three requirements for the ideal or "concept" city, we find that it leaves us with a city without life or presence.

"Rationalorganization must repress all the physical, mental and political pollutionsthat would compromise it" -- we imagine that this must be brought by theinhabitants of the city, not by the urban structure itself. "Thesubstitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminableand stubborn resistances offered by traditions" -- it is the people who mustestablish and break the traditions of the city, it is not for the cityto make its own history. "The creation of a universal and anonymoussubject which is the city itself" -- the city is to bring nothing but thebasis of stimuli to the population and it is the people who are responsiblefor making it come alive and giving it meaning. Moreover, it is peoplewho order city space, making it real for themselves. In effect, thecity provides pen, ink and paper and it is the people -- namely the pedestrians -- whoprovide the story. According to de Certeau, it is specifically the . They do not have that god-like "all-seeing power" and are therefore trappedwithin the "city"s grasp." They are at ground level and looking down, andironically it is these people who write the "urban text" without beingable to read it. More importantly to note, it is the mass movementof people who write the text. With thousands of individuals eachwriting his own story and giving his own interpretation, the city is piecedtogether something like a patchwork quilt of individual viewpoints andopinions. "The created order is everywhere punched and torn openby ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order." It takesa single city to provide the stimulus, but it requires a multitude of people -- allunaware of their role in the creation of the city -- to provide the meaning. walking people who bring the city to life The space once defined, only remains thus definedfor as long as the individual defining the space remains there. Thedefinitions are fleeting, one replaced by the next as a second pedestrianassumes the position of the first. De Certeau defines the verb "towalk" as an action of "lack[ing] a place": this should serve to illustratejust how the stories defining space disperse and disintegrate as the pedestrianmoves out of a place, for the definition of city space is similar to walkingitself. It holds to no single space, and it is in no way anchored. The stories and legends allow people to move freely within city space,but without them there can be no space to move within at all, for space ceases to exist. Thus it can be seen that as the subject moves throughcity space, so he defines it: there is no city space without him. He creates the space to move through as he moves through it. Thecity is subject to the views and stories that the mass population projectupon it. The city is there to be manipulated, molded and used, andyet it emerges the same at the end, for no image projected upon it canever remain since the pedestrians are not static and nor is the space inwhich they move. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that , but simply make-believe. thespace is not even real.

All quotations from de Certeau taken from " Walkingin the City", 1984 "The Practice of Everyday Life"