“They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognised poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”
Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the city’ from The Practice of Everyday Life
Walking as writing: cycling as calligraphy. The graceful loops and elegant swirls of the cyclist form his sentences, between the printed lines of the road and the pavement. His cut corners and detours - planned or near-misses - are his dropped ‘g’s and mispronounced ‘r’s. Downhill straights are his flights of fancy; traffic jams his writers block. Traffic lights are his full stops.
Ken Livingstone’s recent announcement regarding cycling in London is surely a Good Thing. I’m sure there are all sorts of issues relating to the layout and infrastructure of London, and the size and investment of the project and so on: but to try to get more people on bikes seems to me to be a good move all round. I don’t say this so much for the health or green/eco claims for cycling (which I am pretty much sold on anyway), but for a de Certeauian vision of enabling individual, personalised negotiations of the city, which act as a reclamation of public space in the private imagination: an honest, involving and physical understanding of space, as perceived through your own eyes and muscles and memories.
Michel de Certeau, semi-famously, declares that “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered”. Walking is thus an enunciation, a tactical practice in opposition to the strategy of urban planning. The individual’s negotiation of city space is his parole to the street’s langue. To walk from A to B is an act of (albeit minor) resistance, especially, I imagine, if you choose your own route irrespective of designated pedestrian zones. Fight the power by walking on the grass! Of course, I am wary of falling victim to Meaghan Morris’ satirical observation that - to this conceptualisation of the everyday - washing your car on a Sunday becomes a revolutionary event. Nonetheless, I would argue that to cycle is to wrestle back a degree of self-reliance and independence which is always in danger of being lost in city life.
I got a new bike recently (Aha! The real reason for this post!). Well, its not new but it’s a beautiful second-hand French racing bike, almost certainly older than me. I’m not normally the sort of person to declare bikes or cars or suchlike beautiful, but I have unashamedly fetishized this bike and it has reinvigorated my joy of cycling. I thoroughly recommend cycling as transport, too: it’s free after you have the bike and a puncture repair kit (thanks Saturday night bottle smashers!) and means I don’t have to get the bus, as Brighton has the most quintessentially monopolised bus system; it provides near-enough my only physical exercise combined with commuting (ie: I am exercised, rather than I exercise: an important distinction for someone as decidedly un-sports-orientated as me); and it is a fun (honest!) way to claim back a bit of your day. I wouldn’t feel right without mentioning the Situationists, who remind us that “We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure”.
Most importantly, though, every journey becomes a reading of space, far more consciously and physically than through the detachment of the bus or the car. I know the route from my house to my university not by road names or neighbourhood but through a chain of highly personalised and affective associations: the wood where my legs get tired; the busy junction where I am made aware of my own fragility and mortality; the stretch of road with the pot holes where I have to stand up or risk a sore behind.
“It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by.”
Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’
My daily journey, apparantly.
There is, of course, an element of danger and excitement to cycling. My friend once told me of his dismay upon driving his mother’s new hatchback that it lacked the danger and physicality of his old Mini, which was so close to the ground that you felt every bump and were very aware of the process of movement. A bicycle separates you even less from your surroundings: where most of contemporary urban life, and especially transport, is experienced as a detachment from the physical (air conditioning and central heating detach us from the weather, cars/trains detach us from distance and altitude, electric lights detach us from daylight), to walk or cycle reminds us very honestly and immediately that we remain subject to natural processes and geography, but also that these spaces, at least in our moment of using them, belong to us.
