inTRoducTion • 11e y e .” 17 The city from afar, separated from lived experience,
is turned into a mental representation akin to a bird’s-eye-
view map that offers us, like the gaze of Icarus, a similarly
voyeuristic view.
In contrast to the city as representation or mental image
is the city as experienced by a walker on its streets. Certeau
continues, “The ordinary practitioners of this city live ‘down
below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They
walk—an elementary form of this experience of this city;
they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow
the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without
being able to read it. . . . 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 rep-
resentations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.” 18 In
turning his focus to the city as a lived practice, constituted
not by urban planners or by the built environment, but
by the inchoate and quotidian actions of its inhabitants,
Certeau posits the city as also being located in the daily
practices of its dwellers.
Certeau’s way of conceptualizing the city in this essay
sets up a tension between two poles: the representations
of the city on one hand, like maps or the urban planner’s
schema, and the lived experience of its “walkers,” urban
residents whose own daily trajectories define what the city
is, on the other. His identification of the latter—who could
be nameless and politically powerless—as constituting the
city was written to counter the ideas of Michel Foucault,
whose focus was on “the structures of power” that arose in
the wake of the Enlightenment and the rise of the modern
centralized and bureaucratic state, which exercises a “dis-
ciplinary” control over its citizens. By turning attention to
“multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that
elude discipline,” that is, individual human action within
the urban space, Certeau was able to allow for individual
agency within Foucault’s totalizing theories about the
structure of power. 19
In Manhattan, close to where I write now, one need
only walk down 43rd Street near Times Square to see the
dichotomy in action. On a grid laid out by the maps of
nineteenth-century urban planners, commercial buildings
follow legally prescribed street setbacks, and surveillance
cameras set on façades track the movements of every pass-
erby. But the actions of those contained by such spaces are
often uninhibited: office workers jaywalk; West African
immigrants create illicit shops-without-walls by setting
out knockoff goods on the sidewalk; and tourists film
their own personal on-the-spot experience of their singular
N e w Yo r k.
The two spheres that Certeau suggests constitute the
city—on one hand, the representations of the city, be they
maps or urban plans, those “imaginary totalizations,” and
on the other hand, the itineraries and practices of urban
dwellers—provide useful conceptual categories to study
urban spaces of the past like Tenochtitlan, allowing us
to move, when possible, beyond the static representa-
tions that are the urban historian’s principal archive (like
folio 2r of the Codex Mendoza) to take into account the
lived practices and experiences of the streets. Lefebvre, in
fact, offers an equivalent schema for the study of space,
contrasting “representations of space” with spatial practice.
To him, the former draws on a wide body of precedents.
About the medieval city, he explains, “As for representa-
tions of space, these were borrowed from Aristotelian and
Ptolemaic conceptions, as modified by Christianity: the
Earth, the underground ‘world,’ and the luminous Cosmos,
Heaven of the just and of the angels, inhabited by God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. A fixed
sphere within a finite space, diametrically bisected by the
surface of the Earth; below this surface, the fires of Hell.” 20
But by this dualistic approach, the dynamism of those rep-
resentations is unaccounted for; the tourist walking into
Times Square along 43rd Street for the first time undoubt-
edly carries in his or her head memories of TV images of
everything from brilliant neon billboards to the grainy tape
from surveillance cameras used to track crime along the
square, and these images inflect what Times Square is as
a lived space.
It is Lefebvre who offers a third sphere, as he sketches
out a “conceptual triad” to aid in the analysis of space.
Together this triad will be invaluable to us in looking at
Tenochtitlan and Mexico City. In addition to “representa-
tion of space” and “spatial practice,” Lefebvre posits a sphere
of what he calls “representational spaces,” and by this he
means actual spaces in or features of the urban fabric (a
church, a market, a graveyard). In the traditional sphere of
architectural or urban history, this category would envelop
what we call the built environment—streets, buildings,
plazas, and parks. But Lefebvre insists that such spaces
cannot be treated separately from the “representations of
space” that have been formed of them (those “imaginary