12 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
totalizations” of Certeau). In Lefebvre’s schema, “represen-
tations of space” contain ideologically coded, and cultur-
ally specific, ideas about space that are articulated in both
objects and ideas, from an urban planner’s exact scale map
to the medieval cosmic schema. And what he calls “rep-
resentational spaces” (at whose base is the built environ-
ment) are deeply colored by representations of space. In
turn, the built environment cannot be bracketed off from
the practices of urban dwellers (those walkers of Certeau).
So this third sphere, “representational spaces,” postulated
by Lefebvre triangulates the dualism defined above (image
vs. walker), encompassing the built environment, but also
holding that the built environment is not a static physi-
cal entity, but one inflected both by representation and by
practices. Lefebvre would use somewhat different words
to discuss the spheres defined by Certeau, as he wrote of
the equivalent of Certeau’s walker, using the term “spatial
practice,” a term used throughout this book. For Certeau’s
“imaginary totalizations,” he uses the term “the representa-
tion of space,” the second term used throughout. He calls
these two categories “the perceived, the conceived” and then
adds a third category: “the lived,” which he calls “represen-
tational space.” 21
For my readers, who will encounter this triad frequently
in the pages that follow, I ask forgiveness in advance for
departing in one instance from Lefebvre’s terms: “represen-
tational space.” Although useful because it is so carefully
defined, it has proven cumbersome to both eye and ear
in the writing of this book, and so I will modify the third
term of our triad and call the category “lived space.” For the
initial purposes of urban analysis, we can take the spheres
as separate entities, but as we will see in the chapters that
follow, they intersect and inflect each other. 22
To see how these three spheres, the perceived (called
“spatial practice” by Lefebvre), the conceived (“representa-
tions of space”), and what we will call “lived space,” operate,
let us turn to a space in Tenochtitlan’s southwest corner
that on a map of the city in 1500 might appear largely as
a void or might be marked with the symbol for tianquiztli,
or “market” (figure 1.8). This symbol, one representation
of space, is itself significant. It is composed of concentric
circles, one of them filled with smaller disks. These disks
connoted preciousness: when colored blue-green, they
are the symbol for “jade,” the most valuable gemstone of
the Americas; appearing on the entablature of a building,
disks representing jade marked it as the dwelling of a lord.
Inflecting the sphere of lived space, this symbol conveyed
ideas of the market as being a place of preciousness (indeed,
precious items were for sale in indigenous markets) and a
space of lordly authority; its concentric circles also con-
noted origin and order (we find them also in symbols of
navels, that biological sign of origins). Moreover, another
representation of the market space was to be found in the
heavens. Residents of Tenochtitlan called an important
constellation Tianquiztli—it may be what we know as the
Pleiades—and its closely observed passage in the night sky
marked the moment that a new fifty-two-year cycle would
begin. 23 Within the city of Tenochtitlan, of course, it was
the quotidian and unremarkable actions of urban dwellers
that consecrated this space called tianquiztli as the mar-
ket, as they came by foot or in low-slung canoes across the
lake, carrying baskets laden with greens plucked out from
an urban plot, or pitch-pine torches harvested from the
surrounding forests, to buy and sell: our second sphere of
spatial practice. 24 The physical space of the market itself is
the third sphere. Created out of the actions of urban dwell-
ers, its meaning and character inflected by the ideologies
encoded in the symbol, the market was not a mere physi-
cal expanse, a void in the urban fabric, but what Lefebvre
would call “representational space,” and what we will call
“lived space,” given how it carried in it the larger ideologies
of the marketplace as well as the traces of its own historical
creation and existence.
Lefebvre’s triad, these intersecting spheres, gives us
purchase on the complex and messy matter of urban
space, and this interpretive framework will guide us in thefiguRe 1.8. Symbol for tianquiztli, “marketplace.” Author drawing
after Codex Mendoza, fol. 67r.