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1 Introduction Long live the new, network-mediated metropolis of the digital electronic era. —William Mitchell, e-topia It has become common to begin a work about space with a quotation from Michel de Certeau. Indeed, de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” serves as a canonical marker of the possibilities space offers rhetorical studies. Its opening fragment, “Seeing Manhattan from the 118th floor of the World Trade Center,” begins a breathtaking exploration of the kinds of meanings and ideas spaces can produce (91). “A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs,” de Certeau describes it. “The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding” (91). De Certeau’s essay, a rejection of the “totalizing” experience many of us make when we imagine space, is a call for the details, the banal, the mundane interactions that can reinvigorate a spatialized experience—whether of the page, the city, the street, the concept, or some other moment. And in details, de Certeau writes, “walkers” remake spaces via a variety of metaphoric turns and detours, actions that rewrite spaces and one’s connections to such spaces. It’s an attractive, if not romantic, notion. It is a notion that long served as a commonplace for my understanding of space. While still in graduate school, I, like many others who imagine themselves as spectators of a given place or space, was mesmerized by my first reading of “Walking in the City.” “A universe that is constantly exploding” speaks to the potential critical theory and rhetorical studies promise regarding the study of space, and that I, at that moment early in my studies, was being introduced to. Who, when reading de Certeau’s essay, does not imagine him- or herself as the imaginary walker who generates a rheto- Introduction 2 ric out of an engagement with the city? As someone new to the study of rhetoric, I imagined myself as this fictitious walker as well, a writer gleaning inspiration from street corners, stoplights, shop awnings, graffiti , architecture, random conversations, and other items that comprise the materiality of a given generic city. “The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures.’ There is a rhetoric of walking” (100). This rhetoric of walking, I—like so many others before me—found alluring, seductive, and worth further thought. I, too, wanted to walk the city. I, too, wanted to participate in a rhetoric of tours and detours. Getting to that thought process, however, was delayed until I left the college town atmosphere of Gainesville, Florida, and received my first tenure-track job in the big city of Detroit. During the five years I lived in Detroit, and in two different tenuretrack positions at two different Detroit universities, I extended such romantic visions, while also fine-tuning them to new observations and thoughts regarding cities and space. Walking Detroit is not the same as walking de Certeau’s imaginary New York. Detroit, among other things, is not condensed; the city is not set up for casual walking nor for strolling . The most horizontal major city in America, Detroit sports few sky scrapers and has more residential homes than almost any other major city in the country. Detroit’s origins are in residential homes, not city spaces complete with cafes, wide sidewalks, pedestrian thoroughfares, and secluded alleyways that encourage walking, passing time, or experiencing Walter Benjamin’s flaneur behavior. As the city grew in the post–World War II era, Thomas Sugrue writes, much of Detroit’s city space consisted of blue-collar neighborhoods. “Small bungalows, most of frame construction, some of brick, crowded together on twenty-five-byone -hundred-foot lots that allowed just enough room for small vegetable gardens or flower patches” (22). That legacy of the small home—as opposed to the cityscape—is felt today, from Detroit’s most expensive to its poorest residential areas. The implications of such a legacy are found in the city’s distances, its long stretches of empty space from one point to another. Such a legacy other major midwestern cities, like Chicago and St. Louis, lack. Today, most of Detroit’s major areas, those spaces one would want to walk to and among—the New Center, downtown, Belle Isle, the Renaissance Center, the Heidelberg House, Eastern Market, Michigan Avenue—are hardly within walking distance of each other. In the Motor City, the automobile is still the choice for getting from point...

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