The City and Its Other

The way for physical space, for the practico-sensory realm, to restore or reconstitute itself is therefore by struggling against the ex post facto projections of an accomplished intellect, against the reductionism to which knowledge is prone. Successfully waged, this struggle would overturn the Absolute Truth and the Realm of Sovereign Transparency and rehabilitate underground, lateral, labyrinthine—even uterine or feminine- realities.

—Henri Lefebvre

Traditional debates in literature or in the media about the meaning of the "good life" have frequently placed cities and the country on opposite sides of the arguments. With the increase in the size of cities and metropolitan areas, these arguments have taken on far more acute forms, raising questions not only of "the good life," but also of survival pure and simple. According to some estimates, half the world's population will be living in cities by the year 2006. The split between country and city is very much at the heart of ecological debates that seek solutions to the crises attendant on such a rapid expansion of urban centers. In these debates the place of women plays a critical role. As custodians of a long history, which equated them with the chaotic forces of both nature and cities, women are in a unique position—both metaphorically and as citizens —to indicate and elucidate the direction and quality of the development of urban centers.

Italo Calvino's much quoted story of the founding of the city of Zobeide bears the heading "Cities and Desire." It is part of a Scheherazade -like setting, in which Marco Polo entertains the great Kublai Khan with fantastic tales of cities he has supposedly seen in the emperor's immense realm. The monarch is soon wise to the fact that the stories are no more than Marco Polo's invention, and that they are—as the title of the novel suggests—Invisible Cities. Unlike in the narrative situation of Scheherazade, Marco Polo is not in danger of losing his life, but rather draws the monarch into a realm of shared male speculation and imagination. This narrative frame of a continuous dialogic exchange between two men underscores the founding story of Zobeide.

Zobeide, Marco Polo relates, was the result of an identical dream dreamed by men of various nations: "They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her" (45). Upon awakening each man set out to find the city of his dream but never found it, instead they found each other, and decided to build a city modeled on the one in their dream with one exception: "In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again" (45).

The oneiric dimension of cities was explored by Michel de Certeau in his attempt to establish a homology between pedestrian processes and linguistic formations. In his view, the rhetorical figures of synecdochy and asyndeton lend themselves equally as well to the activity of walking as to that of speech:

The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. No matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them it insets its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other's blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define...