Catherine Sundt

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

11

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2014

First Page

46

Last Page

62

Abstract

Henri Lefebvre defines the writing of a city as the daily text that is “inscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and their linkages, in brief, the use of time in the city by its inhabitants” (115). It is a language of connotations and signs, a secondary system that inscribes itself upon the urban space by means of “stories and urban legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants” (De Certeau 106). Imagined cities—Dickens’s London, Balzac’s Paris, Galdós’s Madrid—exist separately from the physical city, but are discursively linked with the lived city that the reader and writer inhabit. Urban writers don’t merely respond to the external stimuli of the city; they are its poets, its cartographers, its biographers. For De Certeau, the collection of their urban texts form a secondary, imagined city, a “universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it […] all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects” (94). However, the created urban imaginary is not completely separate from the real, physical city; it often serves as pretext for and promotion of the built and owned urban environment.

Download

Share

COinS