MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Charles Starks Proposal for MAPACA Conference

Experts and the Everyday: When Urbanists Walk the City

In this personal essay, I propose to examine how people who I collectively call urbanists—architects, writers of the urban, planners, urban historians, and the like, and in whose number I include myself—read and manipulate cities in their everyday lives as workers, residents, teachers, tourists and so on. Drawing on de Certeau’s discussions of the urbanism of the everyday, I suggest that urbanists’ approach to the reading and manipulation of urban space can be explored within the conflict that arises between, on the one hand, their professional identities as expert shapers and describers of idealized space and, on the other hand, their status as subjective human beings who, like everyone else, manipulate the city for their own, often fleeting and subconscious, reasons. Some particular manifestations of urbanists’ behavior that I examine in the essay include their so-called flaneurism and urban exploration; their use of maps, GPS, observation decks and models; and their use of rhetoric to explain, evaluate, and advocate for urban change.

By acknowledging and exploring urbanists’ multiple, overlapping and contradictory approaches to urban space, I suggest, we can more critically and incisively read “plans” and “planned” places, both past and present, and be better aware of our own motivations as we walk the city, both literally and metaphorically, in whatever roles we occupy.