jI can’t say what makes me happier: walking through a city I don’t know or walking through a city I know well. Twin pleasures, without a doubt: in both cases we seek to find ourselves and let ourselves be surprised. Finding yourself with your eyes closed, trusting in the memory of your lost steps to find your way, or on the contrary, surrendering body and soul to that supremely civilized pleasure that Walter Benjamin spoke of: the art of getting lost in a city.
The poets of urban wandering know this well, captives in love with this heart of the city that beats only for us and from which, however, we try to escape its influence. How can we do it, if not allowing ourselves to be conquered by what Jacques Réda, immense writer of this charm created by urban walking and improvisation in jazz, called “freedom of the streets » ? Because, if I can’t find my way, or if it is the path that finds me despite myself, it is perhaps because the streets are free to wander to offer us surprises.
Jacques Réda has just left us. “I stopped believing that I move according to my fantasy. Nor do I believe that I obey, while traveling, any pre-established plan to guide me or get lost.write in Freedom of the streets (Gallimard, 1997). This phrase accompanies those who think about how to write urban history today. Because what takes them there is, most of the time and in a very banal way, the love of cities.
Now, what makes them so adorable? To know this, we still need to understand what they are. Urban geographers today admit that a city is no more defined by a demographic threshold than it is distinguished by the form of its government or its monumental surroundings. What characterizes it would rather be a certain spatial relationship between the density of the habitat and the diversity of those who configure it by inhabiting it. This definition, in turn, allows us to better understand what we hate when we pretend – and it is a very traditional literary pose, at least since Petrarch – to hate the city.
A citizen commitment
To reject the crowd, we will say: “there are too many people” – and what we should then recognize is a distaste for “all” in the sense of Edouard Glissant (1928-2011), or the rejection of this discontinuous plurality of singularities where “the whole lives on its own details”. However, this resentment towards an urban scenario where differences come together entails a political program of separation. And it has also been a classic theme of urban sociology for a century, particularly of what has been called the Chicago school, to understand how urban sprawl, by stretching solidarity and causing breakdowns in segregation, damages the very idea of urbanity. .
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