How is a city like a landscape?
Two weeks ago, in Rome, I wrote this question in my journal. Here are some answers:
1. Streets are like rivers: easy to travel in the direction of flow; difficult to cross. Best to do it at a pre-arranged point: if you ford on your own, you might be swept off your feet. Simultaneously unify and divide the surrounding space.
2. Train stations are like hilltops: nothing remains there for very long. We seek them out, but never to stay; they convert the potential into the kinetic. They are also the gathering point of all directions.
3. Churches are like the highest mountaintops: they participate in an inaccessible realm; only a few gain access to the summit. These are the places of mystery; they are where we cast our gods. But from the inside, churches are rather more like caves, caves in the mountain-side: for sheltering, for gathering, for braving the storm.
4. Bridges are like trees: from a rooted point spans a suspended canopy. Above, their backs allow for raised passage; below, they shelter under-spaces of shade and litter.
5. Signposts are like animal droppings: traces of a non-present existence, pointing away from the current location. If properly read, they serve as maps—maps for the hunt, and for the return.
6. Cars are the water that flows in the rivers: they must follow their paths, always consuming the ground in front of them. If they overstep their channels, it spells disaster for those on the banks. Inasmuch as we need them, we also fear them; we entrust them with our lives, but we do not trust them.
7. Fountains are like carrion: some come out of need; others come simply to gaze. A significant event has happened here.
8. Monuments are like the seasons and days: they orient us and organize our time and space. They are engines of collective memory and collective action—rituals and pilgrimages.
9. Apartments are our predators: they hold us within our boundaries. If we do not keep ourselves active, moving—they will devour us.
10. Town squares are like valleys: here everything collects and is content to linger into the night; here we will find watering-holes. And yet they are not the ultimate goal; their energy spills outwards, downwards, through rivers to the sea.
11. The sea, of course, is the countryside—that which lies beyond. The unending unknown, necessary but mistrusted, resistant to domination, bathing our frontiers. Full of bounty, but equally full of "unsavory characters."
12. Public transport, the city's river crocodiles: they will kill you unless you stand on their backs.
13. Buildings are like cliffs: towering and channeling, they both guide and forbid our passage. Most of them are impassable—their domains are private. Some, though, can be permeated. These conceal interior caverns: worlds so different from the façades that you cannot understand their relationship. A door, then, is like the ivy that hangs over the cavern's mouth; it begs you to uncover its secret.
14. Finally, ruins. Though they seem to be like fossils, they are really nature preserves: roped-off areas that show us "how it used to be."
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