Agency in the City

In Diane Favro’s “Street Triumphant” and Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City,” there is great emphasis placed on the city’s influence on and inversely, the city’s influence by, its populace and their creation of pathways. For this post I’m going to try and wrap my head around the intricate back and forth relationship or dialogue that exists between the city dweller and the city within these two texts.

In “Street Triumphant”, Favro discusses how the infrastructure of ancient Rome was heavily influenced by triumphal processions. Favro states, “planning in Rome did not follow absolutist formal ideas, but was implemented in sympathy with the potent experience of a changing ritual” (Favro 160). The city was essentially designed in and around accommodating these street parades and their participants and viewers. Rome inevitably was a product of its own history, which sounds very basic but I mean it in a more intricate, complicated manner. The processionals were results of Rome winning battles and being victorious. The resulting processionals dictated the design of the streets, of monuments, and of statues (Favro 158). In this way, Rome became a reflection of its populace, of the victories made by members of that populace, as well as their choices and plans for the processionals. But my question is who was permitted to view these processionals or be apart of them for that matter? Were the lower classes allowed to take part or was it merely the elite who participated in this “shaping” of the city and its rituals? Was the infrastructure influenced by all people, or merely people of military/political power?

Favro also mentions several times throughout the text, “a well-attended, lengthy parade transforms a series of interconnected thoroughfares into a new, independent processional street, with its own superseding identity” (Favro 152). The triumphator designed the parade, and each parade redefined the city in that historical moment (Favro 157). While the parade was happening, the route of the parade was the city’s new thoroughfare (Favro 157). The parade and its participants connected different parts of the city that may not have originally been connected before the parade.

Like Favro, I understood de Certeau to take stalk in the city-inhabitant relationship as well. In “Walking in the City” emphasis is put on city dweller participation and the importance and creation of city pathways. De Certeau believes that the inhabitants of a city define the city they are in, although the inhabitants cannot actually see how they’re defining it as a whole (de Certeau 1344). People are walking at street level, so it would be impossible to see from above exactly how their paths and influences have shaped the city. Walking in a city and defining a path is a sort of spatial acting-out in that place (de Certeau 1347). City dwellers or pedestrians are engaging in a sort of writing, of dialogue when they move about the city. Their paths and actions come together to create one story, which would be the map, per se, of the city itself (de Certeau 1344).

For me, both of these texts brought up questions of agency. It seems that the being possessing agency here in the rhetorical situation of the city and its makeup would be the inhabitant. But is it really any inhabitant? Would someone like myself have an impact on the infrastructure or the major pathways of a city? Does this argument mostly apply itself to those with power or is it more universal than that? Is it simply that we as humans more figuratively have an effect on the “story” of our cities? That the life of each person put together as a whole is what makes up a city and its culture?