“Toward a New Urban Corporality
The city, the ultimate artificial habitat, amplifies the other, more intimate habitat-the one encased in skin. But those who truly want to absorb the city around them must learn to become urban bodies. An urban body does not move as it would in the countryside or on a mountain, or even as it would in a city other than its own. Every city enthralls its own bodies and ensnares them in its movement matrix. It brings them into step with its own rhythms. Thus Barcelona bodies are fundamentally different from Paris or New York ones. In a new city, by erasing prior codes, people acquire the freedom to become another instantly, to adopt another body. Anonymity is reflexive, and this new body is a stranger, even to oneself. Time, space, and walking—a great deal of walking—are needed to make a new city one’s own, complete with its own character and corporality, because people need to take on new codes to remake their bodies in the new city’s image.
Body Mobility Put to the Sensorial Test
A corporal merger with the city involves, then, giving the body meaning-a meaning that can only be dynamic. In the first instance, mobility gives rise to an interface through which the resident and the city can interpenetrate one another. The city’s signification emerges through the movements that constantly reconstitute this relationship, allowing residents to link their body to the city’s in a form of true urban participation: subtle glances, bumps, avoidance, missed meetings, near certainties, and happy accidents. Countless movements occur within the city. Meeting places, public spaces, and focal points are the stage for daily life, all places where the private body is revealed, acting anonymously and yet made public, a body that is solely one’s own but put on display for all eyes. A body that, in presenting itself to others, reflects its own image in their gaze.
Indeed, the urban body is above all a visual entity. Imaged and idealized, this portrait of the city includes only its appearance. Its body-the part to be sensed by taste, smell, touch-is erased. Of the city’s living flesh there remains only its iconic character, whose symbols no longer reference urban texture but only its reflection.
The auditory body, to the extent that it can be represented through a voice on a mobile phone, or through an iPod, remains within the domain of imagination and fantasy. This body, carried on sound waves, is not as it is imagined, and encountering it allows sight to supersede hearing. The jarring superimposition of perceptual inferences· does not always make it easy to recalibrate the imagination.
The most ubiquitous of all bodies is the commuter. This body is made of silences, jerky motions, crossing paths, movements captured in a passerby’s ephemeral glimpse, or even daydreams, for example when leaning against a vehicle window while waiting for a light to change or while travelling by subway, bus, or tram. Alive with sudden transitions, it exists at the level of travellers’ half-sleep, in a state of suspension between origin and destination.”
Excerto de The Pedestrian as Urban Actor de Sonia Lavadinho, parte do livro Actions: What Can You Do With the City (2008)