Driving in the city

PERHAPS THE most famous and most reproduced piece of writingfrom Michel de Certeau’s many works – anthologized or extractedalmost to distraction – is the seventh chapter from The Practice of Everyday Life called ‘Walking in the City’. In this article, I want to use that chapter as a jumping-off point, as a means of indexing and interrogating the nature of some (and only some) of the practices of the modern city. In particular, I want to lay the practice of walking that de Certeau uses as a sign of the human alongside the practice of driving. I want to argue that a hundred years or so after the birth of automobility, the experience of driving is sinking in to our ‘technological unconscious ’ and producing a phenom-enology that we increasingly take for granted but which in fact is histori-cally novel. This new and very public sense of possession (de Certeau, 2000) which is also a possession of sense, constitutes a radically different set of spatial practisings of the city which do not easily conform to de Certeau’s strictures on space and place and should at least give us pause. The article is therefore in three main parts. In the first part, I will do no more than outline some of de Certeau’s thoughts on spatial practices i