8 ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’

Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) remains a cornerstone for rethinking urban space anthropologically. In this excerpt, De Certeau contrasts the abstract, panoramic vision of the city seen from above with the embodied, everyday acts of walking that resist totalization. His reflection highlights the gap between official representations of urban space and the lived practices that continually reinvent it — a key tension at the heart of anthropological approaches to urbanism.