fragmenten uit Storytime:
So the city can be described as a text, a legible structure, partially by habit and traditions, partially programmed and controlled by city planners and institutional organizations. Within this text people live and walk around and by doing so, they actualize it, they make the functions manifest. Living in the city they also change meanings, for example by taking shortcuts, using the prescribed space in a different way, by celebrating new festivities in the old squares. So we spend our days in a 3d user’s manual that is rewritten constantly.

So the city is more than just a user’s manual. Victor Hugo taught us that the city is a poem. And of course in this case he was talking about Paris. In his vision the city is álso a text, but it’s an ambiguous one. It’s a text we can read with metaphors, emotions and darkness underneath; with allusion, alliteration and stylistic beauty.

And the flaneur awoke, the universal stranger, using this estrangement to open his eyes and see the beauty of the ordinary, the diverse and the absurd, to notice the poetry of the city. And to this day we need the strange and the estranged, the stranger and the unknown to write and read the poems of our cities.