EMOTIONAL CITIES

I refuse to see the city as squared streets, as point A to point B routes, as cold, hot, humid, grey and high up buildings to the point of hurting my neck. It's much more than that. I think that we often forget that the city is a multitude of sensations, feelings and inner experiences felt by those who cross it, live in it, occupy it. 

Even before I started studying urban studies and orienting my research around the themes of creative and emotional geography, poetic inquiry and women's bodies in the public space, I always asked myself a lot of questions: who actually built the city? Who decided to put this bench here and this building there? I developed a real fascination for construction and manufacturing, to the point where I forgot to ask myself: how do the people who walk through these same places actually feel? What do they pay attention to? What do they look at? What makes them feel good? 

I also often ask myself when did we start being so serious and rational: maps, numbers, statistics, plans, soil, covered with cement, concrete. All this seems terribly cold to me. People are reduced to digital data. Where are you going? Which way? Did you enjoy your Google Maps experience? Can you rate your journey? I get that these data are useful to optimize our movements in public spaces, but where did our emotions go? 

For me, moving around in the city is an explosion of emotions that coexist and fight against each other inside my fleshly envelope. I always feel attacked inside when I take my first step on the ground, I have just come out of my cocoon, my shelter of peace, so warm, well decorated, perfectly illuminated by the light of the rising sun and, suddenly, I have to face the fresh air that enters my jacket, my sleeves, freezes the back of my ears and refreshes my lungs. Often in the city, noises also attack me: the noisy boulevard is shouting, screaming at me “I AM STRONGER THAN YOU”. His speed makes me dizzy and suddenly I feel destabilised.

I travel around Paris by bike, which is a daily acrobatic feat between cars, pedestrians and other bikes. I am frustrated, annoyed, my heart speeds up thanks to the fast rhythm of my legs pedalling, I am fascinated to see that I can move so fast and get to my destination in three times less time than if I had walked. Sometimes it is so pleasant, the noise of the cars is just a lullaby in the background that I don't even pay attention to because I see the man I love biking in front of me. I am following him, blind, I stumble on the pavement because I don't have my glasses on, and I tell myself that we are lucky to move around in an open-air museum. Paris, you are so unique and beautiful. 

When I take the metro, I get scared. I get scared on the platforms waiting for the next train that arrives in 6 minutes, sometimes I imagine that some madman could come from behind and push me on the rails. I get scared because a man takes me out of my reverie and looks at me with a very seductive look, that I perceive as threatening and frightening. I get scared because I wear a skirt, heels, lipstick, I wear jogging, hoodies, I go to a bar, I go to the gym, I go everywhere, it doesn't matter, the gaze is always the same. I get closer to women, because I always feel safer next to women, I imitate them, I do everything like them, I walk where they go, I stay next to them so that people think I am with them. I follow them on the same waggon and try not to sit too far away from them. A homeless woman comes to ask me for money, my heart breaks as soon as I realize I cannot give any coin, simply because I don't even have coins in my wallet tonight, proof of our so dematerialised world. My heart breaks because I leave or return from such a jovial home and she does not, my heart breaks because I wonder how she got there. Do you really only have me to ask for money? I wish you could rely on your family or friends to help you, just like me. My heart breaks. I am lucky. 

As a future urban practitioner,  how do I know what others think when they move around the city? How can I come to know these details of justified, contradictory and sometimes meaningless, but most of the time meaningful emotions? I think that we don't look far enough into people's emotions, or I would say, we don't want to get to know them at all. I think we should develop more creative, funnier, less serious methodologies to give back some fun to our cities, and especially to those who live in them. I would like people to write poems, texts and words to me, to shout sensations and feelings to me, in order to understand what to build and where. Tell me what you feel in the city, but first of all tell it to yourself.