In this light, walking the city resembles reading it. The Situationists proposed the dérive—drifting to map emotional currents—as articulated in Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” (1958). Literary mirrors abound: Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) treats urban space as metaphor, while Borges’s mazes suggest that interpretation is navigation. By treating intersections as punctuation and blocks as paragraphs, citizens learn to annotate their surroundings—choosing side streets over boulevards, or plazas over parking lots—and in doing so, they revise the urban narrative. [...]
