This chapter shows how people use space to construct narrative structures and shape their experiences. He also argues that ‘every story is a travel story—-a spatial practice’, and spatial stories are crucial for people to navigate and understand the world. The author wrote about differences in space and place, map and tour, and boundaries and frontiers.
The writer first mentioned that spatial practices concern everyday tactics, and the writer emphasizes the importance of mobility. Movement constructs spatial stories, in particular, walking. Through these movements, people can organize their paths to make journeys and thus create new narratives, which are more like proliferating metaphors.
However, this emphasis ignores the social barriers and physical limitations. Although walking can provide a further and closer understanding of spatial stories, the writer failed to consider those who have mobility constraints and cannot navigate freely through space. The writer also missed the possibility of people having trouble observing their surroundings. Can these people develop another way to assert their own stories, and how can they construct their own spatial stories?
In conclusion, de Certeau’s exploration of spatial stories gives me inspirations and enables me to understand new concepts; for example, place has the stability of instantaneous configuration of positions, while space is unstable and needs to consider the vectors, velocities, and time variables, which is like a practiced place. However, more constraints and limitations could be considered in order to make the concepts and practice of spatial stores accessible to a broader audience.
Xiru Zhao 3036267733
Your response is quite good writing. To improve, you should expand/elaborate more on paragraph 3 which you make an argument about De Certeau’s idea of spatial stories. You can elaborate on why social barriers and people who have physical limitations would have different experience in spatial stories, based on your questions ‘Can these people develop another way to assert their own stories, and how can they construct their own spatial stories?.’ You also can talk about your own experience of walking in the city.