The Unplanned City Metaphor

Being monolingual for most of my life and then speaking another language is like walking into an unplanned city. Before leaving the "old city", the feeling that I generally understood the world was everpresent and lead me to think I understood things I never fully did, like the concept of mortgage or the word paradigm and lots of others. Maybe I understood most the words out there, but I never understood some compound concepts, but even that misunderstanding or lack of understanding never took me off balance. Whether I knew these random things or not, life meandered along tranquilly, with normal bumps and stress and more freckles or less freckles.

Just like I thought I knew Yreka inside and out. I could get anywhere in town, I know where I like to go and don't like to go, but I haven't been inside every building in town. I don't know how the water system works or many other things, but I trust that it does. And it does. The City works and I live my life, and we are mutually ignorant of each other, the City and I. I see shops and restaurants come and go, but I don't know anything about bigger mechanisms behind the movement of the city, the way it changes and the direction it's going. All the other cities in my life are relatively similar to my hometown, and they change but mostly for me their role stays the same. They are the sidewalk under my feet, and neither of us really considers the other in much detail.

Just as I never question my own language, and my own ignorance never reveals itself to me. I use the words I need most often, and I assume complete comprehension.

And all of the sudden, I'm in a city that's not planned. It's not planned so it's unlike everything I thought I understood, but still works of course, and perhaps is planned but in such a different way that I have to start from scratch to begin to understand how it works. I'm in a city that isn't following rules I remember now in retrospect unconsciously following. And as I begin to learn the rules, my age and my maturity help me question bigger processes...once I understand one simple mechanism, I see that there is something behind that that's bigger, and perhaps behind that again, until I get to a point of sometimes being able to understand more about my new city than I did about the old one.

So then I start to remember my own roots, and question the rules that I followed without being aware of them, wondering how my city began and what networks run through it, what evolutions it has sustained, what revolutions it has seen. I begin to understand things I never did in my old city, and in my native language, just because I question things here and learn concepts I never learned in my language, so to feel complete I need to translate them back into my own deepest network of understanding, which is English.

But it is still an unplanned city to me, and I'm often lost, and it doesn't have the kind of map I'm used to using. So I get used to being lost and always finding new shops or new restaurants, and I begin to accept my role as a perpetual foreigner in the unplanned city. But sometimes I have more lucid moments than the natives of course, just like outsiders to my City probably have. They'll of course never know my City like I do, but I'll never know my City like they do either.

I don't know if this metaphor is well sewn together. I kind of see it like a patch on a pair of pants that's half falling off. But I'm studying the history of Urban Studies in Europe and I had a revelation that united my two favorite disciplines at the moment. I actually envisioned speaking English as being in a small compartmentalized room and beginning to speak Italian as walking into a giant empty bubble where you could lose touch with the ground and of which the boundaries were sort of unclear. (What actually happened was that my housemate Mario was explaining something to Nicoletta and Vittoria and I understood before they did. And I got to thinking how weird it is that sometimes a non-native speaker could pick up on something before a native one could.) And those things to me translated into planned and unplanned cities because guess what........my oral exam for storia dell'urbanistica moderna e contemporanea is tomorrow!!!!! So of course it's time for a long, involved blog entry.

So in the real, concrete world, I went to Spain to vist Granada and Madrid in the middle of March. It was fun, pictures will be posted soon!