A summary of Michel de Certeau’s writing: In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a ‘metaphor’, a bus or a train. Every story is a travel story, a spatial practice. For this reason, spatial practice concern every day tactics, are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication (‘it’s to the right’, ‘taken left’), the beginning of a story the rest of which is written by footsteps, to the daily ‘news’ (‘Guess who I met at the bakery?’), television news reports (‘Teheran: Khomeini is becoming increasingly isolated…’), legends (Cinderellas living in hovels), and stories that are told (memories and fiction of foreign lands or more or less distant times in the past).

The proliferating metaphors, sayings and stories that organize places through the displacements they ‘describe’ (as a mobile point ‘describes’ a curve), what kind of analysis can be applied to them? To mention only the studies concerning spatializing operations (and not spatial systems), there are numerous works that provide methods and categories for such an analysis.

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