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.

As the outset, Michel make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place is the order (of whatever) kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. In short, space is a practiced place.

In our examination of the daily practices that articulate that experience, the opposition between ‘place’ and ‘space’ will rather refer to two shorts of determinations in stories: the first, a determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being there of something dead, the law of a ‘place’. The second, a determination through operations which, when they are attributed to a stone, tree, or human that being specify ‘spaces’ by the actions of historical subjects.

Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between spaces into places. The organization that can be discerned in stories about space in everyday culture is inverted by the process that has isolated a system of geographical places. As operations on places, stories also play the everyday role of a mobile and magisterial tribunal in cases concerning their delimination. This role always appears more clearly at the school degree, when it is made explicit and duplicated by juridical discourse.

By considering the role of stories in delimination, one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting and transgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of ‘crossword’ decoding stencil whose essential narrative figures seem to be the frontier and the bridge.

Creating a theater of actions. The story’s first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found. Strictly speaking, this function is not judicial, that is, related to laws or judgements.

Frontiers and bridges. Stories are actuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority.

Today, narrative operations of boundary-setting take the place of these enigmatic describers of earlier times when they bring movement in through the very act of fixing, in the name of delimination.