For example, we can view Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as an attempt to see the world as what Heidegger would call ‘worlding’, as developing out of its own resources, of which humans are a part, rather than the agency, the privileged understanding. This will be made explicit in Heidegger’s "worldhood of the world" and in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment, by which he sees that the world that we inhabit is embodied in the things with which we’re involved. So, I would get rid of the term “perception of”, which we characteristically use to describe our mode of involvement with architecture, and I would say “involvements with”, since the way we are with one another, with things, with nature, is much more indirect – it’s distributed, it has a depth structure and it is something of which we’re a part.

People have developed a procedure for mapping the city as public-private. Giambattista Nolli drew a map of Rome, where buildings were black and what was “public” was white. I would argue that there is almost nothing in a city that is purely private – maybe the domestic lieu, and that depends on whether you take your showers by yourself; otherwise, everything else is qualified by involvement with others in one form or another, either directly or implicitly.

Taking something like the Japanese tea ceremony, one can see a structure that’s highly ceremonial. One doesn’t simply pick the tea up and slurp it: drinking is almost secondary to the rest of the performance. Now, when you’re drinking your plastic cup of builder’s tea, you don’t have that degree of ceremony, but you have bits of it. One is always caught up in these structures that are more or less free, more or less affordances.

I refer to topography as a resistance to using words like space. Topography speaks of a bottom-up way of understanding how things are distributed spatially and under what circumstances. They don’t occur in a void or floating, except possibly in a collage. In fact, there are structures of dependency, as we saw earlier with the movement from thoughts to speech to gesture to furniture to walls and floor of a room. One’s intelligence is not simply a Cartesian theatre – it is already embodied and distributed in the given context. It doesn’t have to be neat. A mess is a form of order. Violence is a form of order.

In contrast to the overconfidence to be able to command reality as a concept that space promotes, I am arguing for taking proper account of the embodied, metaphoric and distributed context. Moreover, all of this distributed context is temporal. A thought, a fly, a brick wall each have different temporalities, and so to speak of space or time in the singular is to do an injustice to understanding the order in which we’re involved. One can trace this idea from individual situations whose dependence on their contexts is obvious, particularly at an urban level.

If I had to summarise it, I would say that it’s important to understand that the city is distributed, embodied, enacted, metaphoric and temporal, and it is a deep matrix or metabolism which exerts a claim upon our understanding and an opportunity for our self-understanding, to make cities that are habitable, creative and fruitful.