What does it mean to “read” a city? Why must a city be read? And who is capable of reading it?
Unlike the village—where silence forms a vast abyss—the city is a space of appearance, a stage of visibility, a site where bright and striking forms manifest themselves. The city is a place to be seen; it is where things become visible to the eye. It is the industrial core of civilization, where the abstract laws of exchange govern not only commerce but also culture. Its surface reflects the norms—and abnormalities—lying beneath.
In the city, reality strips itself bare. It tears through the veils and bubbles that surround it and exposes itself within the practical and social life of everyday existence. In this experience, one encounters countless strangers—strangers to themselves, to the world, and to others—who make no effort to hide their frowns, and who may not even bother to return a greeting. In the city, necessity is the invisible thread connecting people. This is why we hear what should not be heard, speak what should not be spoken, and remain unmoved when someone a few meters away laughs ecstatically, cries painfully, rambles to themselves, or simply walks. As “citizens,” we become cold observers—indifferent spectators with “no business” in the affairs of others. We merely watch. And if we do not blame ourselves for picking up something lost in the street, it is because we assume that others, upon finding our lost property, would take it without the slightest guilt. Here, humans are not wolves to one another—they are hyenas.
From the rise of the bourgeoisie to the present, the city has deliberately and intensely atomized its subjects. It drags them farther apart and makes the notion of “collectivity” appear naïve, even laughable. The city is the grand exhibition hall of modern life’s becoming, where stillness itself feels unnatural—so unnatural that standing still on a busy sidewalk appears deranged, a sign of mental imbalance. The city thus embodies both totality and relativity: everyone is present, yet no one is “with” anyone. People exist solely with themselves, suspicious and mistrustful of all others.
And because the city is also a theatre—where every detail seeks to be seen, noticed, and displayed—it is equally the heart of the marketplace, where everything becomes a commodity: human beings themselves, as well as what they make, know, or desire. This desire to sell transforms the marketplace—and the city—into a chamber of noise and relentless shouting. Those who have witnessed the evenings of Kabul know the blaring speakers of fruit sellers and vegetable vendors, advertising their produce with loud calls meant to entice buyers. So amid all this chaos and noise, who is capable of reading the city?
The one who reads the city is the city-wanderer—the flâneur. Someone the city has failed to dissolve into its norms. He remains physically inside the city, but his spirit and consciousness roam beyond its boundaries. He walks without a specific destination. He allows the city to reveal itself to him. His wandering becomes meaningful in this process of discovery.
This flâneur is a modern figure; he does not judge the city and modernity from the vantage point of some ancient past. He understands himself as a product of modern conditions. His act of reading the city is an immanent critique of modernity—a critique that arises from within and sustains modern life. The flâneur not only reads the city; he tastes it, smells it, touches it. Though cast out of the city’s normative order, he preserves his singularity and confronts the city, examining both its pure and impure forms. He observes buildings, structures, and the city’s anatomy.
But the flâneur is not an ideologue. He does not contaminate what he witnesses with “shoulds” and “should nots.” His task is descriptive, not prescriptive. He simply offers what he has perceived, faithfully and honestly. This makes the flâneur one of the purest examples of thought in action—indeed, a bodily embodiment of thinking. For thinking, too, is like “walking in the dark”: an arduous process whose outcome cannot be predicted. If one could foresee the end of one’s thought, it would no longer be thinking—it would merely be rehearsal.
Both the flâneur and the thinker fix their gaze upon truth and allow its light to astonish them. They describe what they see and leave excitement and exaggeration to those prone to it.
The true reader of the city keeps a deliberate distance from grand statements and sweeping declarations about humanity and the cosmos. He is a child of secularism, born of an earthly age that has discarded the ancient memory of paradise or heaven. He moves through the concrete experience of life and tries to keep pace with the rapid flow of modernity, recording its movements. He seeks a strong connection to lived, material experience. He knows that awareness disconnected from existence is meaningless—nothing but a tangle of illusions. The city-reader observes the “spirit of the age” through a refined gaze, seeing differently, writing differently. He is a stranger who finds familiarity through seeing and describing.
And even if no city in the world required such a reader—which is not the case—Kabul, my city, certainly does. More than any place where life flows with regularity and routine, Kabul needs to be read. It is a city of the most harrowing spectacles of our era, a place where palace-dwellers imagine themselves wrestling with history while ordinary people pay the price of this absurd enmity. Kabul is a city of great and visible suffering, and of hidden and delicate hopes.
This city—and all the cities of this land—must be read.
