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This chapter extends the analysis of the interplay between visibility and publicity delving into the city as a site of intersecting visibilities, motilities and stratifications. Urban studies literature is immense; in this instance, I choose as interlocutors Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift and their recent call to "reimagine" the urban dimension. Inspired by a Deleuzian perspective, Amin and Thrift (2002) have argued against the priority given to a phenomenological approach to the city and in favour of a machinic one. However, here I seek to point out that, in the attempt to understand urban visibilities, the phenomenological and the machinic perspectives can and, indeed, should be kept together. The matrix view of flows and fluxes in the city, that is, of the city as a pattern of traces and trajectories, is important and enlightening, but rather than being opposite, as claimed by Amin and Thrift, it is complementary to the phenomenological experience of urban circulation. Urban circulation is located precisely at the intersection between top-down and bottom-up perspectives.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230282056_6

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