A translation of Michel de Certeau’s celebrated piece of urban analysis is published for the first time in Russian. The author opposes the gaze of planners and managers gaze, their power to render city transparent – to practical, tactile knowledge of the city of those who inhabit it. Those who walk in the city employ a peculiar set of “walking rhetoric” and transform, through myths and memories, the planned and readable city into migrational and metaphoric one.