Last month the Centre for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) announced the shortlist for its photo competition, ‘Areas of Outstanding Urban Beauty’. Andy Graham, photographer of the shortlisted ‘Leeds’ (pictured), writes: “There are no people at Clarence Dock in Leeds they say, nobody wants to go there. This image on a snowy february morning shows just how many people actually do live here. The hidden folk have for once left their footprints behind.”

CABE’s competition invites an appreciation of the urban environment as beautiful in its own right, in contrast to the more conventional ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’. As Graham’s photo so strikingly reveals, foregrounding human activity makes the city differently legible. Snow in Clarence Dock elegantly materialises the multiple, unmarked journeys crisscrossing space, allowing us to see the city as the dynamic and evolving product of multiple agencies: not only the municipal authorities responsible for trees and tarmac, but the “hidden” trajectories “they say” do not exist.

Graham’s commentary articulates a division between the ‘panoptic’ space of the urban planner and the ‘practised’ space of the urban pedestrian that might remind us of Michel de Certeau. ‘Leeds’ vividly illustrates de Certeau’s definition of “walking as a space of enunciation”, in which the traces of individual journeys, when transcribed on a map, can “only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by… They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984: pp. 97-8). Graham’s photo encourages us to see the city as a text articulated by journeys, in which the “hidden” life made visible by the camera can only be read briefly and in absentia, as traces in the snow before it melts.

The rest of the shortlist is available at http://www.cabe.org.uk/news/aoub-shortlist