By creating a street map, place is rewritten. Concrete, brick, tarmac, grass and plastic become reduced to a collection of readily identifiable graphic symbols. If not exactly erased, humanity is reduced to the identification of services (church to post office, disabled toilet to police station). We filter the jungle of signs that confronts us and makes conflicting calls on our attention into a semblance of meaning that is completely banished from the ordered pages of the map. Absent too are the glances and smiles of the pavement and random acts of kindness, as is the artistry of the pickpocket, the brutality of the mugger or the street theatre of road rage. The map is a tool for living, a way of getting from A to B.

The London A-Z, like most of today's city maps, has a very particular identity. Unlike the folding map where the city can be understood at a glance by unfolding the map into one large sheet of paper, the A-Z is a book. But, despite being bound, it cannot be read as a book. To follow a road from one page to another, west to east, you just turn the page, but going north to south you have to turn a number of pages before picking up the road again. The city is rendered into a series of fragments, page by page. Rather than take the whole book into unknown parts of the city, this sense of the unframed fragment is further emphasised when pages are torn from the binding so that single sheets provide the guide.

This fragmentation is very different from that found in the 1957 map of Paris, The Naked City, drawn up (or rather, cut up) by the French Situationist Guy Debord. The map's title was lifted from the classic of film noir, Jules Dassin's The Naked City of 1948 which, as the critic Parker Tyler observed, laid bare¹ the social body and explored the vastly complex structure of a great city [which] is a supreme obstacle to the police detectives at the same time that it provides tiny clues.¹ For Guy Debord, these tiny clues¹ were a means to charting the fabled North West Passage, so that in his map of Paris he could create a drifting narrative of city spaces that had been drawn through and delineated by the emotional and behavioural responses to those spaces that conventional cartography would ignore. Debord's map lays out a city of potential events, where place is rewritten as potential story.

It is with this narrative potentiality, served up through the tiny clues of the cityscape which are always rewritten (if not all but obliterated) through the transformation wrought by cartographical conventions, that Lars Arrhenius's A-Z finds its ground. Over the rewriting of the map, Arrhenius presents other narratives which find their form and structures from the map they occupy. Geographical narrative is overlayed with social narrative. The map itself gives a structure to what would otherwise constitute seemingly random wanderings across the pages. It is tempting to compare the resulting fragmentations of everyday inconsequentiality with the similar construction of Hergé¹s comic novel The Castafiore Emerald, in which nothing much happens ­ the only Tintin adventure which extends no further than the grounds of his home at Marlinspike Hall. As Hergé admitted, my aim was to tell a story where nothing happened no villain, no real suspense, no adventure in the normal sense. Nevertheless, Hergé's apparent non-narrative is anything but unstructured, as the Belgian critic Benoit Peeters has at length pointed out in Les Bijoux Ravis, his adaptation of Roland Barthes' S/Z. In Hergé's book, image, text and space form a tightly strung web of intertextuality which is constructed so successfully by Hergé that the reader is completely unaware of its existence.