Repeating the experience of childhood

I too am reading de Certeau-- I've been meaning to read The Practice of Everyday Life for years but it has taken me this Institute to actually get me to do it.I have to say that I found the "Walking in the City" chapter strangely alienating, in that de Certeau seems to collapse a newcomer's experience of a city with that of someone who is intimately familiar with it. I'm still thinking about that, but in the meantime, I was struck by this sentence from the end of the chapter:"To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other."This brought to mind two things I've come across in the past few days:

• A parody of Edith Wharton reviewing the Starbucks that now occupies the ground floor of her childhood home
• Megan McCardle on growing up in, and leaving, New York