SCRIB 'Social City: Reinscribe - Involve - Belong'

The SCRIB Project (working title) is about engaging heterogeneous communities within the process of urban regeneration. SCRIB stands for Social City: Reinscribe – Involve – Belong. It aims to produce a model of how local communities can work with property developers, architects and masterplanners to build a more engaging and inclusive vision of the future for cities.

While the pilot project concentrates on an area within Leeds, the broader project will look to build on the pilot in order to engage developers and relevant agencies with communities. It will effectively utilise business networks, project management methodologies, social networking and marketing to raise the profile of academic-based projects. And it offers up a model which can be adopted by other cities who have the desire to engage a diversity of ‘stakeholders’, from grassroots level through to corporations, in order to effect social change.

What does SCRIB stand for?
What is the SCRIB Project?

October Book Talk in Huddersfield – Walking Inside Out

Date/Time: Friday 9th October 4.15-6.15
Venue: University of Huddersfield (please see below for full venue details)

Talk/reading abstract:
Tina Richardson’s new edited volume Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography is the first text that attempts to merge the work of literary and artist practitioners with academics to critically explore the state of psychogeography today. The collection explores contemporary psychogeographical practices, shows how a critical form of walking can highlight easily overlooked urban phenomenon, and examines the impact that everyday life in the city has on the individual. However, it is also a celebration of urban walking and in her talk Tina will be discussing its value in the complex space of the 21st century city. This book talk also includes readings from two of the contributing authors, Alexander John Bridger and Phil Wood. There will be time for questions, and wine and nibbles will also be provided. Please click here for further info and for (free) booking. The outline of the talk can be viewed on the above image.

Biography:
Tina Richardson is an independent scholar and psychogeographer. She became interested in psychogeography in 2009 when researching the Situationist International and set up Leeds Psychogeography Group that year, running it at the university till 2013. She is now a writer/editor and guest lecturer. Walking Inside Out is her new edited volume following Concrete, Crows and Calluses, which she self-published in 2013. Tina is also the editor of STEPZ: A Psychogeography and Urban Aesthetics Zine. The pilot edition was published this summer. Both Walking Inside Out and STEPZ are appearing on university syllabuses this upcoming semester, in the UK and abroad.

Venue details/directions:
Harold Wilson building, ground floor, room 3 (HWG/03).
Click here for location of University of Huddersfield and maps.
Click here for pedestrian map showing Harold Wilson building (while it is building 02 on the map you can also enter through 01, University Reception).

Extracts from Walking Inside Out - Outsider Psychogeography

This is the second of a series of blogs that includes extracts from Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. This section is entitled ‘Outsider Psychogeography’ and begins with a summary of that section followed by extracts from the individual chapters/authors. Please click here for the first extracts: ‘Memory, Historicity, Time’.

Psychogeography has always had to deal with its detractors, from the criticisms aimed at the Situationist International’s hankering for a lost past to the contemporary disapproval levelled at it in its current incarnations. This is especially prevalent today with the proliferation of online forums, blogs and zines. For example a post entitled ‘How Could Psychogeography Come to This’ appeared in June 2012 on the blog Cosmopolitan Scum which criticised the psychogeography carried out on the London Olympic site in 2012.

Some disciplines can be very welcoming to psychogeography, but this is not necessarily the case in all academic fields. When attempting to justify one’s own practice in what may be a somewhat ‘hostile’ environment, it is easy to come across as apologetic or overly defensive. While the vagueness of the term ‘psychogeography’ enables it to be an inter/transdisciplinary tool, as a field in itself (if we choose to call it that) it is considered unscientific, even if some of the practices employed within it might be used in a scientific way elsewhere and might appear under a different label. For instance, the Recitoire project run by the Grenoble Computer Science Lab, looks at qualitative surveys which involve citizens in their local urban planning projects. While this is not labelled as psychogeography at all, nor is the term used in their documentation, the comparisons are apparent.

The two essays which represent this section reflect the work of two academics who use psychogeography in their own field. They both draw on walking-based literature and philosophy and demonstrate how psychogeography can be used as an interdisciplinary tool which can be incorporated in a discipline in which it might not usually be considered.


Psychogeography, Anti-Psychologies and the Question of Social Change
by Alexander John Bridger

Psychogeographical work doesn’t get much mention in the discipline of psychology. Indeed, the ‘high status’, mainstream and funded psychology research focuses on the measurement of peoples’ minds, attitudes and behaviour. However, in the past 30 years, psychologists have begun to conduct research, which has shifted from laboratory research to fieldwork studies with the aims to use interviews and observations to study peoples’ language and experiences in context. In terms of psychological studies about environments, much of that work has tended to be based in environmental psychology and social psychology where researchers have either attempted to study the effects of environments on peoples’ behaviour or they have attempted to discern how people construct identities in places. Whilst there is some value to that previous work, what I want to outline here is a quite different approach to studying environments, which doesn’t fit neatly into the existing mainstream paradigm of psychology. What I want to do is explain why a psychogeographical approach in psychology is needed and how psychogeographical research should be entwined with political and activist practice to be part of a progressive agenda of radical social change. Clearly, these aims are in opposition to the mainstream scientific orientation of psychology research but there are important reasons why this needs to be done.

Generally speaking, psychology work tends to be disconnected from social change except for instances where governments, the media and other corporations use psychology to back up their agendas and where typically, psychological knowledge is used to uphold the status quo. Earlier on in this book, Tina Richardson (2015) discussed how it continues to be a challenge in academia to introduce literature-based psychogeography into academic arenas, unless it was within literature-based courses. This is even more of a challenge in typically scientific and positivist enterprises such as psychology. In this chapter, I want to outline a distinctively radical, political orientation to psychology, which draws on psychogeographical techniques to consider the spatialisation of environments. This chapter outlines a rationale for why a psychogeographical analysis of environments in and against psychology is important and I will explain how such work can be done...


Re-Walking the City: People with Dementia Remember
by Andrea Capstick

Within the dominant biomedical discourse, late-life dementia is regarded as a pathological condition characterised by short-term memory loss, word finding difficulties and ‘problem behaviours’ such as ‘wandering and ‘repetitive questioning’. As its title suggests, one of the main purposes of this chapter is to shift the focus from what people with late-life dementia forget to what they remember, particularly as this relates to places they have known much earlier in life. A central part of my argument is that dementia, often somewhat crudely represented as wholesale memory loss, might better be regarded as a form of spatio-temporal disruption; a disruption which intersects with the theoretical territory of psychogeography.

People with dementia are often regarded as unreliable narrators, and I first became interested in psychogeography when searching for archival and historical evidence that the places people with dementia referred to in stories they told about their lives actually existed. Or, at least, that they once had done, since the changes that have taken place in the outer built environment during a lifetime of 80 or 90 years are often extreme. The first section of the chapter, ‘Locating narratives’, therefore discusses narrative biographical work carried out with people with dementia as part of the Trebus Projects (trebusprojects.org). Many of the narrators were people whom staff in the care homes where they now lived believed could no longer communicate meaningfully and often their stories were dismissed as mere invention or attention seeking. It was noticeable, however, that very often they appeared to use quite precise geographical markers to ‘signpost’ memories from earlier life. I found that although many of these places had either disappeared or altered beyond recognition in the intervening decades, the references themselves were almost always accurate and verifiable. In one care home, for example, two women both referred independently in conversation to “black cat”. While this could easily have been taken as a reference to a former pet or a superstitious belief, it emerged that in fact both women had worked at the Black Cat cigarette factory in Camden.

In working with people with dementia there is often therefore a need to suspend our disbelief, and to resist what Russell Jacoby (1996) has described as “social amnesia”; the societal tendency to undervalue, and therefore to forget, the past. This resistance is, in itself a form of psychogeographical détournement (Debord and Wolman 1956) in that an existing concept - that of the amnesiac - is ‘liberated’ from its usual meaning and relocated in wider society. The destruction of memory lies as much in the outer world with its demolition sites, road-widening schemes, bomb damage, slum clearance and gentrification, as it does in the ‘damaged’ brain of the person with dementia. The tendency for people with dementia to ‘wander’, get lost, or become anxious in places that have changed significantly is better understood when we consider it as a correlate of change in the external world as well as internal cognitive impairment.

What does SCRIB stand for?

Scribe - Dictionary Definition

Verb

1. To write
2. To mark with a pointed instrument

The SCRIB Project is about rewriting the city by acknowledging the social history that is geographically contained within the terrain. It is concerned with leaving a recognisable trace of the past in the form of an inscription...

Why the dislike button adds nothing to Facebook!

At his Townhall Q and A on 15th September, Mark Zuckerberg did not announce for certain a ‘dislike’ button, despite all the reporting focusing on this as if it is an imminent future additional feature. What he actually said was that Facebook are considering another feature that goes alongside the ‘like’ button, such as a ‘dislike’ button that could be used for ‘expressing empathy’. This post will explain why I think including a ‘dislike’ button does not add anything to the dynamics of the scenario of the already existing ‘like’ button.

The singular ‘like’ option allows users to select ‘like’ for any number of reasons, here are some examples. It might be for liking the content of a positive post, or for when a friend has achieved something (such as completing their dissertation), or it may be they have reached an anniversary of some kind. It also allows you to agree with the contents of a post – this could be something to do with a shared political opinion, or showing approval for an event that a friend may be attending, for example. There are many reasons why you would click ‘like’ to express an actual (genuine) liking of a post’s content.

One of the problem arises, as acknowledged by Zuckerberg, when you don’t like the content of the post, even if you may like the sentiment behind why someone has posted it. Zuckerberg’s example is the current refugee crisis. Sometimes people qualify this in their comments when they are liking a post the contents of which are upsetting or of which they have sympathy. It can sometimes feel ‘wrong’ to ‘like’ posts if you feel clicking ‘like’ does not reflect the complete response you have towards that post. So let’s use this as our example, since Zuckerberg used this is in his Q and A session.

Zuckerberg says that a ‘dislike’ button in this instance would allow people to show their empathy in a given situation. But does it really do this? Say you don’t want to ‘like’ a post on the refugee crisis because it does not express your feelings about it, and not clicking anything clearly doesn’t show the opposite since it does not recognise your acknowledgement of the post in any way at all (unless you write a comment). Also, you may be worried that if you do click ‘like’, it may seem you are liking that there is a crisis, rather than showing your empathy towards the refugees. So there appears to be a ‘lack’ in Facebook in providing you the scope to express yourself in this particular scenario. So, how would ‘dislike’ make up for this lack?

In the way that the ‘like’ button works, the ‘dislike’ button works the same way but in reverse, actually adding nothing to the overall Facebook experience, except for further confusion and the need for people to continue to qualify their use of it. This is why: if you click ‘dislike’ on a post about the refugee crisis, what are you saying ‘dislike’ to? Are you actually saying you dislike the fact there are refugees suffering in this crisis? Possibly, in this situation, that may be the assumed response. But actually you could be saying that you dislike the post for a number of reasons. For instance, you may be someone who is totally unsympathetic to the crisis and has empathy for those countries staunchly protecting their borders. This is empathy, but not that described by Zuckerberg in his example.

Let’s take another more ambiguous example and assume that almost everyone would be sympathetic to the refugees and in that instance we would read the use of ‘dislike’ in meaning that. Let’s say a friend of yours is a Jeremy Corbyn supporter and they put up a link to an online newspaper about him being voted the new Labour leader, but upon reading the post it then appears to be from a right-wing newspaper criticising Corbyn’s new appointment. You may be a Corbyn supporter and are happy to hear about his new position, but unhappy to read the criticisms about him in the newspapers. What do you click on then?

Many posts are of this nature. A lot of the time our opinion of something is not completely ‘black and white’ and our empathy may be directed at some of the content of the post, but not all of it. Buttons denoting ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ simply reinforce the existing dynamic. I would suggest adding a ‘dislike’ button is worse than simply having a ‘like’ one, in that it adds another layer of ambiguity. Having a ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ appears to allow you take one of two positions on a post, but in fact these two positions are just the reverse of each other, forcing you into complete commitment in one direction or other, both choices being of the same dialectical structure. While it may work successfully in some scenarios, as is the case with the ‘like’ button, does it really improve the quality of our user experience, or does it just provide more usable data for Facebook?

NB: I originally thought about doing a deconstruction of the like/dislike feature since it lends itself well to Jacques Derrida’s themes of ‘the trace’ and ‘lack’. It would certainly suit an analysis using his concept of ‘the supplement’, which is an addition that is attached to something original to improve it. However, I wanted this post to be accessible. Despite this I will sign-off with a Derrida taster: ‘the supplement…adds only to replace [and] is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness’ (Of Grammatology).

Related Links:
Thank an aging audience for Facebook’s proposed ‘dislike’ button

Extracts From Walking Inside Out - Memory, Historicity, Time

This is the first of a series of blogs that includes extracts from Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. This section is entitled ‘Memory, Historicity, Time’ and begins with a summary of that section followed by extracts from the individual chapters/authors.

Our relationship with the city is intrinsically tied up with our knowledge and memory of it. If a particular city is somewhere we know - from today or from our past - we are unable to separate our psychological responses to it from the materiality of the place itself. This, in fact, is psychogeography and is what makes us all psychogeographers to a degree. A sense of place connects us to a geographic region in a specific way that becomes apparent when we start to explore the emotions attached to particular urban pockets that spark something in us. It might be a memory from our adolescence, such as an independent record shop in our hometown where we purchased our first piece of vinyl, or a more recent memory we have of the experience of moving to a new town or city and the differing aesthetics of that place compared to our last home.

These memories are not separate from our self, they inform and form us. The experience of the everyday that is played out in space - walking to the train station, going to the supermarket, taking the dog for a walk – make up a significant part of our day. These practices are imprinted on our psyches over time, forming our relationship with space and at the same time are laid down in our memory of that place, creating our attachment to it. What is particularly pertinent to our memory of place is that it is subjective and partial – it cannot be anything other. It is this that lends itself to the multifarious and often contradictory accounts of specific spaces.

In this section contributions range from qualitative research on memory and place, to personal accounts which interweave fact and fiction. They express the variety of styles of writing on place, but also the effects of time and memory in the way that they become part of our own histories.

Walking Through Memory: Critical Nostalgia and the City
by Alastair Bonnett

This chapter explores how nostalgia for the city shapes the way we use it and think about its future. I will be examining how fond memories and a sense of loss amongst ex-residents shape their movement within and relationship to the city. Building on recent reappraisals of the role of nostalgia in psychogeography I point out overlaps and connections between avant-garde psychogeography and the supposedly conservative and backward-looking sensibilities of ex-urban residents. . .

The image of ex-residents of the city as “escapees” offers one of the most influential stereotypes of counter-urbanisation (for example, Osbaldiston 2010; Salt 2004). Yet the 26 interviews this chapter draws on suggests we should expand our vision of ex-residents towards a more complex picture of continuing engagement. It also allows us to begin mapping individuals’ memories of the city upon their contemporary use of the city. Our interviews were carried out with long-term ex-residents of Tyneside (an urban area comprised of the four Metropolitan Boroughs of Newcastle upon Tyne, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Gateshead) are the now living along the Tyne valley to a distance of 22 miles (the principal towns in the study are Prudhoe, Corbridge and Hexham). “Long-term ex-residents” were defined as those who lived in Tyneside for over 10 years and left Tyneside over 10 years ago.

Our interview technique directed interviewees to talk about their early memories and then their contemporary use of the city. Each interview began with the request: “Tell me about your earliest memory of Tyneside”, eliciting a variety of rich accounts and pictures of the city. . .

The Art of Wandering: Arthur Machen’s London Science
by Merlin Coverley

In the summer of 2013, I was amongst a small group of fellow writers and enthusiasts who gathered in Caerleon in South Wales to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Machen. Here, in Machen’s birthplace, surrounded by the enchanted landscape that inspired him so greatly, we discussed his experiences of both Wales and his adopted city, London, and sought to account for the enduring impact of his work. For in recent years Machen has enjoyed something of a comeback; his many works, for so long out of print, have gradually been reissued, and his unique voice has found a new audience. And, as his inclusion in a series of essays such as this would suggest, this renewed interest has resulted to a large degree from his having been adopted, retrospectively, into the psychogeographical tradition, that community of writers and thinkers which enables a diversity of figures to come together, finding common ground where perhaps none might have been sought previously. It is Machen’s role within this tradition and his continued relevance to contemporary debates surrounding psychogeography that shall be the subject of this essay. . .

By 1936 when ‘N’ was first published, Arthur Machen was 73 years old and the books which had established his reputation, such as it now was, were long behind him: The Great God Pan (1894); The Three Impostors (1894); The Hill of Dreams (1907). This final period of Machen’s long career has since elicited little critical attention, and yet ‘N’ is perhaps his strangest and most revealing story. The title is intriguing, for while its meaning is impossible to establish with any degree of certainty, it may well refer simply to the area in which it is set, Stoke Newington being represented by the single letter N, the postal district for North London at this time. In this sense then, the story is almost, but not quite, the perfect backdrop to Machen’s search for the north-west passage, instead revealing a route to the north-east, but in any event a more romantically inclined title, to my mind, than its contemporary equivalent, N16. . .

Wooden Stones
by Gareth E. Rees

It’s the sea air, as I stand by the ruined pier, which brings me the first whiff of Mike’s memory. The instant the salt hits my nostrils I’m transported to that morning when he was found by a dog walker, laid gently on the rocks beneath the castle at low tide. It didn’t happen here in Hastings, though. You’d have to travel 900 miles north up the British coast to St Andrews in Fife, and nineteen years back in time, to see me beside the castle, staring in horror at what lay below. Mike was still wearing his tweed jacket, jeans and leather soled shoes. But his glasses were gone. It looked as if he was curled up asleep.

He was buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Edinburgh among myriad rows of glittering marble on the brow of a vast manicured lawn, high above the city. Months later I left Scotland for a job writing radio adverts in Cardiff. A few years after that I migrated to London, where I lived for fifteen years, morphing into a middle-aged man with a wife and kids. I’ve been back to Edinburgh several times, but never to that cemetery. I never thought about why. Not until I came to live by the sea once again.

Not until I discovered the wooden stones. . .

Selective Amnesia and Spectral Recollection in the Bloodlands
by Phil Wood

Why I should spend my time walking around places that most people would choose to avoid has never been entirely clear to me. My parents suggest the experience of falling unnoticed into a subterranean coal cellar as a toddler, and spending several hours there, has burned itself into my subconscious. My childhood playgrounds were old colliery spoil heaps, slowly slipping back into nature, and I can recall the uncanny thrill of my first illicit entry to an abandoned building – the recently closed mine near my home at Lepton Edge in the British town of Huddersfield. Doubtless there is also the eerie experience of seeing the film Stalker (Tarkovsky 1979) at an impressionable age. Whatever, I can endorse Iain Sinclair’s view that the act of walking, or purposeful drift, is the route to revelation.

Yet it also seems, in my case at least, to be the places of past or recent tumult, where the silt has been stirred and agitated, that the greatest spectral potential lies. Thus, in Britain, it is no surprise I should be drawn to the remnants of the industrial revolution and its long tail (Edensor 2005; Hill 2013). But for decades I have been drawn also to the east of Europe – particularly the regions dubbed the Bloodlands (Snyder 2012) - where past and present still co-exist in a more dynamic and occasionally dangerous relationship. And, whilst industrial ruination proliferates (Pusca 2010; Schönle 2006), there are other sources of tumult too. In Britain most boundaries are defined by the sea, and ethnic identities have remained fairly stable for centuries whereas a 20th century resident of Lviv in western Ukraine, for example, might feasibly have been a subject of five different national jurisdictions without once having moved house (Snyder 2003). They would also have witnessed mass deportations of neighbours and other atrocious acts, many of which remain psychologically and politically unresolved, leaving behind unexorcised ghosts. . .

Please click here for more extracts: Outsider Psychogeography

26 Psychogeography Stations by Darrant Hinisco

In August 2015 Darrant approached me to produce his first artist’s book after coming across a copy of STEPZ: A Psychogeography and Urban Aesthetics Zine in a second-hand bookshop in Lisbon. Darrant had already begun working on a collection of his urban landscape images and on discovering STEPZ decided he would like his images to be published under the rubric of psychogeography and as an Urban Gerbil publication. I would like to thank Darrant for trusting me with his first publication and I feel honoured to be working with him. Tina Richardson 2015.

TwentySix Psychogeography Stations will be published before the end of the year. Please check back here for any updates.

Let’s Talk About What People Don’t Like About Psychogeography – Part 4

The Spoon Bending…

This is the final part of the blog looking at psychogeography’s detractors. Please click here for part 1, part 2 and part 3.

What has been written about the urban spaces we occupy influences how we see those spaces to begin with: “there is no city that is simply outside the network of texts that circulate and shape our experience of the city” (Highmore 2005, 141). However, if we look at the reverse of this then we can also influence how our city is perceived through our explorations and writing of it. Our cities are in a continual state of flux, despite the appearance of some stability. Have you noticed how you see new hoardings appear, then later the building work begins behind the hoarding, then upon completion the hoardings are removed and the new building appears in its fullness? In a very short space of time you will have forgotten what was previously in its place. The space will become stable again. This stability is an illusion which is a side-effect or urban planning. Psychogeographers are one of the groups of writers who remark on the changing nature of space and contribute to the history of these places, the very spaces on our doorstep.

Possibly because of the prominence of the creative-writing/creative non-fiction background of many urban walkers historically, psychogeography has often been highlighted for not being critical enough of itself – although I believe this is unjustified. I would like to defend this strand of psychogeography and say I do not think this is necessarily the job of these writers any more than it would be for travel writers to critique their own field. However, for those of us in academia who are interested in psychogeography from a theoretical and/or methodological perspective, this is our job. One of the comments on the The Great Wen: A London Blog attached to the post mentioned previously, written by ‘Jason’, says: “Psychogeography has about as much rigour as spoon bending but I’ve always had a weakness for it” (cited in Watts 2014). So, let's change that perception.

It is difficult to get to the bottom of what some of these generic criticisms of psychogeography actually mean. In these instances I always want to ask the rhetorical question: ‘Which type of psychogeography are you talking about?’. However, I have to assume by their question that these individual’s think that all psychogeography is the same, since there is no nuance in their remark (although Jason does seem to actually like psychogeography despite this). It is quite apparent from researching psychogeography (especially that of the Situationists), that it has, and continues to be, critically assessed. I hope Walking Inside Out demonstrates that psychogeography can be rigorous when applied methodologically and it can also be aligned with relevant theories in order to be used to explore urban space by those in and outside academia.

Related Links:
The New Psychogeography
STEPZ

Bibliography:
Highmore, Ben. Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Watts, Peter. "New London Writing, or What the Fuck Is Psychogeography Anyway?": The Great Wen, 2014.