S T E P Z Official Launch

S T E P Z: A Psychogeography and Urban Aesthetics Zine

S T E P Z is a zine for and by those interested in psychogeography and in critiquing, appreciating and debating urban space. It does not have the strict editorial rules applied to it that would be the case in an academic article, textbook, or even in a novel. It is, what you might call, ‘editorially restrained’ and is the brainchild of the psychogeographer Tina Richardson. This pilot edition includes contributions from both professional and creative writers. Please click here for a welcome from the editor and for a list of contributions.

S T E P Z is available to download online for free and for sale in limited edition hard copy format. The limited edition hard copy differs slightly from the downloaded free version due to the insertion of a symbol to denote its limited edition status (see above) and to differentiate from possible bootlegged copies. The hard copy is 16 sides of A4 bound into a booklet and costs £4.00 plus postage.

Copies available here:
Please click here to download a free pdf.
Please get in touch via the contact page at www.schizocartography.org to organise a limited edition hard copy. You can pay via cheque or paypal.

S T E P Z: A Welcome from the Editor

 
I shall be taking S T E P Z to the printers on Friday. It will be available online (free) and as a limited edition hard copy by mid-June. Please click here for the overview and here for a rundown of the upcoming contributions.

Below is the welcome message from the editor:

Welcome to Stepz, the new zine for and by those interested in psychogeography and in critiquing, appreciating and debating urban space. I started Stepz following the completion of Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015). I felt there were voices that I was unable to represent therein, for various reasons. Stepz does not have the strict editorial rules applied to it that would be the case in an academic article, textbook, or even in a novel. It is, what you might call, ‘editorially restrained’.

When researching for Walking Inside Out I looked at some of the 1990s psychogeography-related zines and alternative texts (like the London Psychogeographical Association’s newsletters and Tom Vague’s ‘Wild West’ zines). These have historically been a part of psychogeography, going back to the sixties and the Situationists – for example, their 1966 pamphlet ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’. If, how I have suggested in discussions about what I’ve termed ‘the new psychogeography’, there is a current resurgence, then it needs to be marked in some way that represents an alternative mode of publication to the mainstream one.

Please note: this pilot edition is in digital and limited edition hardcopy format. While I am happy for people to circulate and copy the magazine as much as they wish, all the authors gave their creative time for free and the magazine is un-copyrighted and not run as a profit-making publication, so please keep that in mind. I have also added a hidden symbol to the hard copy version in order to track its propagation over ley lines.

Tina Richardson

Stepz Zine – Summary of Upcoming Contributions

The first draft contributions are in for Stepz: A Psychogeography and Urban Aesthetics Zine, so here is a summary of what you can expect in the pilot edition, which will be out in June (in alphabetical order):

Anna Chism
Chism interviews Tina Richardson about her psychogeography bucket list.

William Davis
Davies talks about hostile architecture, surveillance and social control.

Sophia Emmanouil
Emmanouil carries out an urban expedition with her daughter, turning it into a collage.

Jim Lawrence
Lawrence contributes a Ballardian fiction on Southampton’s underbelly.

Niall McDevitt
Max Reeves illustrates McDevitt’s essay on Yeat’s London, with his photographs.

The Psychogeographical Commission
The Psychogeography Commission provide lyrics on the experience of walking in the city.

Marlowe Reeves
Reeves will be including a drawing of urban space.

John Rogers
Evoking William Blake, Rogers offers us a history of Caledonian Park.

S.:
S.: discusses place and how memories persist over time and space.

Bobby Seal
In his essay, illustrated by Ian Long, Seal talks about how his health problems have impacted his mountain walking.

Ally Standing
Standing provides a critique of the brutalist architecture in Birmingham.

Tim Waters
Waters offers a textual, cut-up style map of Leeds.

Stepz: A Psychogeography and Urban Aesthetics Zine

The Launch of a New Urban Walking Magazine

Stepz is a new hard copy (and digital) zine which has been set up by the contemporary psychogeographer, Tina Richardson. In the process of completing her edited volume, Walking Inside Out (due out July 2015), Richardson felt that there were voices within the field of psychogeography and urban aesthetics that she was unable to represent due to the limits of space. She set up Stepz as a way of expressing these voices. The summer edition, which will be out in June 2015, is a pilot edition and if it proves successful will continue. This is what Richardson says about the zine:

Lately I’ve been thinking about the future heritage of psychogeography. This issue came up when I was writing the conclusion for the new book, which is on what I’ve termed ‘The New Psychogeography’. As part of the conclusion to the book I looked at the previous resurgence in psychogeography – that of the 1990s and the London Psychogeographic Association (LPA). This led me to look at their material and, hence, I started thinking about the more ‘grass roots’ products of psychogeography (like Tom Vague’s zines and the Trangressions journal of the LPA). This material is more creative than a formally published book. I also wanted something that was going to eventually become part of psychogeography’s legacy, in say 20 years. I’ve added ‘urban aesthetics’ to the subtitle of the zine in order to open it up a bit and appeal to a slightly wider audience who might not necessarily know what psychogeography is.

Please note, until there is a dedicated website for Stepz, all information and the first edition will be announced on this blog.

Using Psychogeography to Discover the Hidden Consequences of Social Reproduction

In the opening to her essay on the regeneration project at Grand Central Station in New York during the 1990s, Cindi Katz states: "The hidden city is itself an outcome and a representation of what might be understood as 'postmodern geographical praxis', but so too is the project of its unhiding." (2001: 93) Commenting on the complexity of heteretopic spaces, and their implicit heterogeneity, she discusses the partitioning of space through "domination and privilege". (2001: 94) This is done by looking at particular neighbourhoods, the relationship 'the other' has with specific spaces, and the process of hiding (in public policy) and unhiding (in this case a deconstructive form of revealing produced by her own critique). Katz states: "it is clear that the spatial forms associated with increasingly globalized capitalist production are indeed masterful at hiding the consequences and contradictions of the associated social relations associated with it." ( 2001: 96) Comparisons can be made between postmodern geographical praxis and psychogeography in the way that "Psychogeography comprehen[ds] buildings through their use, their history, and their collective and associative generation of meaning and mood". (Sadler 2001: 160)

Katz explains how the process of privatizing space is at the heart of the neoliberalist project such that this raises important issues in relation to place and meaning. This is also remarked upon by Michel Foucault. When commenting on the "human site" he says that it is a function of our times that a certain type of knowledge is required when examining space, such that "knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end." (2001: 238) This becomes pertinent when applied to the process of capital accumulation inasmuch as when the "given end" is the project of acquiring space, then a knowledge of how processes such as "circulation" and "marking" operate become useful in altering the appearance of spaces such that they manifest in a new way, occluding their socio-historical origins. Guy Debord also remarks on aesthetics and urban semiotics in a similar way to both Katz and Foucault. He states: "What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic." (1998: 50) He explains that "Today [...] the tendency to replace the real with the artificial is ubiquitous [...] Everything will be more beautiful than before, for the tourists' cameras." (1998: 51) In Katz's case study, removing the signs of homelessness was one of the priorities of the Grand Central Partnership. Postmodern geographical praxis is what is employed to reveal these types of heterotopic inconsistencies.

Links:

The North/South Divide: Spaces of Illusion and Compensation in Leeds
Cindi Katz
Grand Central Terminal

References:
Debord, Guy. 1998. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London and New York: Verso).
Foucault, Michel. 2001. 'Of Other Spaces', The Visual Culture Reader, ed. by Nicholas Mirzooeff (London and New York: Routledge). pp. 237-244.
Katz, Cindi. 2001. ''Hiding the Target: Social Reproduction in the Privatized Urban Environment'', Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis, ed. by Claudio Minca (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). pp. 93-110.
Sadler, Simon. 2001. The Situationist City (Cambridge: The MIT Press).