Walking Inside Out - Introduction

Introduction:A Wander through the Scene of British Urban Walking

by Tina Richardson

WHAT IS PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY?

Get a map of your local area and spread it out on the floor. Study the map, imagine the terrain, find your preferred route – perhaps a bridleway or a towpath – and trace it on the map. Grab your coat off the hook in the hallway and put on your sturdy shoes. Leave the house and dump the map in the wheelie bin. Forget the map. Go to the nearest bus stop and get on the first bus that comes along. Get off when you feel you are far enough away from home that the area is unfamiliar. Begin your walk here.

Psychogeography does not have to be complicated. Anyone can do it. You do not need a map, Gor-Tex, a rucksack or a companion. All you need is a curious nature and a comfortable pair of shoes. There are no rules to doing psychogeography - this is its beauty. However, it is this that makes it hard to pin down in any formalised way. It is also this ‘unruly’ character (disruptive, unsystematic, random) that makes for much discussion about its meaning and purpose - today more than at any other time.

This volume does not pretend to have a definitive answer to what psychogeography is, but it does propose to open up the space that can be defined as psychogeography, providing examples and encouraging debate. In his introduction to Psychogeography (2006) Merlin Coverley asks: “Are we talking about a predominantly literary movement or a political strategy, a series of new age ideas or a set of avant-garde practices?” and goes on to say that it is all the above (2006, 9-10). In just a couple of sentences we have opened up a can of nebulous worms on the ambulatory behemoth that psychogeography (or urban walking) is. What this selected volume of essays does is present the state of play as it is for psychogeography in the UK in the 21st century...

Click here to download a pdf of the introduction.

Call for Papers – Psychogeography Zine for Manchester Exhibition

Special Edition of STEPZ for the ‘Loitering With Intent’ Exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester (UK) from July to September 2016.

We (Tina Richardson and Ally Standing) will be editing and designing a special edition of STEPZ and providing accompanying artwork for the above exhibition. Please consider this a CFP for written content for STEPZ, the first edition of the zine since the pilot in the summer of 2015. Inspired by the lyrics of the Mancunian punk poet, John Cooper Clarke (JCC), the zine will be Manchester and The North influenced, in particular looking at themes that are consistent across urban space in this geographic region. We are looking for short text-based submissions based on this subject and within the broad realms of psychogeography. They can be directly inspired by JCC’s lyrics, about Manchester itself, or more generally about Northern Psychogeography. The working title for the submission is currently - ‘Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies, in a box on Beasley Street’ – but this may change. Please also consider the context of the exhibition in The People’s History Museum (in other words, we are also interested in texts that represent ‘the people’, are radical and/or are about historical working-class struggle, providing it can be loosely tied to the city or urban walking e.g. the Jarrow March).

Below is part of the original CFP for the exhibition itself. We have included these themes to suggest ideas that can be tied into the overall theme of Manchester/The North or, indeed, JCC:

• Psychogeography (however you choose to define it)
• Creative walking, walking art and walking as a cultural or political practice
• Public/private space and the right to the city
• Radical, emotional and hidden histories, especially of or linked to Manchester
• The Situationist International and their legacy
• Critical geographical responses to urban issues and inequalities such as surveillance, gentrification, homogenisation, etc.

Final submissions should be no longer than 1000 words and can be commentary, psychogeographical accounts, poetry or short essays. If you wish to supply photos to accompany your work you can, but we will be treating/reappropriating them in order to fit within the overall design of zine if we use them, so please bear this in mind. Images will need to be your own so that there are no copyright issues. We will acknowledge your images if we use them, but please be aware that they will be changed to fit the aesthetic of the zine. You are not required to submit photos to accompany your final text, though, and artwork on its own is not a part of this CFP. If you are interested please supply a 200 word abstract plus a 100 word bio about yourself, to Tina Richardson by using the contact page on this website schizocartography by 28 February.

TIMELINE:
Abstracts in by: midnight 28 Feb
Replies re: submissions returned by: midnight 6 Mar
First draft to editors in by: midnight 3 Apr
Edits returned to authors by: 17 Apr
Final draft to editors in by: midnight 8 May
(please note, these deadlines are subject to change)

Needless to say there is no fee for your contributions, sorry, and Tina and Ally will not be receiving payment in any form for the production of the zine, the artwork or the final submission. We are hoping to be able to apply for a small amount of funding to cover the physical cost of producing the zine and artwork.

If you have any further questions please contact Tina at the above website.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you, Tina Richardson and Ally Standing

Extracts from Walking Inside Out – Practicing Psychogeography…

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

Guy Debord wrote The Theory of the Dérive in 1959, setting out instructions on how to drift through the city in such a way where the participants are in tension between a relaxed state of being open to what may arise on the walk, and a conscious awareness in regard to the controlling force of urban décor. Recommending it as a group practice (even specifying the number of participants), suggesting the duration of the walk and discussing the logistics of the area under observation, we can see the genesis of a methodology unfolding in Debord’s text. He tentatively describes psychogeography as a methodology under development at the time of writing his essay and tells the reader how the dérive can be used as a springboard to further the purposes of the Situationists’ wider project, later laid out in Basic Programme of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism (1961).

Formulating a methodology for philosophical (or scientific) inquiry is often necessary for an academic in order to propose potential work and to validate the results of findings. There are a number of situations where this might be required, for instance: when presenting one’s work to a particular body (such as an ethics committee) in order to validate a prospective research proposal. The three essays in this section represent the academic work of three individuals from three different fields: performance, urban planning and cultural studies. The authors have developed a methodology for their walking-based practices and named the methodology in order to distinguish their form of walking from other psychogeographical practices. These essays show the development and evolution of a methodology over time, the fleshing out of a process for a specific project, and the practical aspects of applying a methodology to walking-based research.


Psychogeography and Mythogeography: Currents in Radical Walking
by Phil Smith

The mythogeography project was not planned. It emerged from particular circumstances that still mark it; a transition within artists’ collective Wrights & Sites (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Cathy Turner and myself) from making site-specific performances to making interventions in everyday life. What it then became is more a result of emerging opportunities for dispersal than of any coherent strategy; an interwoven set of terms, theory-tales and praxis-narratives made available as far as resources allow to that assemblage of ambulatory and ‘resistant’ practitioners who escape the more popular and literary summaries of psychogeography (Coverley 2006).

‘Mythogeography’ is a theorization of multiplicity and mobility that hangs on the texture, grit, sweat and emotion of individual journeys. Its promotion of its own ideas stems partly from a painful awareness of how quickly actions can melt into air, and partly from a grudging admiration for those, like postmodern performers Forced Entertainment (Etchells, 1999), who have created a critical-theoretical scaffolding around their own activities (getting their retaliation in first).


Developing Schizocartography: Formulating a Theoretical Methodology for a Walking Practice
by Tina Richardson

My interest in psychogeography began in 2009 on a Masters module that included the work of the Situationist International (SI). At the same time I set up Leeds Psychogeography Group and also decided to develop my own specific form of psychogeography as a critical method of urban walking. This was because I wanted to differentiate the urban walking I did from that of others, and at the same time to add nuance to a seemingly vague term. Also I needed to think through my own type of critical walking as a more formulated methodology that could stand up to critique, to the extent it would be credible as part of a PhD.

By applying Félix Guattari’s theoretical critique to the practice of psychogeography, I formulated the term ‘schizocartography’ from his terms “schizoanalysis” and “schizoanalytic cartography”. In its combining with psychogeography, what schizoanalysis does is enable alternative existential modes for individuals in order to challenge dominant representations and power structures as they appear in urban space. This provides an opportunity for multiple ways of operating in and reading the environment; it critiques the conventional ways of viewing, interpreting and mapping space. In this essay I will detail the theoretical aspect of schizocartography, explaining the comparisons with Guattari’s work and that of the walking practices of the SI, describing the methodology of schizocartography by providing examples.


Route Planning a Sensory Walk: Sniffing Out the Issues
by Victoria Henshaw

Sensory walks have emerged since the late 1960s as one form of psychogeography with a focus upon environmental characteristics, experiences and perceptions gained through one or more of the senses. Their emergence as a research method was as a consequence of the coming together of a range of philosophical and theoretical thought and debate, influenced predominantly by feminist and ecological movements where the investigation and analysis of everyday experiences are argued important and necessary in gaining insights into the physical and social environment…

Despite the increasing use of sensory walks as a research method, little has been written about the practical considerations and decisions to be made by the researcher during their planning and implementation. In order to promote and inform the continued use of sensory walks as a method, further debate and discussions are therefore required. In this chapter, I seek specifically to examine the decisions faced in selecting the environments through which a sensory walk might travel and in doing so, to highlight the implications of research site selection on factors such as the nature of the data collected and participant reflections upon the research design.

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.

Let’s Talk About What People Don’t Like About Psychogeography – Part 2

Please click here for part 1.

The Setting...

In recent times there have been what could be described as forms of low-level snobbery that have sprung up around psychogeography. For instance, for a reason I do not particularly understand, Will Self's column-turned-books on psychogeography have been harshly judged. Many people do not consider Self to be a psychogeographer, although it is unclear why. He certainly travels urban spaces on foot and also brings a personal perspective to his walks, so this may be more to do with a dislike of his media profile as a broadcaster/writer than as a psychogeographer. Sinclair, too, does not consider Self to be a psychogeographer, but he does not consider himself to be one either – so I appreciate something else might be occurring there. This is what Sinclair said to The Guardian journalist Stuart Jeffries in 2004: “For me, it's a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live. I'm just exploiting it because I think it's a canny way to write about London. Now it's become the name of a column by Will Self, in which he seems to walk the South Downs with a pipe, which has got absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography. There's this awful sense that you've created a monster” (cited in Jeffries , 2004).

In the same interview the writer and co-expounder of London history, Patrick Wright, is quoted as saying of Sinclair: "I don't care about Iain's hokey-pokey malevolent stuff", however, he praises Sinclair's work overall and its critique of Thatcherism's colonisation of space in the East End (cited in Jeffries, 2004). Wright’s criticism is levelled at Sinclair’s occult writing, though, but the language, nevertheless, is derogatory. Even if there is some elitism around what criteria should be attached to someone in order to classify them as a psychogeographer, attempting to locate a definitive criteria is not easy.

There also exists disapproval directed at the broad field of psychogeography. The most recent outspoken criticisms seem to be from Owen Hatherley. For instance in Tough Crowd in 2010 he said (in relation to his, at the time, new book): "I don't want Militant Modernism to be totally associated with the psychogeography industry that's around now. There are no ley lines in my books, there's no pentagrams" (2010, 32). I do find this somewhat presumptuous: a form of psychogeography practiced by one person is invariably different from that practiced by the next. I also feel there might be a slight flavour of high-handedness against the people he is alluding to here. Also, what, exactly, does he mean by "the psychogeography industry"? If he is referring to the co-opting of psychogeography by the marketplace, this is a criticism that should be levelled at the marketplace, not psychogeographers. In The London Review of Books, he brings up the subject again when discussing Jonathan Meades' book Museums Without Walls. He says: "However, unlike Iain Sinclair or the London 'psychogeographers', with their taste for pathetic fallacies and loathing for anything remotely new, Meades does not fetishise spaces between" (2013, 27). So, it seems, psychogeographers are also being 'called to task' for their discussions on liminal spaces.

Geoff Nicholson also has levelled some pejorative comments at psychogeography, although they are aimed rather more at the Situationists (as is the case with Rebecca Solnit) and some of the experiences he has had when attending specific events, such as the New York Conflux festival, where he attended a Situationist-type walk made by drawing around a martini glass on a map and following the route, of which he concludes: “It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn’t have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real experience of walking, And it confirmed to me, what I’d really known all along, that walking isn’t much good as a theoretical experience” (2010, 150).

Doreen Massey also directs criticism at the Situationists’ perambulations in For Space (2005): “At its worst it can resolve into the least politically convincing of situationist capers – getting laddish thrills (one presumes) from rushing down dark passages, dreaming of labyrinths and so forth. (Is this not itself another form of eroticised colonisation of the city?)” (2005, 47). This expresses the often masculine approach to a particular form of psychogeography, also the colonising aspect already discussed in the introduction. Not that I would dismiss these “capers” outright. While they might not be considered critical in any way exploring our towns and cities in a way that opens up the space to us in a productive way, and that responds to our inner desire, is a form of self-expression and could be considered a counter strategy to the dominant signifiers that abound in urban space: “It doesn’t matter what the motivation is. What matters is that in each instance a kind of motivation nevertheless exists. It is that expectation in mind that informs which route we will take and, in this way, what we will see along the way to achieving it” (Prescott-Steed 2013, 45).

Related Links:
Tough Crowd
The Situationists

Bibliography:
Jeffries, Stuart. "On the Road." The Guardian, 2014.
Hatherley, Owen. "Re-Imagining Modernism." Tough Crowd, 2010, 31-48.
Hatherley, Owen. "Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair." The London Review of Books, 2013, 27-30.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005.
Nicholson, Geoff. The Lost Art of Walking. Chelmsford: Harbour Books (East) Ltd, 2010.
Prescott-Steed, David. The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture. Boca Raton: BrownWalker Press, 2013.

A Psychoactive Trip Down Memory Lane Via Letsby Avenue

This is the first online review of Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography edited by Tina Richardson. The review is written by Jim Lawrence:

So being a psychogeographer (if you so choose to call yourself while you drift through the urban extended phenotype) is being a pavement Pope of Discord or a street-corner preacher in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, an ambulatory ludibrium, a conceptual art joke, a psychoactive trip down Memory Lane via Letsby Avenue, a twerk beneath the cold glare of the CCTV’s lens, looning about in the city’s open spaces, an art praxis mashing up dancing and strolling, vogueing and rambling, joie de vivre in stout walking-boots. It is sole music.

Mervyn Coverley’s classic primer Psychogeography, published in 2006, is the essential guide to the history of psychogeography from its precursors in the 19th century via the Lettrists and the Situationist International to currents of drift in the 1990s (Stewart Home, the London Psychogeographical Association) and the literary meanderings of Papadimitriou, Ackroyd, Sinclair and Self. It’s a book you need to read if you want to get an understanding of how psychogeography got to where it was, generally standing about and not doing very much on some lost conceptual street corner, at the time of its publication. But what has been happening in the subsequent near-decade? Evidently it was time for a new overview of where psychogeography is going now and in the future; where Coverley’s book left off, a new and equally essential account of today’s psychogeographical doers and thinkers would have to take up the story. Read more.

Related links - click below for:
Contents
Chapters

'Take to the Streets' Book Talk in Leeds - Walking Inside Out

Here are the details for the next book talk for Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography which is out now and available to buy. Click here for all the details: Rowman and Littlefield International.

Take to the Streets - Horsforth, Leeds Monday 27th July
Time: 5.30-7.30
Address: Horsforth Library, Town Street, Horsforth, Leeds LS18 5BL

Abstract of Talk:
Tina Richardson is an academic and urban walker who lives in Horsforth, Leeds. Her new edited volume has just been released and the contributions are from a multitude of perspectives, such as a creative non-fiction chapter about a daily dog walk, to a semi-fictional essay on walking in Odessa. Tina’s book is a celebration of urban walking and in her talk she will be discussing its value in the complex space of the 21st century city. As well as encouraging you to take to the streets to explore our urban spaces, she will be providing readings from the book itself.

Walking Inside Out - Now Available

Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography is now available on the publishers website: Rowman and Littlefield International. Here is an overview of the book:

Walking Inside Out 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. Through a variety of case studies, it offers a British perspective of international spaces, from the British metropolis to the post-communist European city. By situating the current strand of psychogeography within its historical, political and creative context along with careful consideration of the challenges it faces Walking Inside Out offers a vision for the future of the discipline.

It is part of the Place, Memory, Affect series of books.

Click here for:

Contribution Details

Introduction Extract

Walking Inside Out - Endorsements

Below are the endorsements for Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography which will be out soon. For an overview of the book and a summary of the chapters, please click here.

Richardson’s book testifies to the richness and profusion of British urban walking today, by turns serious and light-hearted, intensely focussed, and freely rambling. More than armchair philosophy, these essays—by a motley rabble of loiterers, strollers, academics, writers, agitators and wastrels—make me want to depart my desk and head out into the city, leaving all maps behind.
Will Buckingham, School of Humanities, De Montfort University.

I read this book in a single sitting, flying from Singapore to London. By the time we were over Afghanistan, I was hooked. Stumbling into the London streets from Heathrow Airport, I needed to walk into British pyschogeography, which as this collection shows, blends British grittiness and continental influences, creating something vital.
James D. Sidaway, National University of Singapore.

A bumper compendium, bubbling with insights and oddments, and a multiplicity of perspectives, Walking Inside Out accentuates the vibrancy of British psychogeography, its varied theories, walking styles, pathways, motivations. It will inspire you to stride out, to wallow in this weird Island, looking askance at its incongruities, vestiges, banalities, security apparatus, rural idylls, shabby seafronts, and the less trodden ways.
Tim Edensor, Cultural Geographer, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Walking Inside Out is more than a history of British psychogeography: it is a compelling drift through the conceptual space of the discipline as practised in the contemporary cultural and social situation. It points to psychogeography’s possible futures in all their theoretical complexity, playful subversiveness, political and therapeutical potential. An essential addition to the growing corpus of psychogeographical literature.
James Lawrence, Writer, poet and translator.

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.

Walking Inside Out - Stoke Newington Lit Fest Book Talk

Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography
Edited by Tina Richardson

Date/Time: Saturday 6th June 3.00-4.00
Venue: The White Hart, Stoke Newington, London N16 8EL

Talk Outline
Tina Richardson will be talking about how a critical form of walking in our towns and cities can transform our relationship with them. Psychogeography can be used by anyone as a tool to explore urban space and reveal a sense of place in the built environment. Reading from her new edited volume – Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography – Tina will look at ways we can see beyond the homogenised world of urban planning to a multiplicity of radical new experiences and hidden worlds in our everyday spaces.

Biography
Tina 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. Tina is currently editing a magazine called S T E P Z, which will be published in June. Walking Inside Out will be released in July.

Unofficial Britain
Tina’s talk will be part of the 'Unofficial Britain' section of Influx Press’ 'Alternative Voices' event which begins at 1.00 in The White Hart. Please click here for full details of the afternoon.

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

Walking Inside Out – Contents

Walking Inside Out:
Contemporary British Psychogeography
Editor: Tina Richardson
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield International
Due: July 2015

Below are the contents for Walking Inside Out. For the full details on the book by the publisher, please click here.

CONTENTS

Introduction: A Wander through the Scene of British Urban Walking
Tina Richardson

Part I: The Walker and the Urban Landscape
1 Longshore Drift: Approaching Liverpool from Another Place
Roy Bayfield
2 Walking the Dog: (For Those Who Don’t Know How to Do It)
Ian Marchant
3 Incongruous Steps toward a Legal Psychogeography
Luke Bennett

Part II: Memory, Historicity, Time
4 Walking through Memory: Critical Nostalgia and the City
Alastair Bonnett
5 Selective Amnesia and Spectral Recollection in the Bloodlands
Phil Wood
6 The Art of Wandering: Arthur Machen’s London Science
Merlin Coverley
7 Wooden Stones
Gareth E. Rees

Part III: Power and Place
8 Psychogeography Adrift: Negotiating Critical Inheritance in a Changed Context
Christopher Collier
9 Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse, or Psychogeography the Mancunian Way
Morag Rose

Part IV: Practicing Psychogeography/Psychogeographical Practices
10 Psychogeography and Mythogeography: Currents in Radical Walking
Phil Smith
11 Developing Schizocartography: Formulating a Theoretical Methodology for a Walking Practice
Tina Richardson
12 Route Planning a Sensory Walk: Sniffing Out the Issues
Victoria Henshaw

Part V: Outsider Psychogeography
13 Rewalking the City: People with Dementia Remember
Andrea Capstick
14 Psychogeography, Antipsychologies, and the Question of Social Change
Alexander John Bridger

Conclusion: The New Psychogeography
Tina Richardson

RELATED LINKS:
Contributions
Book Talk in Leeds 14th May

Book Talk in Leeds – Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography

The Inside Out of Walking Inside Out

Date/Time: Thursday 14th May 5.15-6.15
Venue: University of Leeds (please see below for full venue details)

Talk/reading abstract:
This is the first talk in the series and preempts the release of Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (Rowman and Littlefield International) in July. The talk introduces the premise behind the book, the ‘Inside Out’ of the title. Tina will be talking about why she thinks the book is timely and how it straddles both the fields of academia and creative writing. She will be reading from chapters written by some of the contributors and also talking about ‘the new psychogeography’. Flyers will be available on the night which give you a discount on the purchase of the book.

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 currently editing a magazine called Stepz, which will be published in June.

Venue details/directions:
Garstang Building, Level 7, Room 7.36
Once at the University of Leeds, go to Chancellor’s Court. Chancellors Court can be seen between buildings 88, 89 and 84 on this downloadable map: Click here for Map.
To get to the room, go to the middle of south side of Chancellor's Court: Click here for google earth view of Chancellor’s Court.
There you'll find a set of (as yet unmarked) sliding doors, which are the entrance to the new School of Geography complex. Go through and into the foyer; the room is on the left.

Walking Inside Out – Conclusion Extract 3

It’s Psychogeography’s Turn

Attempting to define something as ‘new’ that has not appeared out of a distinct break from the past is beset with problems. In academic theory the tendency is to use the word ‘turn’ (linguistic turn, spatial turn and so on). I would prefer to describe the current movement in psychogeography as more like a gentle bend in the road. I see the motifs under discussion here as representing leanings rather than seeing them as a clearly defined set of criteria about what something is and what something is not. This is not a radical break. There are qualities of contemporary urban walking that are Situationist, in the same way that there are similarities with the 1990s resurgence of psychogeography. An epoch of any kind does not end one day and the next day begin with a whole new set of different or opposing themes, as can be seen when discussing modernity ‘versus’ postmodernity within the framework of cultural epochs. They bleed into each other, but they also contain distinctions that respond to their cultural (politico-social) moment in time.

It could be argued that not enough time has lapsed to look at how and why today’s psychogeography is different from that of the 1990s. A lack of critical distance might mean it is not possible to state what today’s urban walking is in concrete terms. Labelling it in any way could be foolhardy. However, starting a dialogue about the changes that are taking place is important in a book about contemporary psychogeography. I also appreciate that attempts to define it may be considered to go against what psychogeography represents (labelling, constricting, limiting). Nevertheless, many of my own discussions in recent years with those in and out of the field, and those I have read in journal articles or online blogs, demonstrate that there is a general consensus that a revival is taking place. If this is the case, we need to consider what form this psychogeography might take and why. Not least because we should think about how it can be used productively in a changing historical, political and cultural milieu.

Please click here for more extracts: Resurgence and the Virtual and What is British Psychogeography?

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order

Walking Inside Out – Conclusion Extract 2

The Matter of Psychogeography

Conclusion Extract 1: Resurgence and the Virtual

The current interest in rewriting and remapping urban space has taken hold at a time when communicating with each other has never been easier (aided by the internet and social networking). This has coincided with a geo-political moment when people are aware they have a stake in a city that is diminishing before their eyes. The differing groups and alternative strategies that come under the umbrella of psychogeography today, more than at any other time, are making available psychogeographical tools to fellow urbanites in order to help them express their subjective response to living/working in and moving about the city. Psychogeography related events and projects - even if they are not necessarily overtly activist or even described as psychogeography - enable a re/connection with a material space that is always potentially under threat of being renegotiated into private/prohibited space.

This connection to the concrete space of our towns and cities reflects a desire to offer a material/archaeological critique which excavates signs contained in the terrain that might be contrary to the dominant discourse (something that could be placed under the rubric of schizocartography). It often involves an exploration of the social history of a space that may exist below the surface and might not be obvious on a cursory viewing. The study of material culture helps reveal social boundaries - and the very ‘matter’ under critique by psychogeographers is urban space itself.

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order

Walking Inside Out – Conclusion Extract 1

Resurgence and the Virtual

Our desire to not only explore the social history of a particular space, but also to express it in a personal and affective way that responds to the aesthetics of that place, is one that comes about through description via our imagination. It is an individual expression which is different for everyone, in other words a psychogeographically articulated response. Alastair Bonnett says a “much broader group of people are now interested and involved in psychogeography, many of whom have no interest in the Situationists. It may be argued that this is a form of depolitization or that psychogeography has outgrown the limited and exclusionary world of the revolutionary avant-garde” (2013 Oxford Bibliographies Online: Geography). If this is the case, then the sharing of psychogeographical accounts from whatever perspective (activist or otherwise) have been enabled through contemporary technology, with websites, blogs, social networking and aided by new ‘geo apps’.

The digital and satellite way of creating maps enables a synthesis with the older peripatetic method of simply talking and writing about walks. It allows the psychogeographer to include more tools for tracking their walks, presenting their information and making it available for others to access. These maps and forms of data collection show the infinite possibility of cartographies and ways for walkers to present personal and qualitative information. They offer a large degree of control of the mapping process to the user/cartographer. The open source software that is often used for these types of collaborations to a large extent disengages the data from capitalist production and, hence, provides more freedom of expression, production and distribution. This enables their use in explorations of space, creating mapping-oriented art for pleasure or for a variety of community-based projects.

The current resurgence in walking has coincided with a renewed interest in cartography encouraged by the availability of digital tools. While these tools are often used by non-specialist users in community and arts-based projects, the contemporary psychogeographer is at once embracing and critical of the new technology, preferring to use it as one tool amongst many for creating, recording and producing output from the dérive.

Conclusion Extract 2: The Matter of Psychogeography

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order
Axis of Exploration and Failure - Animated Map

Walking Inside Out – Introduction Extract 3

Where to Now, Psychogeography!

Please click here for part 1 and part 2

In 2002 Iain Sinclair said of psychogeography that "the next step is to bury it completely! Let it go and let it re-emerge. I think it needs 15 years to gain some new energy, as I think this energy is rapidly running out" (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, ‘City Brain’, Fortean Times). Since we are now fast-approaching the end of Sinclair's 15 year embargo, perhaps this is a salient moment to begin to discuss psychogeography again in a critical way, and take a serious look at the work being carried out in the field. I hope this text contributes to this discussion. Sinclair further comments on this problem when discussing the work Stewart Home did with the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA): “Stewart Home says that the LPA deliberately mystified and irrationalised their psychogeographical ideas in order to prevent them from being academicised in the future. But they inevitably will be because Stewart himself is a sort of rogue academic, so it's self-contradictory in some ways. By doing it, it becomes part of this machinery in talks and interviews” (ibid.).

Nevertheless, Sinclair is in praise of walking despite his concerns with the term psychogeography. One thing that many walkers are preoccupied with, from activists to The Ramblers, is not just the marginalisation of our public spaces, but the marginalisation of the very act of walking itself. As Sinclair says in an interview in the Ramblers own publication: "We're at the bottom of the food chain and the day will come when we'll have the equivalent of bike lanes: a narrow suicide strip chucked in among the traffic. We'll have to have ghost walkers, like the white ghost bikes you see to commemorate dead cyclists" (2012, ‘My Perfect Day’, Walk). So, it seems, psychogeographers perhaps do have more in common than can be expressed in their differences.

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order

Walking Inside Out – Introduction Extract 2

What Doth a Psychogeographer Make?

To provide an aphorism of what psychogeographers do and why they walk assumes they are a generic group, which is not the case. It is as difficult as trying to provide a pithy sentence to describe what a writer or artist does and why they do it. Nevertheless, there are some universal qualities that are representative of many psychogeographers and that may help explain their intention. For instance, they attempt to connect with the terrain in a way that is other to that of a casual stroll, bringing a focus to the walk that takes it beyond both a ‘Sunday walk’ in the country (where the landscape almost appears to be placed their in order to be admired) and that of the Saturday shopping expedition in the local high street. It is neither of these. Nor is it about getting from A to B - it is absolutely about the process itself, however clichéd that may sound. The walker connects with the terrain in a way that sets her/himself up as a critic of the space under observation, but at the same time they unite with it through the sensorial acknowledgement of its omnipresence. The space becomes momentarily transformed through this relationship. The psychogeographer recognises that they are part of this process and it is their presence that enables this recognition to occur.

The form and purpose behind the critique of the topology/topography will be very dependent on the individual walker. It might involve making mental connections with the space through a song or piece of literature or it may involve a philosophical/theoretical analysis of particular objects under scrutiny. It could also be an overtly political process which applies an assessment of the power structures in play in a given situation or even a physical act of challenging those very structures directly in the moment. This could be thought of as a kind of traversing, whereby the walker sees this as a negotiation of the space which questions established routes and draws attention to the possibility of approaching the territory in a different way.

Please click here for other extracts: Introduction 1

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order