Places of the Heart – Psychogeography for Architects!

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard (2015)

This is a short review of/commentary on Colin Ellard’s new book. Ellard is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo. Here's a quick summary of what he does (from his own website):

I work at the intersection of psychology and architectural and urban design, conducting experiments that measure how your brain and body respond to different kinds of settings. I also write accessible books and articles based on my scientific work, and travel the world trying to figure out how to build better places.

And this is the summary of the book from the blurb on the back cover:

In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature – places we escape to and can’t escape from – have influenced us throughout history, and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating.

I came across Places of the Heart on twitter by simply searching for the term #psychogeography, which I do on a regular basis, since it is my academic field. While I was waiting for it to arrive in the mail, I posted on my Facebook page a link to the book. While the general consensus was that it might be ‘too sciencey’ to be psychogeography, I am generous with the use of the term and also wanted to reserve judgement till I had read the book. Having now read it, I think it deserves a place within the contemporary canon of psychogeography, even though it does take a scientific approach, which some people may think goes against the subjective aspect of ‘classical’ psychogeography and might be considered reductive. The book has chapter headings such as: ‘Places of Lust’, ‘Boring Places’ and ‘Places of Affection’, so it is clear from this that we are still talking about how people ‘feel’ about place – and what is wrong with backing that up with some neuroscience! While I could write more about this side of the book, what I would like to do is provide an anecdote which actually helps situate the book within a specific field of study (and practice) which may be of interest to people who might only tangentially be connected to psychogeography: architects and architecture students.

In October I was invited to the Canterbury School of Architecture to talk about schizocartography (my own version of psychogeography) and at the end of the lecture I wanted to recommend some books to them that were at the intersection of psychogeography and architecture. I took with me Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (obviously, since this is my own edited volume and also came out this year, so is very current), The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture by David Prescott-Steed (2013) (also very recent, and the title is a clue to how it might interest my audience) and Ellard’s new Places of the Heart.

These three texts are very different from each other in content and style, yet they all use the term ‘psychogeography’ in the title. Walking Inside Out, as the subtitle suggests, includes chapters that represent British psychogeography today. While architecture does appear in the content (it even has its own section in the index), it is more broadly related to urban space in general. A number of the index references to architecture cite the Situationists critique of architecture under the rubric of their unitary urbanism project, although there are other references. The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture, while very psychogeographical in that it includes many of psychogeography’s common themes - subjective responses to urban space, walking in the city, personal accounts, cultural/philosophical critique, etc – it does not directly discuss architecture, but in a way it is always talking about it. You cannot really separate architecture out of a critique of urban space. However, in the use of the word as it pertains to architects, the title may be misleading to those not from a psychogeography background. Rather, the book is not about architecture per se, even though it is a super book in many other ways.

Out of the three books I took to Canterbury, the book I actually recommended to the architects (the lecturers) and the architects-in waiting (the students) was Ellard’s book. The biggest section in the index is ‘architecture’! Ellard talks about Gothic and Malian architecture, he talks about public housing and retail architecture and he even discusses “cognitive science’s collision with architecture”:

It seems a risky course to so scientize design that the creative vision of architects is force-fed into a reductive sausage grinder that can only produce quasi-Corbusian designs of the kind that we’ve already tried and found wanting. Nevertheless, allowing architects to have unfettered access to fecund imagination untroubled by psychological realities of what seems to work in a building also seems unwise. (page 219-220)

Also, interestingly, this was the book out of the three that the students were most interested in, although I appreciate it may have been because I was recommending it in this specific setting. So…despite the fact I should be promoting my own book, I think that this would be a good book for architects who might be interested in how the field of psychogeography intersects with their own work. Then, once they have read that, they can read Walking Inside Out to find out what is going on at the cutting edge of British psychogeography!

Related Links:
Concrete, Crows and Calluses – Book Review
On Walking – Book Review

Let’s Talk About What People Don’t Like About Psychogeography – Part 3

The Situation...

Please click here for part 1 and part 2 of the blog.

Despite these criticisms (which I do actually consider to be constructive to discussion, even if the actual criticisms themselves are negative ones), I believe psychogeography brings something useful forth. In particular it draws attention to overlooked places (often these liminal spaces criticised by Owen Hatherley). In a series of articles in the Guardian newspaper in 2009 called 'Secret Britain' Sinclair explains the affect of stumbling across these types of places:

These sites, come upon by accident, prick our imagination, provoke reverie. Questing for one story, we blunder into another: we must train ourselves to expect the unexpected. The thing hidden behind a high wall is still part of our true 'legacy', but buildings and sites sometimes have to wait to achieve a haunting dereliction, to become legitimate targets for vulgar curiosity. That's how the Secret Britain guide philosophy works: when you don't see it, it is still there. And when you do, it is on the point of disappearance. (2009, 5).

As the ‘Secret Britain’ article demonstrates, the homogenising effect of neoliberal space coupled with signs that prohibit action and entry at every turn, discourage our questioning of how urban space got to be the way it is. One needs to de-familiarise these spaces for them to be seen clearly for the first time. David Prescott-Steed discusses this de-familiarisation in regard to the dérive, although what he says applies to any critical form of urban walking: “de-familiarisation not only fosters critical thinking but, furthermore, finds it manifest in the form of a creative negotiation” (2013, 75). He explains why the dérive has been useful as part of his own practice. In connecting critical thinking to the physiological act of walking he believes this makes “theory actionable” through “praxis” (2013, 72) and it is formed through “the application of a theory to everyday activities” (2013, 81). This is somewhat echoed when Rebecca Solnit says: “Walking the streets is what links up reading the map with living one’s life” (2002, 176).

One of the most engaging things about psychogeography, or even urban walking in its broadest sense, is that anyone can do it. Since most of us in Britain live in urban space, 82.4% as of the 2011 census (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs 2013, 1), all we have to do is open the door and step into it.

Even if you do not carry the walk out in any critical way, simply thinking about the physical act of walking, and the somatic sensation of thoughtfully connecting oneself with the ground, turns the walk into something entirely different from a regular stroll. Your walk has then become a form of critical psychogeography: “Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and cross-continental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us back to the sites of this history” (Solnit 2002, 4). This quote by Solnit, reflects the complexity of the relationship between urban space and walking, in particular in regard to texts on the city. The output of walking in the form of, say, maps and stories cannot be separated from our own impressions of the city itself.

Please click here for part 4 (final part).

Related Links:
Iain Sinclair in Walking Inside Out – Extract
Lose Yourself in Melbourne – David Prescott-Steed

Bibliography:
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. "Rural Population and Migration." 2013.
Prescott-Steed, David. The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture. Boca Raton: BrownWalker Press, 2013.
Sinclair, Iain. "A World You Never Knew Existed." Secret Britain, April 2009 2009, 4-6.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002.

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.

‘Lose Yourself in Melbourne’

The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture by David Prescott-Steed

I’ve recently read the above book by sound artist and urban explorer David Prescott-Steed (Academy of Design, Melbourne). It has the informal writing style of psychogeographical texts that originate from creative writing rather than academia, which I really liked.

I especially enjoyed the introduction, which is rather more a wander through Melbourne than an actual introduction to the book, but the better for it. I’m going to include one paragraph of the introduction which mentions an advert for the city of Melbourne and include the link to the film itself Lose Yourself in Melbourne.

“While the endless movement of the city shows it to be a place of many motivations and meanings, the Lose Yourself in Melbourne advertisement asks the viewer forget about all of these familiar patterns with which they might experience the city, such as where they involve our engagement in shopping or working. It invites the viewer, you and me, to let down our guard; to loosen up by letting go of preconceived, city-based goals. It wants us to sweep aside all of these conceivably routine or boring things. It invites us, instead, to simply ‘make it all up’ as we go along. When I first saw this advertisement, it was if it was asking: ‘Why get so consumed in all of the routine? The city is your built environment, of course. But why not use it for playing in? Why not embrace your opportunity to improvise everyday life? Quite literally, this is a chance to think on your feet. Take the shops, offices and street, and turn them into your playground.’”

The book is published by BrownWalker Press (2013)

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography
How We Used to Live – A Psychogeography of Your London