Creating a Situation in the City

I have a chapter in the new The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication edited by Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson (2019). The chapter is entitled 'Creating a Situation in the City: Embodied Spaces and the Act of Crossing Boundaries'. You can read more about the book here, and below is an extract from my own chapter which introduces a variety of urban interventions and walking practices:

This chapter will discuss the history of what appears under the general term of ‘urban critique’ in its many incarnations, such as modern day psychogeography, place-hacking, DIY urbanism, guerrilla urbanism and urban exploration. By examining the act of placing one’s body into the space under examination, we can begin to understand the dynamics that operate on us when crossing the material boundaries that appear in space, but also the symbolic ones that might be culturally formed in our psyche (such as ideas about who and who might not be allowed in certain spaces). Urban space is a mediated space that enables a form of reflexivity to take place when the individual engages with it in a critical way. The aesthetic and affective response that a person or group generates through the embodied process of the urban encounter, momentarily changes the space to fit the subjectivity of those placing it under scrutiny. While this process can be undertaken and expressed in multiple ways depending on the approach undertaken, what is consistent across these alternative methods is a challenge to the taken-for-granted view that urban space is simply a neutral space that happens to appear as ‘the built environment’ – something that is immovable, and yet also innocuous.

Urban critique, in whatever its form, provides an opportunity for the city to be examined at the micro level, through what Michel De Certeau describes as “spatial practices” which take the form of modes of resistance to an imposed way of life as it appears in “lived space” (1988: 96). These spatial practices allow one to question, and even challenge, the usual ‘rules of the highway’, such how we cross the road at a zebra or pelican crossing, or do not drive on the pavement.

By providing examples of the different forms of contemporary urban critique in regards to forming - what can be described as - situations, the discussion will focus on how some people actively seek to question the way urban space is manifest, ask why it appears the way it does and whether we are able to challenge its, seemingly, fixed materiality. This chapter will provide an overview of these approaches and their mediated relationship with the practices of everyday life in mediated cities...

Walking Inside Out – Introduction Extract 1

What is British Psychogeography?

This is the first of a series of short extracts from the upcoming publication Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography.

While this volume concentrates on British psychogeography, dividing international and home-grown psychogeography into clearly delineated groups is not representative of the lineage of contemporary urban walking. Psychogeography is about crossing established boundaries, whether metaphorically or physically, locally or globally. The Situationists did not limit their psychogeography to their own location, Paris. They walked other cities, such as Venice and Amsterdam and incorporated existing maps of cities, for instance of the New York and London transport networks, into their own maps. Recent projects in the UK have involved international cities working together. One example was the Leeds-Dortmund Project (part of Superimposed City Tours 2003-03) and incorporated a simultaneous psychogeographical mapping of both cities and their accompanying narratives. The newly created superimpositions were then seen as a virtual city, this third city resulting from the overlap of the other two. So, too, British psychogeographers often do not limit themselves to just British towns and cities. Will Self’s Psychogeography (2007) includes walks in Liverpool and London, alongside those in Istanbul and New York.

This volume sets out to demonstrate the diversity of urban walking in Britain today through the numerous factors that make up the walk itself: the individual walker(s), the space of the walk (town/city, rural/urban/suburban, and so on), the ‘method’ (if there is a defined method being utilised and, in fact, if there is no method is this also a type of method for carrying out psychogeography), and the phenomena under observation/critique (urban décor, surface textures, prohibitive signs, other people, buildings, cars and so on). These are just a few of the factors that influence the walk itself. One could look further at factors such as night versus day-time walking, as this also greatly changes the experience, and also the weather, especially in somewhere like Britain where it can change from moment to moment. The city looks hugely different on a bright sunny day than when it is overcast. These features of the walk change the subjective nature of the walk in the same way the intentions of the individual walker does.

Please click here for extract 2.

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

Cybercartography, Second-Order Observing and Virtual Connectivity

Cybercartography was introduced by D. R. Fraser Taylor in 1997 at the International Cartographic Conference. It does not just refer to GIS but is related to cybernetics in its connection to social systems and actions that take place at a community level. Feedback loops become significant in cybernetics, and machines (systems, technologies, devices, etcetera) become tools that create engagement and connections rather than something that separates the observer from the action observed. Katherine Hayles explains how, in a world of relationships and networks, an individual constructs its environment through a space of reciprocal actions. (1999: 137) She explains how second-order observing arises when an observer self-consciously describes herself to others and to herself. (1999: 145) Cybercartography is based on second order cybernetics and includes the accessing of multi-sensorial experience, interactivity, digital and virtual systems, and is an inter-disciplinary field of theory. (Taylor 2005: 3) This is how Taylor describes it:

The author sees the paradigm of cybercartography not as a sudden and dramatic shift from past ideas and practice, but as an evolutionary and integrative process which incorporates important elements from the past, redefines others, and introduces new ideas and approaches to both cartographic practice and theory. (2005: 2

Source: Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre

Cybercartography favours self-reflexivity, heterogeneity and real-world representations. It proposes self-organisation and the retaining of identity through a process of circular interaction that could be described as autopoietic. The originators of the term ‘autopoiesis’, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, describe it as a character of living systems where through the circular interaction of its processes it maintains its organisation and retains its identity (1980: 9). They explain that second order conduct is denotative because “it points to a feature of the environment that the second organism encounters” and which can be described. (1980: 28). They also make it clear that for linguistic behaviour to be of an orienting nature there needs to be consensus: individuals need to be able to compare events and experiences that are not only similar but use a shared medium – language (1980: 30). Geospatial technology, used in conjunction with local communities, enables spaces to have a symbolic meaning attached to them by encouraging exploration into areas of creative expression. Virtual geographies have the function of reversing the spectacle, “the secret nodes which connect and route flows of capital”, and help to reveal the concealed “black-box that is anti-market capitalism” (Imken 1999: 103).

Source: Centro de Investigacion en Geografia y Geomatica

In his essay ‘The Convergence of Virtual and Actual in the Global Matrix: Artificial Life, Geo-economics and Psychogeography’ Otto Imken situates the situational control of psychogeography within the computer-generated map, stating that this can help one “tilt a situation into various desired basins of attraction, and then, with a higher-level (almost instinctual) knowledge of the attractor’s neighbourhood, its quirks, probabilities, and back-alley pathways, the expert situationist can reach desired results.” (1999: 103) He goes on to explain that the goal is to create multiple possibilities through various connections, feedback loops and interactions, resulting in maps that capture a moment-in-time, an event. (1999: 103-104) In this essay he also makes reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in relation to the decoding of capitalism and how the process of mapping can create “syncretic assemblages within the [Global] Matrix”. (ibid.)

Links:
Maps of Competence
Cartography: Representation and Revealing the Hidden

Bibliography:
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press).
Imken, Otto. 1999. ‘The Convergence of virtual and actual in the Global Matrix: Artificial life, geo-economics and psychogeography’, Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations, ed. by Mike Crang, Phil Crang and Jon May (London: Routledge) pp. 92-106.
Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: Dordrecht).
Taylor, D. R. Fraser. 2005. ‘The Theory and Practice of Cybercartography: An Introduction’, Cybercartography: Theory and Practice, ed. by D. R. Fraser Taylor (Amsterdam: Elsevier) pp. 1-13.

Finding the Antiuniversity: A Walk Through the Graffiti of Rivington Street

On 12 February 1968 a group of artists, writers and intellectuals started the Antiuniversity of London. The free university was led by people such as the ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R. D. Laing, the academic Stuart Hall and the Situationist Alexander Trocchi. Run at 49 Rivington Street in Shoreditch, London EC2, the group advertised education in the area of “Music, Art, Poetry, Black Power, Madness, Revolution”. The aim of the university was to open up education to more people in an effort to desinstitutionalise it (hence R. D. Laing’s involvement, since he was attempting to do something similar in the institution of psychiatry). Teachers at the Antiuniversity included Herbert Marcuse and Gregory Bateson. It was to be “a meeting ground for discussion, discovery, rediscovery and revelation. It [was] intended as an on-going experiment in the development of consciousness and [was] related to other revolutionary experiments in universities”. Unfortunately, even at the opening, there were arguments between the committee, students and teachers about press coverage. The Antiuniversity did not last long.

The above image of the building where the Antiuniversity was located was taken by Peter Műnder and dates from around that period. This blog takes you from the entrance to Rivington Street, from the Old Street end, via the graffiti and street art I spotted on the way. At the end you will see the building as it is today.

Today the building is the retail shoe outlet Fiorentini + Baker. It looks very different from its time as the Antiuniversity. This part of Shoreditch has been smartened up so much since I first moved to London in the late 1980s. It’s now a trendy, artsy, boho area. Although, thankfully, there is still something gritty about it in its scruffiness, especially when entering from Old Street.

Links:
Mayday Rooms on The Antiuniversity of London
Negotiating Brutalist Space at the University of Leeds

The Psychogeography Franchise

The British psychogeographer and writer Iain Sinclair is known for highlighting the problems of psychogeography, at one time calling it "psychotic" geography and describing it as a type of "franchise". (Fortean Times 2002) Historically it has often been considered to be the pursuit of middle-aged men, fortunate enough to have the luxury of time and money, who wander through urban space formulating a commentary on it, as was the case with the flaneur. However, in contemporary times, and perhaps in part because it has become a method and practice for art, there are many more women who partake in it and could perhaps classify themselves as psychogeographers. Probably the most high profile female psychogeographer in recent history is the Situationist Michèle Bernstein.

British psychogeography, in particular, has been criticised for being nostalgic, with Sinclair being cited as one of the main proponents of an approach where "loss and redemption are explored and negotiated". (Bonnett 2009: 54) Alistair Bonnett's recent article 'The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography' explores these notions alongside a consideration that this strand often sits next to a radical activist lineage of psychogeography in Britain.

For the purposes of my own project I mostly use the definition of psychogeography as it is set out by the Situationists. Psychogeography is: “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” (Situationist International 1996: 69) However, I think it is pertinent to note that another form of psychogeography was given the same name by Howard F. Stein. In his book Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (1987) Stein does not see psychogeography as a nebulous or cryptic response to space at all, but something that is ever-present in the individual. Approaching it from a psychoanalytical angle, Stein sees psychogeography as referring to "people's shared psychological representation or 'map' of the natural and social world". (1987: 3) In his edited text with William G. Niederland Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography (1989) it is described thus:

Psychogeography is the study of how issues, experiences, and processes that result from growing up in a male or female body [...] become symbolized and played out in the wider social and natural worlds, which serve as 'screens' for these inner dramas. (1989: xvii)

Psychogeography for Stein and Niederland takes a Freudian look at space, in considering the inner life of the individual and, therefore, their gender. This form of psychogeographic study aims to look at what connects someone to place and how geography makes a person who they are. It is possible that this form of psychogeography pre-dates that of the Situationists, as the introduction to Maps from the Mind states that Niederland developed it in the 1950s when looking at river symbolism. (1989: xxix) Joel Greenberg uses Niederland's definition of psychogeography in his oedipally named essay 'Psychogeography: A Freudian Look at the Search for Mother Earth...or, How I loved My Mother, Hated My Father and Discovered America' (1978) which looks at exploration and cartography. Greenberg looks at "the unconscious libidinal components linked to geographical pursuits", why the ego projects imagery onto the outside world and how geography appears in representative form. (1978: 90) This type of psychogeography is not the direction I take. I include it here to show the 'grey areas' in the different types of psychogeography. Also because the work of Niederland and Stein has authority in its own field in academia, and to not acknowledge it would be to provide an incomplete picture of what psychogeography is considered to be.

Merlin Coverley talks about how psychogeography resists definitions, and while this could be considered its downfall, it could also be part of its enduring nature: it can be picked up like a flexible tool and re-shaped to suit the individual practitioner. The downside of it is that practically anyone on a causal stroll through town could describe themselves as a psychogeographer, and while this is not really a problem for many individuals involved in this field, it is another criticism levelled at it. In order for psychogeography not to be an elitist pursuit, I prefer to be generous in the use of the term. However, one urban walk does not a psychogeographer make and I would also attach the premise that the walk needs to have certain qualities for it to be of a psychogeographic nature, for example, it needs to be an intentional act that elicits an aesthetic response of some sort in its critique of that space. Coverley describes it as "cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city's inhabitants" (2006: 12) and I think this would be a good way of describing what many contemporary psychogeographers do, including the Situationists (it is also true of the psychogeography I carry out, on my own and with Leeds Psychogeography Group). It would be at least partly correct to say psychogeographers "seek to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the every day" (Coverley 2006: 13); however, this sentiment is problematic, as it implies that there is a truth underlying postmodern space that can be revealed, and this is not the case; there is no single truth present under the surface, nevertheless, the act itself does allow one to reveal social histories which might otherwise remain hidden.

Not only are there different definitions of psychogeography, some of which have been discussed, but there are alternative names for different forms of psychogeography, and some of the differences are quite subtle. Papadimitriou calls his own type of urban walking "deep topography":

What is deep topography? It's not a programme. It's an acknowledgement of the magnitude of response to landscape. Something that I don't see in most accounts that I read of landscape. I find there's two ways that descriptions of landscape go. One of them puts the person who is experiencing at the centre; and it always seems a little narcissistic to me: 'I respond to this', 'I spotted that'. It's more about them than about the landscape. And the other way it goes, it tends to be greened or touristed, one of the two. So there's either an attempt to place the landscape within the framework of mainstream green philosophy, or else it goes the other way, which is it just becomes touristic: 'The field are really nice in April'. That sort of thing. (Papadimitriou 2009)

The London Perambulator is predominantly about Papadimitriou and his deep topography. There is also a well known form of walking known as mythogeography, subscribed to by a number of artists, writers and academics who are part of a fluid collective. On the Mythogeography website there is a page which differentiates mythogeography from psychogeography. It says:

In the UK the concept of psychogeography was detached from activist meaning and reconfigured as a literary practice in the work of writers like Iain Sinclair and also gathered some occult trappings during this time from Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and others.
Mythogeography describes a way of thinking about and visiting places where multiple meanings have been squeezed into a single and restricted meaning (for example, heritage, tourist or leisure sites tend to be presented as just that, when they may also have been homes, jam factories, battlegrounds, lovers' lanes, farms, cemeteries and madhouses). Mythogeography emphasises the multiple nature of places and suggests multiple ways of celebrating, expressing and weaving those places and their multiple meanings.
Mythogeography is influenced by, and draws on, psychogeography – seeking to reconnect with some of its original political edge as well as with its more recent additions. (Mythogeography 2011)

This definition of mythogeography attempts to return to the more activist form of psychogeography proposed by the Situationists, while at the same time allowing for multiple meanings to reveal themselves through those spaces.

Psychogeophysics analyses the effects of geography and place on the individual. Walking is one of the means for carrying out this semi-scientific-based research. Mostly examining the city from an ecological perspective, it uses measuring and mapping devices when creating 'situations'.

Because of the historic problems attached to the term psychogeography, and in order to differentiate my own style of psychogeography from the many other existing forms, I have formulated my own term: schizocartography.

I have developed schizocartography from Félix Guattari's terms “schizoanalysis” and "schizoanalytic cartography". While the term “schizoanalysis” is derived from “schizophrenia” (as discussed in depth in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia collaborative series of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), it does not promote mental illness; rather, “schizo” is used as a way of offering up the possibility of multiple voices, and alternative world-views, amongst other factors. Schizocartography enables alternative existential modes for individuals in order to challenge dominant representations and power structures. This provides an opportunity for multiple ways of operating in space and reading the environment; it critiques the conventional ways of viewing, interpreting and mapping space. This is my definition of 'schizocartography':

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that both questions dominant power structures while at the same time enabling subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

Bibliography:

Bonnett, Alistair. 'The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography', Theory, Culture and Society, 26, 1 (2009), 45-70.
Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials).
Greenberg, Joel. 'Psychogeography: A Freudian Look at the Search for Mother Earth...or, How I loved My Mother, Hated My Father and Discovered America', Science News, 113, 6 (1978), 90-91.
Mythogeography, 'Not Psychogeography', Mythogeography, (2011), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Sinclair, Iain, 'City Brain: A Meeting With the Pioneer Psychogeographer', Fortean Times, (2002), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Situationist International. 1996. Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City, ed. by Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona).
Stein, Howard F. 1987. Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press).
Stein, Howard F. and William G. Niederland. 1989. 'Editors' Introduction', Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography, ed. by Howard F. Stein and William G. Niederland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press) pp. xvii-xxix.