The Atlas of Improbable Places: A Fantastic Voyage into the Body-Politic

While the dictionary states that ‘improbable’ means “Not likely to be true or happen. Unexpected and apparently inauthentic”, the Improbability Principle states that “extremely improbable events are commonplace” (David Hand – statistician). So what does Travis Elborough and Alan Horsfield’s Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners tell us about “the obscure and bizarre, the beautiful and estranged” places contained therein? Well, perhaps there are more improbable places than we knew existed. Elborough (writer) and Horsfield (cartographer) educate us in improbable places through their atlas, categorising these unusual, surprising and secretive phenomenon under headings such as architectural oddities, floating worlds and deserted destinations.

Covering a multitude of types of places, from off-grid or hidden spaces to underground or abandoned settlements, the book takes us on a fantastic voyage through its beautiful pages of stylishly formatted text, maps and photos. Every place discussed has a map, grid reference, description and image. We have photos ranging from the words of God to spooky doll heads, showing all sorts of places like underground railways and lost kingdoms.

While it’s difficult to pick my favourite one out of the fifty-one described, I’m going to discuss Concrete City because I have an interest in towns that are especially built for workers, such as Fordlândia (Henry Ford’s prefabricated town from the early part of the 20th century).

‘Concrete City: Garden City of the Anthracite Region’ is in Pennsylvania, US (see above image). Elborough explains that Concrete City was built in 1911 by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western rail/mining project. It is both a new town and also part of the garden city movement created by Ebenezer Howard. The workers’ town was set for demolition in 1924, following a litany of issues relating to damp, poor sanitation and so on. However, it proved hard to destroy despite much dynamite and still remains today, now recognised as having cultural value. You can see some more images of Concrete City here.

What in particular interests me about places like Concrete City and Fordlândia is that they arise as a response to the understanding that taking care of your workers is beneficial in terms of profit. Both these new towns arose in the period of post-Victorian industrialisation. We are still in the second stage of capitalism at this time, what some theorists describe as “the family wage economy”, where the husband’s income supports the whole family. We haven’t yet reached the post-World War II consumer economy where women are more widely employed, start to leave the confines of the home and are considered consumers in their own right.

In terms of a cultural theoretical critique of these townships, one can’t help but see the downside of this being one of control of the body-politic. Power structures are materially embedded and the housing provided by 'the company' exerts more control over the worker than would be the case if the properties were not owned by the same organisation that the labourers work for. I wonder if there was also perhaps some of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon at work here, too. In Concrete City the oblong layout of the houses means they are all looking in towards a centre, and hence at each other (self surveillance). Actually, this takes us to another of the improbable places in the book, Presidio Modelo a former prison in Cuba. Its circular buildings epitomise the panopticon (see the model of the panopticon below).

For Michel Foucault, the body-politic is: “a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communications routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge” (1991: 28). Foucault explains that thinking of power and knowledge as separate from each other and that they exist in detached domains is a mistake. In fact “power produces knowledge” (1991: 27). He explains: “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does no presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” (ibid.). This reciprocal power/knowledge process involves the knowing subject, the known object and also the modes used in the procurement of that knowledge. This works in regards to knowledge of the individual, in particular the body.

You can see how this applies to the prison system, but I believe it applies to these types of new towns, too. This is what Foucault describes as “political anatomy” (1991: 28). However, he makes it clear that this is a procedure that does not decontextualise the subject, or the body: it is the analysis of a process - the body-politic - which means the individual cannot be removed from this activity and examined on their own in terms of power. They are only known in regards to this power dynamic and not in their own right. Although, we can never be known ‘in our own right’ as we always exist in apparatuses that exert power through ideology (Louis Althusser): for instance, even within the private place of the family.

Bibliography:
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books).

The Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography – Report by David Bollinger

Since I was expelled following last year’s world congress I had to attend this year’s one remotely, which I was able to do thanks to the streaming of the event here (despite being told I was to have nothing to do with the event any more, "even at a distance"). I’d just like to say how well the The Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography was put together, and attended, despite my lack of professional input. Below you can read some of the noteworthy observations I made about the conference on September 9 and 10:

Travis Elborough as Keynote
I think it was a coup for the conference to get such a high quality speaker when you consider the rest of the usual bunch of itinerant, rucksack-wearing, gore-tex fetishist types that made up the rest of the speakers at the conference – not that I’m bitter. Mr. Elborough was charming and gave an eloquent and entertaining talk about his book A Walk in the Park.

Tina Richardson’s Pretentious Talk
Richardson gave her usual affected talk, although I have to admire her for her shorter than regular talk title: Town and Gown: The Studentification of Urban Space. She must have really struggled to restrain herself. Coming from a critical theory background, she tends to over-embellish her lectures with, what I can only describe as, smartass deconstruction punctuation. I was surprised to see a distinct lack of bracket use and did wonder if she was perhaps feeling a bit unwell. Other than that, her talk was tolerable. Although she did set herself up for a ‘big reveal’, her model of studentification in Venn diagram form. Like this is the first time someone has ever used a Venn diagram in a presentation! These hyped up announcements invariably fall flat, like she did later that evening when leaving The Head of Steam public house.

Alex Bridger’s Talk: What is Psychogeography?
Dr. Bridger clearly broke into my office and stole the abstract I submitted for my talk for the event. Two bottles of spirits also ‘co-incidentally’ went missing. I thought his talk was great, but that’s because IT WAS MINE! I have nothing more to say about this man…

Tim Water’s Walk
The famous (or should I say infamous) neogeographer Mr. Waters is just a sadist. Three of those attending his walk sought me out online ACTUALLY DURING THE WALK – knowing I was no longer with the world congress – to complain about the 12 hour long walk he took them on. And all with no proper toilet break and, worse, no alcohol! Darrant Hinsico, who had come all the way from Portugal, said "I was forced to tinkle on Harold Wilson". I also heard that a desperate splinter group actually stormed Huddersfield Town Hall after becoming so deranged after a lack of any “pep me up” (and I quote) that they began to hallucinate, thinking it was The Bastille.

Phil Wood’s Presence
When I say Phil Wood’s presence, I mean 'presence'! Thankfully this psychogeographer not only kept the whole gathering on a professional footing, with both his flat cap and his Rob Rinderesque gavel, but also brought some gravitas to the event. To be honest, the man is wasted in this group of, what I can only describes as, losers! If I was Wood, and some have suggested that I am both he and also Luther Blissett, I would move across the Pennines and join the Western camp of the Northern Psychogeographers and get as far away from these idiots as possible!

Heterotopias of Compensation

Travis Elborough’s A Walk in the Park

This is a short essay inspired by Travis Elborough’s A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution (Jonathan Cape 2016).

Travis Elborough’s new book A Walk in the Park is an informative, entertaining and elegant ambulation through the history of the public park covering a period of four millennia. While drawing on a breadth of research on the park and providing much useful information, Elborough still manages to keep the book lively and engaging when situating this phenomenon in its cultural lineage.

Rather than provide a book review (you can read some of the more ‘regular’ reviews here: one by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian and one by Daisy Dunn in The Times), I am offering a short essay. Inspired by the book my article draws on Michel Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia.

The park is an excellent example of a heterotopia as explained by Foucault in his text Of Other Spaces (1967). In his essay, which was originally a lecture, Foucault describes the difference between a utopia and a heterotopia: “Utopias are sites with no real space,” whereas heterotopias “…are real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” (2001: 239).

In Of Other Spaces Foucault details the complex criteria required to consider a particular space to be a heterotopia, setting out his four principles. He also uses labels such as “crisis heterotopias” and “heterotopias of deviation” to apply to, for example, 19^th-century boarding schools and contemporary psychiatric hospitals, respectively (2001: 240). However, I shall be choosing to look at the public park from the perspective of a heterotopia of compensation since they are designed to “create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (2001: 243).

At the beginning of his book, Elborough explains that: “many of the globe’s most famous public parks were created in part to quell political unrest and prevent revolutions” (2016: 3). They were: “widely deployed as tools to tame supposed wildness among the population, ease alienation and see off social discord” (Elborough 2016: 4). In this respect, we can see that creating a calm ordered greenspace for potentially unruly citizens to spend their social time could be advantageous for political administrations (on a local and national level). Civil unrest is not economically productive and is expensive to police and clean up. Therefore, the park has the effect of controlling the behaviour of individuals by operating on the body politic.

All space (whether urban, suburban or rural) is structured in such a way as to enforce a certain habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) on individuals. This organises their behaviour, at the same time inculturating them into a specific socio-cultural practice. The public parks encouraged certain behaviours and not others. These were (are) subtly written into the very design of the parks and more overtly into the rules attached to behaviours that were considered unacceptable in the space (some written and some not). By behaving in a different way than was deemed customary in these parks, individuals could be seen as being deviant or criminal, and Elborough’s book provides examples of this, such as fighting, homosexuality, prostitution and rape.

The ideologies and practices behind the development of urban space appear in the form of programmes which have specific material and social effects on individuals (Fischler 1995: 22). This is what Michel Foucault refers to as a regime of rationality. But this geographical and social ordering also has a function other than one of just control. Above, Foucault alludes to a dichotomy between the organised space of this type of a heterotopia – one of compensation – which opposes supposedly ‘real’ space in its disorganised form. The public park, in fact, becomes a kind of hyperreal space. If we look at Jean Baudrillard’s levels of simulation, we can classify the public park as level 2: “it masks and denatures a profound reality” (1994: 6). Thus, the park also has the effect of ‘hiding’ the needs and desires that may arise through the social reproduction inherent in everyday space: the disparity in wealth which is always geographically apparent in urban space and the differences between inherited privilege and raw poverty.

The public park was designed as a cultural space available to all citizens irrelevant of class. Quoting a British parliamentary committee, who in the early 19^th century were looking at a potential public parks programme, Elborough says: “those who spent their lives ‘shut up in heated factories’…should ‘on their rest day’ be able to ‘enjoy the fresh air’” (2016: 70). Everyone then has access to the park, and this creates the illusion of social levelling. But what happens is that this type of heterotopia not only orders the space within the park. Through its compensatory function, it also organises the lived experience of individuals so as to exert power over them in the everyday.

I am sure it is no coincidence that surges in public park programmes accompany times of great socio-cultural challenges. Indeed, in Britain, there is a Parliamentary Select Committee that has just announced a public parks enquiry (this follows years of public funding cuts, meaning public parks have been under threat for a while). The Victorian period also provides a good example of a public parks programme and Elborough discusses in depth this period in Britain and the parks that were formed at this time, for example, Battersea Park in London (see above image). Opened in 1858, this part of London had previously been a wilderness where duels and riots took place, and the police feared to go (Elborough 2016: 75). To the Victorian bourgeoisie, these unruly wastelands were probably considered ‘Godless’ places.

This moment in time reflects the same philosophical epoch of Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration “God is Dead” (The Gay Science1882). It also echoes Baudrillard’s second level of the simulacra, which I have attributed to the public park phenomenon. For Baudrillard’s second level of simulation “there is no longer a God to recognise his own, no longer a Last Judgement to separate the false from the true, the real from the artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance” (1994: 6). Thus, the formation of the Victorian park, many of which still survive today, is a stand-in for a God, who had already left the scene.

While today we are fighting to keep our public parks open, perhaps our attachment to them is as much because the real has been lost to us as it is about protecting our public spaces. “We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end” (Baudrillard 1994: 10).

Bibliography:

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press).

Elborough, Travis. 2016. A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution (London: Jonathan Cape).

Fischler, Raphaël. 1995. ‘Strategy and History in Professional Practice: Planning as World Making’, in Helen Liggett and David C. Perry (eds.), Spatial Practices (London: Sage), pp. 13-58.

Foucault, Michel. 1998. ‘Of Other Spaces, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge), pp. 237-244.

How We Used To Live – A Psychogeography of Your London

I rarely come out of a film feeling uplifted, or think this is my best film of [insert year]. Some of my years don’t even have my-best-film-ofs attached to them, as the films I saw were all so unmemorable. However my favourite film of 2014 is How We Used to Live (2013), written by Paul Kelly and Travis Elborough. I saw it this week at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds.

I’ve never been a fan of Ian MacShane, but he was the narrator and his voice was marvellous. There was a spooky resemblance to John Hurt’s narration on the Art of Noise’s The Seduction of Claude Debussey (“imagine me saying the following”). The timbre of their voices is so similar. Interestingly, the music was not dissimilar to the Art of Noise, as St Etienne provided the soundtrack.

I should image that anyone who can remember the 60s, or who knows London from maybe at least the 80s, would find this film extremely nostalgic. From fashion, to music, to social history, we are taken through the decades from the late 50s. But this is not a stuffy overly sentimental historic trip. It is also amusing and includes strange little moments, like a young woman in a green dress being grabbed off the street and put into the back of a car. What happened to her? We don’t know. But the film is more because of these quirky moments.

The film uses British Film Institute archive footage and the film format reflects this history – no widescreen format for the postwar Brit. Also, the aesthetics of the titles, etc, is in keeping with the period:

“Whenever you go down the road, you travel not in three dimensions, but in four. The fourth dimension is the past.”

You can read a Channel 4 review here: Can You Spot the London You Know?

Related links:
For my favourite film of 2013: The Great Walk - A Film, a Mystery, a Cult. . .
Film overviews: Le Pont Du Nord and Urbanized