Jennifer Dumpert runs the Urban Dreamscape site, which is an oneiromantic map of the San Francisco landscape. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this sort of psychographical topography fascinates me. As she mentions on the site, the Situationists used a technique they called the Dérive to create an artistic impression of their urban habitats*. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in From Hell chart Sir William Gull’s psychogeographic explanation for the rationale behind the Jack the Ripper murders. Iain Sinclair has written at least two books that rely on psychogeography for structure and theme (London Orbital, about the M25 roadway; and Edge of Orison, a reconstruction of poet John Clare’s stroll from a lunatic asylum to the beach and then back to his home).
So what is psychogeography? Clinically, it is the study of the manner in which the environment effects those who inhabit it, and by “manner,” I mean, the quantifiable and articulated rules and laws that can be objectively presented about a given environment as they relate to the behavior and emotional reactions of those individuals who pass through. In short: it’s how your city shapes you the longer you live in it.
Every environment starts off with its natural patterns and pathways of influence, be they geographical, electromagnetic, magical, or biochemical. Mountains influence our ability to travel between plains; rivers divert us as well as afford us ways to bypass areas through which we’d otherwise have to slog. Forests provide shelter and sustenance, thereby luring us to create permanent encampments near to them. Any natural landscape has its own rhythm.
In a microcosmic fashion, the way in which we accrete history in a defined space creates rhythm as well. We lay down desire lines (we call them ley lines when they correspond to a natural flow of energy), and over successive generations, these paths become an indelible part of the landscape.
Psychogeography is an effort to understand how we’ve come to haunt the world we live in.
[*The French have also given us Parkour, which is sort of an anti-Dérive approach to interacting with an urban landscape.]
