Psychogeography is a critical tool encouraging the study of the effects of a particular urban environment on the emotions, cognitive responses and behaviour of individuals. The term, first defined by French political theorist Guy Debord in his essay Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, encompassed the “study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” At the core of this method of urban data gathering was the dérive, a form of walking or drifting. For Debord, a dérive was “the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiances.” Initially, the dérive was a tool to increase individual awareness of urban surroundings and its alienating effects. Unlike the flâneur of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, Debord was less interested in interpreting the space and more in the personal experience while observing a drift. At stake was the exact investigation of the effect of the geographic, architectural space on individuals’ emotions and consciousness.
Debord is better known as a leading figure of the avant-garde revolutionary Marxist organisation known as the Situationists International (SI) that emerged in Paris in the 1950s. SI was rooted in a Marxist critique of the effects of the uniformisation of society through urbanism, mass media, and the alienating and divisive effects of capitalism on work and leisure. In critiquing the spread of the fetishism of the commodity into the everyday, the Situationists International concluded that social relations had become mediated by images, in which, as propounded by Guy Debord in his seminal 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. The commodification of the everyday led to life itself becoming a spectacle. Debord argues that the spectacle is not simply a collection of images, “but a social relation among people, mediated by images”. His outbursts denounced our highly mediated, image-saturated culture. Their alternative was a utopian, neo-romantic vision of a collectivist society inspired by Marxism and avant-garde art movements such as Dada, Surrealism and Futurism. Some of the key concepts advocated by SI for a better, more equalitarian world were constructed situations, psychogeography and unitary urbanism.
Since then, psychogeography has gained popularity in architectural theory, architectural psychology, urban studies, sociology and cultural studies. Concepts and strategies such as the dérive have perpetuated psychogeography’s relevance in today’s architectural, design and public art debates. However, given the apparent failure of critical theory, and its commodification and even hijacking by capitalism, a new theoretical and methodological approach that broadens the scope of ongoing debates is urgently needed. What kind of city we want, as reiterated by David Harvey, Professor of Anthropology and Geography at CUNY, “cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.” As Harvey states in his essay The Right to the City (New Left Review 53, September-October 2008), the “right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.”
Drawing inspiration from the underpinnings of Debordian psychogeography (i.e. the promotion of “democratic aesthetics”), a new methodology could emerge based on direct observation of the urban environment, our reactions to it and our conscious interpretation of the resulting data. This methodology would be founded on a cross-disciplinary approach, based on collaborative work and rooted in awareness, empathy and understanding. The end goal would be to use psychogeography as a tool/methodology to generate ideas, sketches and/or design solutions, whilst simultaneously questioning our own formation of emotional, affective and cognitive experiences. It would aim to be participatory and to emphasize the processes of knowledge creation and sharing. Informed by Romanticism, historical analysis, psychogeography, ethnography, design theory and critical theory, this method could open up a conceptual space based on direct observation of the urban environment’s “field of influence”. It could be part of the recent evolution in design research “from a user-centred approach to co-designing”, as described in the essay Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design by Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers, which would lead to “creating new domains of collective creativity” and “support a transformation toward more sustainable [and democratic] ways of living”. I propose that this is a methodology we should develop.
THEORETICAL ROOTS
The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 60s witnessed a period of unprecedented social change and acceleration in the urbanisation of cities worldwide. Particularly in Europe, in the aftermath of World War II with its destruction of cities and displacement of entire communities, there was an explosion of new cities, which gave rise to the opportunity—the excuse, even—to test and implement new urban models fashioned on the remnants of Modernism’s utopian ideals. This period also witnessed the emergence and consolidation of Cold War liberalism and, as art historian Claire Bishop points out in her book Artificial Hells, Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), its early signs of “transformation into neoliberalism, that is, the economic practice of private property rights, free markets and free trade” underpinned by rampant consumerism.
Calum Storrie, in his book The Delirious Museums (I.B. Tauris, 2006), explains that the Situationist International was formed during a conference in Cosio d’Arroscia in Italy in 1957, and was founded by existing members of other groups including the Letterist International (Guy Debord, Isidore Isou, Michèle Bernstein), artists associated with CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (Asger Jorn, Constant, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio), and the London Psychogeographic Committee (Ralph Rumney). Together these individuals produced magazines that explored the themes of art and urbanism, which became increasingly political. As Storrie writes, “The stated aim of the Situationists was to disrupt and eventually dismantle the ‘spectacle’ of capitalist society by creating subversive ‘constructed situations’.” This development represented a turn to the social realm. Importantly it also marked a shift from the author as producer to the author as collaborator and facilitator. Claire Bishop proposes that “the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant.” For Bishop, what is clear is that “these shifts are often more powerful as ideals than as actualised realities, but they all aim to place pressure on conventional modes of artistic production and consumption under capitalism.”
Another major influence on the theoretical development of SI was the work of French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. As exemplified in his book Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre was a Marxist who held that “Marxism, as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life.” Lefebvre conceived of the everyday as being at the juncture of “illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control”. Embracing the everyday life, Lefebvre’s work pioneered the understanding of urban space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production. For Lefebvre, as propounded in his book The Production of Space, “social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and through space.” It was on the back of Lefebvre’s enquiry into public space that SI developed their ideas around constructed situations, psychogeography and unitary urbanism. Debord defined constructed situations in the first issue of the Situationist International Bulletin (first published in 1958 as Internationale Situationniste) as “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary and a game of events.” Unitary urbanism, in turn, is defined as “the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behaviour.” As Bishop observed in Artificial Hells, it was “an attempt to undo and move beyond what they saw as the disciplining, homogenizing and ultimately dehumanizing effect of modernist forms of urban high-rise living, exemplified by the modular architecture of Le Corbusier”. In fact, Lefebvre himself quipped that “we come to think in terms of spatiality, and so to fetishize space in a way reminiscent of the old fetishism of commodities…[Space] in addition to being a means of production is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power” (Henri Lefebvre, 1974).
During the first years of SI’s existence, members produced a series of artistic works exploring psychogeography and how it might affect social change. One of the most celebrated works from this period was a collaboration between Asger Jorn and Guy Debord called The Naked City. Drawing inspiration from CoBra, which defied the rules of traditional painting and encouraged experimentation with materials and artistic collaboration, Jorn and Debord produced a new map of Paris based on their drifts, or on a “mobile architecture of living”. The subversive map consisted of 19 fragments, cut out from a travel map of Paris and then reconfigured with red directional arrows linking the cut-outs. Through the fragmentation of Paris and its Situationist re-construction, the map forms new relations among the city’s parts and their inhabitants based on the subjective experience of traversing the cityscape. Its use of montage and pastiche techniques not only laid the foundations of what we now call post-modern aesthetics, but also pioneered the idea of converting “urban topography into a social and affective landscape”. It was an attempt at exploring the relationship between urban spaces and emotions.
Not surprising, psychogeography first found expression amongst artists and architects. Some of the art produced under the auspices of SI would eventually lead to participatory art and what Nicolas Bourriaud termed “relational aesthetics”. The architectural manifestations, however, would culminate in a revolution in architecture and a reappraisal of our understanding of public space. Projects such as Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon and British Architecture collective Archigram’s The Walking City, amongst many others, would have a lasting impact on architecture practice, and its power to transform daily reality. Constant’s New Babylon, from the late 1950s, consisted of interconnected transformable structures, suspended above ground, sprawling endlessly across the globe. New Babylon represented his vision of the city of the future, fit for a post-revolutionary wandering society. His utopian drift-city was designed to facilitate situations, allowing its inhabitants to be in a constant state of play, wandering from one leisure environment to the other at will. Archigram, inspired by Constant’s megastructure, proposed three concepts for mobile, miniaturised and technologically-rich alternatives. These concepts, as stated on the the Victoria and Albert Museum’s website, included “Walking City, a peripatetic giant reptilian structure, Living Pod, a miniature capsule home and Instant City, an airship containing all the cultural and education resources of a metropolis which could land in remote areas giving inhabitants a taste of city life”. Although the primary roots of psychogeography lie with SI, historically these ways of thinking about the politics of design and the role of art in social life can trace their lineage much further back, to the Romanticism and anarchism of the 19th century, or even to notions of the sublime and the conservation of nature first propounded by Edmund Burke in the 18th century. The work of William Morris, most notably his propaganda novel, News from Nowhere, bears the hallmarks of some of Lefebvre’s ideals of art for and by the people, and foreshadows the ideologies of SI. In this book, Morris depicts an England transformed by an imaginary revolution that has taken place in 1952. Previous structures of society have been overthrown, and England has become a place of communistic freedom and genuine equality between men, women and children. There is no private property, no money, and no divorce courts since laws of sexual ownership have been overthrown. Schools, prisons and central government are obsolete.
In an article in The Guardian, Fiona MacCarthy, a cultural historian and a leading expert on Morris, claimed his “originality as visionary thinker lies in the case he makes for the centrality of art. He argued with ferocity that art was not a matter of pictures on the wall; not merely a plutocratic hobby. In his Nowhere, art is in the detail of everyday life, in the design of household goods, conservation of the countryside, thoughtful planning of towns, proper upkeep of roads. In this new post-revolutionary England, art is so omnipresent there is no need to define it. ‘What business have we with art at all unless all can share it?’ By the 1880s—his violent years of involvement with socialist politics—Morris was prepared to die for the cause of democracy in art.” While Morris’ Romantic and anarchic ideals are still relevant today, there is a need for further discussion about how these ideals can be incorporated into a holistic methodology that also draws on techniques of psychogeography and the ethos of SI. Although psychogeography has recently become more of a personal, almost self-indulgent artistic approach, there is scope to implement a new methodology that takes into account the changing needs of dynamic populations and recognizes that design and co-creation are an integral part of the processes of habitation. An important question to explore in this context is how psychogeography can be used to take into consideration the wider social structures and processes into design and problem solving approaches.
NEW APPROACHES
Recent methodologies developed by the design disciplines could be of help when considering this question. Take for instance the work of IDEO, a global design consultancy “that takes a humancentred, design-based approach to helping organisations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow.” There are several elements in this approach that echo psychogeography’s methodology. Design thinking according to IDEO is a “human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through means beyond words or symbols”. Warning against an “over-reliance on the rational and analytical”, IDEO advocates a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach that provides “an integrated third way”—pioneering what are nowadays understood in design circles as “human factors”, or as a “human-centred” design approach.
Jane Fulton Suri is a Partner and Chief Creative Officer at IDEO, who came to the organisation with a background in psychology and architecture and the ambition to bring social science-based perspectives to the design practice. To increase the accessibility of human-centred tools, Jane coauthored and published IDEO’s Method Cards. She also created Thoughtless Acts? Observations on Intuitive Design (Chronicle Books, 2005), a collection of snapshots that depict the subtle and creative ways in which people interact with the world. Fulton Suri believes that everyone is creative and resourceful at heart and can earn great rewards by tapping into that capacity. As designers face increasingly complex and systemic challenges, she has begun to look beyond human behaviour to explore how patterns in nature and living systems may inform and inspire more elegant and sustainable solutions. A series of city guides published by IDEO in 2008, for instance, aims to shift the attention of the traveller away from sightseeing toward looking at their surroundings. Their methodology, whilst emanating from the work of Jane Fulton Suri, could be argued to have many common threads with the pioneering observational work of SI and to a certain extent, both Constant Nieuwenhuys’ and Archigram’s work. As IDEO propound in the book IDEO Eyes Open: London: A Field Guide for the Curious, “social behaviours, fleeting moments, and subtle details can be very inspirational once you tune in to them. It’s really just a matter of getting out there and opening yourself up to it all.” IDEO’s work resonates with Donald Norman and James Gibson’s concept of affordances—that is the actual and perceived properties of objects or spaces. For Norman, an affordance, as defined in his 1988 seminal book The Design of Everyday Things, is: “The perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. […] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.” According to Joanna McGreene and Wayne Ho in their paper entitled Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept, Gibson, on the other hand, defines affordances as “an action possibility available in the environment to an individual, independent of the individual’s ability to perceive this possibility”.
When taken together with the historical influences discussed above, such developments suggest a direction in which psychogeography could be taken forward and transformed into an inclusive social practice that could allow those who are not trained as designers, academics, artists, psychologists, etc. to apply creative tools and methodologies to address a vast range of challenges. Taking advantage of the recent surge of interest in participation and collaboration that has taken place since the early 1990s across a plethora of disciplines, thinkers, artists, designers and makers could incite the community at large to become involved in collaborative processes of co-design based on empathy, understanding and awareness.
Originally published in Dapper Dan magazine 11, 2015. Words by Nuno Coelho