Walking the City

Back on the topic of cities, obviously.

I found this post by Jayme Lynn Blaschke on an interview by noted SFF writer China Miéville in the journal of YLEM:

Loren Means: William Gibson was talking with me about London and the people like Ian Sinclair who are doing this deep geography...

China Miéville: ...Psycho-geography...

LM: And I asked him if Vancouver was such a place, and he said, "No it's too new, but San Francisco is."

CM: Absolutely. And I like cities that one can do that in, cities that have a--to sound monstrously pretentious--a psycho-geographical hinterland. I think London, I think New York, I think Cairo, Havana, and I absolutely take your word, San Francisco has that feel to it. There is a San Francisco literature, isn't there? ...The city becomes uncanny through its very physical existence. You couldn't do that with all cities.

Blaschke also expounded on this by citing his own experience, something which I concur greatly:

I like this line of thinking, and believe there's a good deal of validity to it. There are places I've been, cities, towns and other locations that have a tangible weight of history to them, which literally gives them an invisible, omnipresent personality. A well-defined psycho-geographical terrain, as it were.

Anyway, obviously, this term piqued my interest: psycho-geography. A google search came up with these items, most especially the walk:

19th Century opium eater Thomas de Quincey remains the first reported case & indeed the prototype of the obsessive drifter. With no other goal in mind than to satisfy his curiosity about what might be discovered around the next corner, De Quincey spent entire days randomly strolling around London. In the 20th century, the surrealists in the 30ties & the Lettrists in the 50ties elaborated on this urge by transforming it into a systematic practice. In the 60ties the Situationists took this activity to the next level by developing psychogeography: the science of the dérive, the drift.

Also here (something straight out of Colson Whitehead's feuding elevator-inspectors book, The Intuitionist!):

Psychogeography was developed as a critique of urbanism by the Lettrist International and then by Situationist International in the late fifties. Today, it is pursued by artists, radical thinkers and, on an academic level, geography researchers.

Lastly, Wikipedia notes it as:

Psychogeography is "The study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals", according to the article Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, in Situationniste Internationale No. 1 (1958). The precise origins of psychogeography are unknown but today it is practised in the West (ie Europe and America), formally in groups or associations, sometimes consisting of just one member.

Weird, eh? Meself, I prefer to drive.

(Edit: Okay, are we back online? We are? Good. For a moment, the internet was fucking up again...)

This is very interesting though obviously, you take whatever you read on the internet with a pinch of salt. Information is not knowledge, as they say. But it's an attractive idea, one that fits quite nicely with mine about cities having personalities of their own.

However, I was serious when I said I prefer to drive. Given the safety of the great imperial city of Manila, it would be better. I suppose I could call my automobile my psychopomp. And you get around faster, too.