Postmodern Urbanismand the New Psychogeography

Tina Richardson

Introduction

‘The Unseen University: A Schizocartography of a Redbrick University Campus’ [available on White Rose Research Online]

Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography Rowman and Littlefield International [due 2015]

Cultural Theory

+ Psychogeography

= Urban Cultural Studies

Lecture Outline

Schools of Urbanism: Modernist/Postmodernist The Los Angeles School

Michael Dear Edward Soja

Spatial Theorists Henri Lefebvre Michel Foucault David Harvey

The New Psychogeography Deep Topography Mythogeography Schizocartography

Dérive Strategies

The Chicago School

Chicago from space

Concentric Zones

Which city is this?

The Los Angeles School

Los Angeles

Differences

The periphery organises the centre, rather than the other way around

There is a tension between neoliberal relationships (corporate and global) and those of the individual (the social)

The structure is not linear (it is disordered) and operates against attempts to de-pathologise the city

LA “the capital of the twentieth century” [see article] What it produces are:

The spectacle Edge cities Gated communities Corporate citadels…

c/o Michael Dear

The Spectacle

Edge Cities

Gated Communities

Corporate Citadels

Grid System

Michael Dear

Edward Soja

He sees postmodernity as just one of a series of epochs representing capitalism (see Jameson)

Influential in the current (last) spatial turn Taking Lefebvre’s thesis as his starting point, he

sees space as having taken over from time in regard to its ability to hide the consequences of social reproduction

Invented the term ‘thirdspace’ His work is connected to the Marxist geographers

e.g. David Harvey Wrote Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities

and Regions (2000)

Edward Soja - Thirdspace

“Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”

From Thirdspace:Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996)

Michael Dear

Offers new ways to represent the structure/restructure of postmodern urban space

Provides a new lexicon that describes the spatial formations within the postmodern city…

Made connections with the work of the Chicago School and the Frankfurt School in developing the LA School

Wrote The Postmodern Urban Condition (2000) Sees the urban model of LA as having a

dominant influence worldwide Has incorporated the work of cultural theorists in

his own work e.g. Jameson

Michael Dear - Postmodernism

“Postmodernism is a political economy of social dislocation. Time and space are now ordered differently and no longer exert the influence to which we are accustomed.”

“The postmodern city has become a mutant money machine, driven by the twin engines of state (penetration) and (corporate) commodification.”

From ‘Postmodernism and Planning’ inEnvironment and Planning D: Society and Space (1986)

Psychogeography in a Postmodern City

Do you know this building? Film

The Westin Bonaventure - Jameson

“...the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd.”

Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The Westin Bonaventure – the Entryway

A Dérive in the Westin Bonaventure

Spatial Theory and Psychogeographical Motifs Henri Lefebvre:

Wrote The Production of Space (1974)Was involved with the SituationistsCame up with a neat formulation of space Influenced Edward Soja and…

David HarveyInfluential Marxist geographerSupports ‘The Right to the City’Also came up with a neat formulation of spaceWrote ‘Space as a Keyword’ (2004)

Michel FoucaultPhilosopher/social historianWrote about space, power and knowledge and their relationshipFleshed out the concept of heterotopiaWrote Discipline and Punish (1975)

fluid spacepalimpsest

the socialresistance

multiplicity

biopolitics

representationcapital accumulation

practice

relational

power structures

discourse

Henri Lefebvre and Ideology

Lefebvre discusses how ideology works in conjunction with space: “what we call ideology only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and in its production” and “Ideology per se might well be said to consist primarily in a discourse upon social space.”

“What is being covered up here is a moral and political order: the specific power that organizes these conditions, with its specific socio-economic allegiance, seems to form directly from the Logos – that is, from a ‘consensual’ embrace of the rational.”

The Production of Space

David Harvey and Relational Space

“An event or a thing at a point in space cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at that point. It depends on everything else going on around it [...] A wide variety of disparate influences swirling over space in the past, present and future concentrate and congeal at a certain point [...] to define the nature of that point.”

Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

Michel Foucault on (urban) Planning

For Foucault an economic plan is one which “has an aim: the explicit pursuit of growth, for example, or the attempt to develop a certain type of consumption or a certain type of investment”; “a plan means the adoption of precise and definite economic ends.”

The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France

“Stones can make people docile and knowable.”

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The New Psychogeography

What is it?Challenges the stereotype

OrganisedPost-Sinclairian

CartographicRereading/writing

HeterogeneousCritical and strategicEmbraces/critical of

technologyArchaeological (material)

Somatic

What isn’t it?Nostalgic (retrospective longing)Masculine/colonialApoliticalExclusiveClosedUnivocalProtectionist/snobbishSingularly literaryTouristicDialecticalLondon-centric

Not prescriptive

Psychogeographers and MethodologiesNick Papadimitriou:Deep Topography

Tina Richardson:Schizocartography

Phil Smith:Mythogeography

Nick Papadimitriou

London-based writer Geographical concentration: Middlesex Investigates the urban detail at its fundamental

microbe-like level He believes the materiality of urban space

stores “conglomerate images” Described as “one of the unknown characters of

the urban landscape.” (The London Perambulator 2009)

Wrote Scarp (2012)

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.

Nick Papadimitriou (2009) [from an emailed soundfile]

palimpsest

capital accumulation

practicepower structures

Phil Smith

Southern England based academic/practioner from performance/theatre background

Part of a collective that is interested in counter-tourism and site-specific performances and interventions

Has produced a number of guides on how to carry out walks which have been used in a number of countries and across disciplines

Also working on concepts around ‘The New Psychogeography’ [see David Pinder]

Wrote On Walking (2014)

Mythogeography

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.

Phil Smith (2011)

fluid spacepalimpsest

the socialresistance

multiplicity

biopolitics

representationcapital accumulation

practice

relational

power structures

discourse

Tina Richardson

Leeds-based academic/practitioner from a cultural theory background

Set up and ran Leeds Psychogeography Group from 2009-2013

Invented schizocartography ; ) Interested in multiple uses of urban walking and

raising its profile within academia Wrote Concrete, Crows and Calluses (2013)

Schizocartography

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that questions dominant power structures and at the same time enables 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.

Tina Richardson (2014)

fluid spacepalimpsest

the socialresistance

multiplicity

biopolitics

representationcapital accumulation

practice

relational

power structures

discourse

Situationist Dérive Instructions

• Chance, randomness• Playful but constructive• Need to let-go and be conscious at the same

time• Spatial field: single city, neighbourhood, or

defined region• Be aware of: liminal (threshold, edge) spaces and

interstitial (in-between) spaces• Recommendation: 5 people max• Usually deliberately limit hours and define that as

a single derive

Dérive Strategies and Tools

• Left, left, right• Throwing a dice• Draw the outline of one city over another (SI)• Follow subconscious urges, free from the voice of

reason (Surrealists)• In pairs, one blindfolded - enables other senses

to operate better (see Henshaw’s Smellwalks)• Dérive App: online• The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel:

• Backpacking at home• Dog-leg travel• Nostalgia trip

DIY Dice

Cootie Catchers

Oblique Strategies

Don’t break the silence Ask your body

Just carry on

What would your closest friend do?

The Miniature Boulder Dérive

A Subjective South…

Contact and Information

www.schizocartography.org