Psychogeography

Definition

Psychogeography, coined by the Situationist International, is "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals" (Debord, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography"). It is both a theory (the city has an affective and psychological topography that is not captured by maps, zoning, or functional plans) and a practice (the dérive, the aimless drift through urban space that registers these effects). Benjamin prefigured psychogeography with his "street-level perspective on the city" — an attention to the sensory, mnemonic, and political texture of urban environments that resists both the master-plan view and the computer model (Elliott). Psychogeography is the method by which the city is experienced rather than planned, and it underwrites the Situationist claim that everyday urban life can be the site of resistance and creativity.

Key Thinkers

• Guy Debord — introduced psychogeography; the critique of urban geography.
• Walter Benjamin — the street-level perspective prefiguring psychogeography.
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin as precursor to Situationist psychogeography.

Related Concepts

• Dérive — the psychogeographic practice of urban wandering.
• Unitary Urbanism — the architectural project informed by psychogeography.
• Flâneur — the 19th-century precursor to the psychogeographic wanderer.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — Benjamin's street-level perspective prefiguring Situationist psychogeography.
• Stalking Detroit — "Line Frustration" (Young et al.) makes psychogeographic charts of attempts to walk the Empowerment Zone boundary, recording Detroit's "distinct psychogeographies" of ambiance, attraction and repulsion; reading the maps invokes the line itself.
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the interior-architectural appropriation: psychogeography quoted in Debord's own definition ("the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment… on the emotions and behavior of individuals"); conceived "to expose the means by which conventional urban design controls everyday life and the ways in which this control can be exposed and subverted"; the SI's concern with top-down public housing ("stifled psychogeographic aspects of the city and individual creativity"); and the claim that the method transfer "provides a model for subversion of conventional urban design" applicable to political interior architecture.

Open Questions

• Can psychogeography operate at the scale of the interior volume — Teston's appropriation suggests yes ("a model for subversion of conventional urban design" for political interior architecture) — or does it presuppose the city's unplanned movement? What would a dérive through a non-place interior yield?
• Teston notes the SI "derive[d]… by arranging experiential, unplanned (and often alcohol-fueled) multi-day journeys" — is the method's subjectivity (the individual experiential city) what makes it transferable to the interior, at the price of what collective political force?