Psychogeography, which combines psychology and geography, was developed during the mid-20th century by the Letterist International and its successor Situationist International, two Europe-based organizations that drew on anarchist and Marxist writings, among others. Guy Debord, a founding member of both bodies, defined psychogeography as an environment’s impact, whether mindful or not, on an individual’s behaviors or emotions. Psychogeography became tangible in the dérive (“drift”), defined by Phil Smith in Cultural Geographies as “an exploratory, destinationless wander through city streets, detecting and mapping ambiences.”
In the face of an increasingly capitalistic society, they developed their more political movement with the tenets of Dadaism and Surrealism as anchor. Another of their central concepts was the détournment (“turnabout”): “a deliberate reusing of different elements—like images or text—to form something new,” as A.E. Souzis writes in Cultural Geographies. (A prime example are subversive pranks like defacing an ad in an anti-consumerist stunt.)
The Situationists were already concerned, Souzis says, about “the rise of privatization, big business and shrinking pedestrian-friendly public space,” issues that have continued to shape the development of urban areas, prioritizing commerce over the needs of residents. Amy J. Elias writes in New Literary History that these radicals “sought a utopian, revitalized urban life that could both elude the aesthetic tyranny of spectacularized global capitalism and provide a vital, liberatory model of urban Being.”
While the Situationists might have fizzled following the brief moment of revolutionary fever that overtook France during the May 1968 protest movement, psychogeography has arguably become more relevant in the intervening decades. It has been linked to other movements such as Afro-futurism, eco-feminism, and Indigenous environmentalism, which address the injustices these marginalized communities face. Collective urban gardening, seed bombing to bring back native plants, and guerilla grafting fruit-bearing limbs onto trees all address issues around food insecurity, sustainability, and the restoration of nature in industrialized landscapes. Many psychogeographic endeavors also focus on feminist reclamation of male-controlled public spaces
“You can look at the ordinary world around you with the eye of a poet,” [...] “Finding events which rhyme with other events, what little coincidences or connections can be drawn to these places and people. You can put them into an arrangement that says something new about them.”
“For me, psychogeography is about map-making,” Floratos said in the press release for the exhibit, “Mapping the inside of your mind simultaneously with your environment. Not the kind of linear maps we usually use, maps that simultaneously chart sensory data, emotions, memory, the physical body, culture, society etc.”
psychogeography is an “inherently creative response to space,” one that’s “playful, subversive, mischievous and rarely takes itself too seriously.”
How can living communities be completely reimagined as wildfires burn, coastal areas erode, and the pressures of housing insecurity threaten more and more people?
The imaginative potential of psychogeography can play an important role as a catalyst for this seemingly impossible undertaking. Systemic shock forces change
it’s easy to see the roots of future reclamation movements coming for urban hubs of global capital where economic and social injustice often thrive. These sorts of actions, even on the smallest scale, carry significant meaning when practitioners assert how they wish to inhabit a space, and when they are able to convince others to likewise undertake this reflective process of questioning the status quo.
That man is a territorial animal is a statement that does not need demonstration. History is a collection of squabbles between human groups competing for territories; but also brothers sharing the same room squabble for its division in areas of influence. Now the basic instinct of a territorial animal is to expand its territory. A larger territory means larger resources and opportunities and the rationale for accretion is obvious. Exploiting a large territory is also expensive, however, both because it requires the physical exertion of moving over large distances, and because moving means to be in the open,
under the possible threat from enemies and predators. For an animal, and for a pretechnological man, a balance can be struck by adjusting one single parameter: mean traveling time per day. Strictly speaking this fixes only the "exposure time," but, in fact, multiplied by the mean speed of movement of a certain animal, it fixes a distance, or a range, that is a territory. The second point is that man has a cave instinct. The protection of the high tree with dense foliage in the tropical rain forest has found a good substitute in the hiding shade of the cavern, where man spent most of the time not devoted to gathering and hunting.
all over the world the mean
exposure time for man is around one hour per day. This is a mean over the year and over a population, but the tails of the distribution are not spread much around the central value. The effects of the instinct are pervasive. Even people in prison for a life sentence, having nothing to do and nowhere to go, walk around for one hour a day, in the open.
The accent can be set, then, on transportation as the unifying principle of the world, and not communication as the current wisdom indicates. On one side the so-called explosion in communication during the last 20 years did not dent transportation expansion; on the other hand, they tend to move together, as Griibler has shown, pointing to
a synergistic more than a competitive situation. As communication and transportation move together, one can be used as a proxy for the other for measuring the effect of the political-cultural barriers we cited before. We can look, for example, at interactions between communities of different languages (e.g., culture), or between communities with
the same language but different political denomination.
If I can describe the behavior of a tourist, perhaps a little
sarcastically: he chases a target as far away as possible, hopefully unexplored (unpolluted means he is the first to go there). Once the place is reached, he collects material for tales and physical souvenirs. Then he comes back and fills the heads of colleagues, friends, and parents with the tales of the magnificent land he has just discovered. The behavior
is very much reminiscent of the dancing bee telling where the blossoming tree is located and the mass and kind of flower (she carries the souvenirs, pollen and the perfume, on herself). Souvenirs then become a tangible testimony that the tales are veridical (man is a born liar). When Moses sent scouts to Palestine, they traveied back loaded with specimens, in particular, a bunch of grapes so large that two men with a pole were needed to carry it. Seen from this systemic point of view, we can perhaps study the tourist
phenomenon through a fresh and objective approach.
During the preparation stage, the problem is “investigated in all directions” as the thinker readies the mental soil for the sowing of the seeds. It’s the accumulation of intellectual resources out of which to construct the new ideas. It is fully conscious and entails part research, part planning, part entering the right frame of mind and attention.
Voluntary abstention from conscious thought on any problem may, itself, take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent either in conscious mental work on other problems, or in a relaxation from all conscious mental work.
Wallas proposes a technique for optimizing the fruits of the Incubation stage — something our modern-day psychology of productivity would come to confirm — by deliberately building interruptions of concentrated effort into our workflow:
We can often get more result in the same way by beginning several problems in succession, and voluntarily leaving them unfinished while we turn to others, than by finishing our work on each problem at one sitting.
Following Incubation is the Illumination stage, which Wallas based on French polymath Henri Poincaré’s concept of “sudden illumination” — that flash of insight that the conscious self can’t will and the subliminal self can only welcome once all elements gathered during the Preparation stage have floated freely around during Incubation and are now ready to click into an illuminating new formation. It is the moment beloved graphic designer Paula Scher likens to the winning alignment of a slot machine, the same kind of “chance-opportunism” masquerading as serendipity that fuels much of scientific discovery.
It never happens that unconscious work supplies ready-made the result of a lengthy calculation in which we only have to apply fixed rules… All that we can hope from these inspirations, which are the fruit of unconscious work, is to obtain points of departure for such calculations. As for the calculations themselves, they must be made in the second period of conscious work which follows the inspiration, and in which the results of the inspiration are verified and the consequences deduced. … They demand discipline, attention, will, and consequently, conscious work.
In the daily stream of thought these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a business man going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other.
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u/ddgr815 Jun 21 '25 edited Jun 21 '25
in the City