psychogeography..what is it?????.....

Psychogeography what is it? In its simplest term it is about cities and their surroundings in my opinion. It’s about discovering something new about that city that you would have not previously associated with that place. It’s in relation to form and shape a new identity for that chosen city or area of that place.
Psychogeography first came to be used in 1955 by Guy Debord who described psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. (Wikipedia, 2009)
Debord aim was to “unify two different factors of "ambiance" that, he felt, determined the values of the urban landscape: the soft ambiance – light, sound, time, the association of ideas – with the hard, the actual physical constructions. Debord's vision was a combination of the two realms of opposing ambiance, where the play of the soft ambiance was actively considered in the rendering of the hard. The new space creates a possibility for activity not formerly determined by one besides the individual”. (Wikipedia, 2009)

By means of characterization, psychogeography combines “subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately producing "Theory of the Dérive" in 1958, a document which essentially serves as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of derive ("drift")”. (Wikipedia, 2009)
Debord argues that “in a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities”. (Wikipedia, 2009)
And that what psychogeography is all about, letting go and exploring the area you have chosen, allowing yourself to be taken to the different spaces and path’s of that place. I think there’s the fascination of allowing the path and road to take you to a new way of means. By doing that, you as a tourist, learn something intriguing and new about the place, instead of having a plan of where you want to go.

The term psychogeography is still a popular term in today’s society. From 1980 to today, psychogeography has grown and diverged mostly through the re-emergence of the London Psychogeographical Association. “As situationist theory became popular in academic circles, avant-garde, neoist and revolutionary groups emerged, developing the praxis in various ways. This interest survives today, manifested in a number of groups practicing contemporary psychogeography. The journal Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration (which appears to have ceased publication sometime in 2000) collated and developed a number of post-avant-garde revolutionary psychogeographical themes” (Wikipedia, 2009)

Psychogeography also become a way used in performance art and literature. In Britain in particular, psychogeography has become “a recognised descriptive term used in discussion of successful writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd and the documentaries of filmmaker Patrick Keiller. The popularity of Sinclair drew the term into greater public use in the United Kingdom. Though Sinclair makes infrequent use of the jargon associated with the Situationists, he has certainly popularized the term by producing a large body of work based on pedestrian exploration of the urban and suburban landscape. Sinclair and similar thinkers draw on a longstanding British literary tradition of the exploration of urban landscapes, predating the Situationists, found in the work of writers like William Blake, Arthur Machen, and Thomas de Quincy. The nature and history of London were a central focus of these writers, utilising romantic, gothic, and occult ideas to describe and transform the city. Sinclair drew on this tradition combined with his own explorations as a way of criticising modern developments of urban space in such key texts as Lights Out for the Territory. Peter Ackroyd's bestselling London: A Biography was partially based on similar sources. Merlin Coverly gives equal prominence to this literary tradition alongside Situationism in his book Psychogeography (2006), not only recognising that the situationist origins of psychogeography are sometimes forgotten, but that via certain writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Defoe and Charles Baudelaire they had a shared tradition. Psychogeography, as a term and a concept, now reaches more British eyes than ever before, as novelist Will Self has a column of that name which started out in the British Airways in-flight magazine and now appears weekly in the Saturday magazine of The Independent newspaper.A core element in virtually all these developments remains a dissatisfaction with the nature and design of the modern environment and a desire to make the everyday world more interesting” (Wikipedia, 2009).

If I was doing the project on my own rather than with a group, in order to meet the modules criteria/outlines, I would first and foremost research into what psychogeography is. Having once found the definition of what psychogeography is, I would start to look at places around London that I could portray in another way/ illustrate a different side and quality to that place. For example like Buckingham Place or one of London’s renowned underground stations. Give the readers a new perspective and outlook of that locale.
It’s important that the place that is chosen is a place that has not be hinged a lot, to give it some authenticity and realism. You want to represent the place as real as possible and something that defines that certain environment. You want to give the readers new information and something they may have not known about that place before. I believe it’s important, in discovering and learning something new, instead of being told the same information.

Bibliography:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography