This lecture provides an overview of some of the theoretical approaches to the postmodern city highlighting the issues that pertain to the appearance of urban space under neoliberalism. You will be introduced to some of the leading contemporary thinkers from the field of urban theory/planning and urban cultural studies. Many of the motifs that arise in the theories of contemporary urban life have been incorporated into the critical practices of a number of today’s urban walkers. These practitioners have developed their own form of psychogeography which responds to the complexity of postmodern space in different ways. Tina’s lecture will tease out some of these motifs and will demonstrate how they have been incorporated into the various methodologies of the New Psychogeography.

1. Postmodern Urbanism
and the New Psychogeography
Tina Richardson

2. Introduction
Cultural Theory
+ Psychogeography
= Urban Cultural Studies
‘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]

3. 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

4. The Chicago School
Chicago from space

5. Concentric Zones

6. Which city is this?

7. The Los Angeles School
Los Angeles

8. 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

9. The Spectacle

10. Edge Cities

11. Gated Communities

12. Corporate Citadels

13. Grid System
Michael Dear

14. 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)

15. 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)

16. 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

17. 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’ in
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (1986)

18. Psychogeography in a Postmodern City
Do you know this building? Film

19. 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 Jameson
Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

20. The Westin Bonaventure – the Entryway

21. A Dérive in the Westin Bonaventure

22. Spatial Theory and Psychogeographical Motifs
power  Henri Lefebvre:
structures
Wrote The Production of Space (1974)
Was involved with the Situationists
Came up with a neat formulation of space
Influenced Edward Soja and…
palimpsest
biopolitics
 David Harvey
fluid space
Influential Marxist geographer
Supports ‘The Right to the City’
Also came up with a neat formulation of space
Wrote ‘Space as a Keyword’ (2004)
the social
multiplicity
 Michel Foucault
resistance
representation
Philosopher/social historian
Wrote about space, power and knowledge and their relationship
Fleshed out the concept of heterotopia
Wrote Discipline and Punish (1975)
capital accumulation
practice
relational
discourse

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. The New Psychogeography
What is it?
Challenges the stereotype
Organised
Post-Sinclairian
Cartographic
Rereading/writing
Heterogeneous
Critical and strategic
Embraces/critical of
technology
Archaeological (material)
Somatic
What isn’t it?
Nostalgic (retrospective longing)
Masculine/colonial
Apolitical
Exclusive
Closed
Univocal
Protectionist/snobbish
Singularly literary
Touristic
Dialectical
London-centric
Not prescriptive

27. Psychogeographers and Methodologies
Nick Papadimitriou:
Deep Topography
Tina Richardson:
Schizocartography
Phil Smith:
Mythogeography

28. 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)

29. Deep Topography
What is deep topography? acknowledgement of the palimpsest
It's not a programme. It's an
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 power of landscape structures
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 practice
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 capital within the framework philosophy, or else it goes accumulation
of mainstream green
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]

30. 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)

31. Mythogeography
power structures
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.
fluid space
discourse
Phil Smith (2011)
palimpsest
biopolitics
relational
the social
resistance
multiplicity
representation
practice
capital accumulation

32. 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)

33. Schizocartography
power structures
Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that
questions dominant palimpsest
power structures and at the same time
enables subjective voices to appear from underlying
postmodern topography. Schizocartography fluid is space
at once the
process and output of a psychogeography of particular
spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented
biopolitics
relational
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,
discourse
the homogenizing character of overriding forms
practice
that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.
Tina Richardson (2014)
the social
resistance
multiplicity
representation
capital accumulation

34. 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

35. 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

36. DIY Dice

37. Cootie Catchers

38. Oblique Strategies
What would your closest
friend do?
Just carry on
Don’t break the
silence Ask your body

39. The Miniature Boulder Dérive

40. A Subjective South…

41. Contact and Information
www.schizocartography.org