"Last year, Hari Kunzru took a walk around London. Or not quite a walk but a dérive, a French term appropriated by the Situationist International political group that is often translated to mean "drifting" or taking an "aimless stroll." By drifting through the urban landscape, the Situationists hoped to attend to the often invisible ways in which the built environment can function as an instrument of control, of power."
"The term used to describe such an approach to the city, whose history Kunzru sets out to explore in his essay, "Another London," is psychogeography. It is less a discrete discipline than a cast of mind, a way of experiencing the urban milieu that is alive to "strange atmospheres and hidden meanings," as Kunzru puts it. I spoke to Kunzru about psychogeography's history, its politics, and its relevance today."
Psychogeography treats urban environments as layered, charged spaces where history, hidden geographies, and architecture shape human experience. The dérive, or deliberate drifting, functions as a practice to reveal how the built environment operates as an instrument of social control and power. In 1960s London, psychogeographical ideas merged with a native occult tradition that read architecture as bearing esoteric meaning or spiritual force. London’s many lost streets, rivers, and palimpsest geographies contribute temporal depth that favors mystical readings. Psychogeography operates less as a formal discipline than as a cast of mind attuned to strange atmospheres, hidden meanings, and the political implications of urban design.
Read at Harper's Magazine
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