Psychogeography: the next 50 years

Dr Andrew EvansUniversity of Leeds

Personal narratives, Political data• Psychogeography is about personal experience of space.

• However, Situationism was, at its core, a leftist movement.

• Psychogeography set out to pervert the dictated meanings of spaces.

• But this was only a tool to enable people to build their own narratives and a new politics of space.

• This would break The Hegemony Of Commodification and introduce new richness into our lives.

Personal narratives, Political data

• The last 50 years has seen an increased democratization of the notion of experience in architecture.

• However, the personal nature of narratives is not engaging for decision makers:

– What influences them is votes, not voices.– If they engage with other narratives it is largely to mark out the

cities as progressive places to do business.

• The Regional Spatial Strategy: Economics is still the dominant issue in the politics of space.

Personal narratives, Political data• Theorists try to mediate between policy and people,

but:– No real person talks like a left-wing theorist.– No decision makers will listen to the call that real people

be heard.

• In another 50 years, it is unlikely anything will have changed.

• Decision makers like:– Discrete lines on maps.– Big numbers not voices.

Personal narratives, Political data

• The answer: we have to take the voices to the policy makers, in a form they understand.

• We have to allow people to elucidate spaces in a voice they normally use.

• Only then can we really allow people to start reclaiming space and its development.

Vernacular GeographyLocational: Loaded:

“Uptown” “Our village”“The shops”“Everest”“The West End”“Down by the docks” “Up North”“Across the river”“Down by me Nan’s”

N.B.Places and relations

“Dangerous end of town” “High crime area” “Ugly bit of the suburbs” “Poor area around the station”“The Ghetto”“Commutersville”

Vernacular geography

When asked, for example, to define and explain areas where they are afraid to walk in the dark:

• The datasets people use are continuous and discrete, at differing scales, historical, architectural, and mythological.

• The resultant areas linguistically ambiguous.

• May be bound by prominent landscape features for convenience, but are more usually diffuse.

• Often have different levels of intensity within the areas.

Vernacular geography

• Evolved to make things easy to remember and discuss.• Gives us geographical references that include associated

environmental, socio-economic, and architectural data.

– “He lives in the grim area by the docks”– “I’m going down to the shops”

• Gives us a connected socio-linguistic community with shared understandings (and prejudices).

– “A poor little baby child is born… In the ghetto” – “This is a local shop, for local people”

Vernacular geography is important.

• Represents psychogeographical areas in which we constrain our activities.– “I wouldn’t walk through the rough bit of town at night”

• Conveys to our socio-linguistic community that this constraint should be added to their shared knowledge and acted upon. – “That’s a pretty high crime area”

• This private and shared geography influences billions of people every day.

• But it’s hard to tie directly to objective data so we can use it to make policy or scientific decisions.

Capturing Vernacular spaces

• Let’s take an example policy makers would find relevant now: an area people think of as “high crime”.

“fear of crime will grow unless unchecked. As an issue of social concern, it has to be taken as seriously as…crime prevention and reduction” (Home Office 1989).

TaggerInput GUI

• Spraycan of different sizes.

• Attribute information box.

• Send button.

Tim WatersWas: Policy and Research Unit,Bradford Council

• Click on map of combined areas.• Comments of the people who weighted that area as most

important float to the top.

Output GUI

Case study: Crime in Leeds

Crime and Understanding• Looked at crime ratings vs. confidence in local knowledge.

Found actual crime spots 23.81

Failed to find actual crime spots 4.15

Overestimated crime spots 76.19

Example analyses

• How does fear of crime vary with:– personal victimhood?– media exposure?– conditions (summer vs. winter)?

• Current models based on aspatial demographic, psychological and temporal factors only accounted for ~1/3 aspatial fear levels.

• Treatment of such information as data is difficult. – How do we compare with traditional data? – What kinds of algebra can we do? – How do we define accuracy and appropriateness?

• But many of the assumptions we need to make are already accepted in standard techniques.

• Many techniques are available from more clear-cut areas.– Mereotopological calculi – Supervaluation semantics– Fuzzy Logic / Logics of Belief– Statistical / Probabilistic techniques

Problems

Towards Post-Modern Geographical Information

• But what would it look like if all data was like this?

• How do we construct the world? Through the internalisation of socially negotiated concepts.

• Post-modern Geographical Information would centre on social negotiation.

Here we have one component of a narrative “that a space is dangerous” in a form policy makers can use.

Hierarchy of social negotiation• Our system allows people to define an object and attach

a single meaning to it.

• As well as negotiating space, we must negotiate meaning.

• Hierarchy between:– Official Ontologies– Social negotiation of meaning– Free-form folksonomies

Social negotiation• Not easy.

• Processes for social negotiation through use:– Amazon: The word “architecture”

is defined by people with the same taste in books

• System would have to work at multiple scales to provide both aggregate mega-voices, and highlight individuals.

Danger, Robinson

• The deadly sins of Psychogeography– Commodification– Over-theorisation– Computerisation

• So, other than an opportunity to sneak real people into Policy what advantages are there?

• The same advantages the web offers: the chance to build single personal narratives into an understanding of the world.

The Future is Now

• Example: OpenStreetMap– Public control of data.

• Example: Photosynth– Builds memories of objective space into a coherent

picture.

• Google Groups about areas.– Expressing new meanings for features.

• Hacking GoogleMaps – Still a sense of the perversion of meaning.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

http://www.climatechangewales.org.uk/public/college/key_stage_4/flood_maps/

Photosynthhttp://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Grant Schindler, Georgia Institute of Technologyhttp://www.cc.gatech.edu/~phlosoft/

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

http://earth.google.com/

The easiest way to predict the future is to build it

• Imagine if there was a system that built a new understanding of space from personal understandings.

• Such a system might well initially represent the status quo.

• But it would be built by the people, for the people.• It would be ripe for a whole new set of

Psychogeography tools fit for the 22nd century.

Further info

• Thanks to Tim Waters (Bradford Council), Alan Grainger (Leeds Uni), Steve Carver (Leeds Uni), Richard Kingston (Manchester Uni), Kevin Cressy (City Uni).

• More details, various papers:• http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.evans/• http://thinkwhere.wordpress.com/