On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

Exemples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes’ fashion, ways of making pots or of building archives. Just a genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm of eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, a reads about a good idea, he passes it onto his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up our earlier draft of this chapter: ‘memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.’ When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press (1976), p.192

In this book, De Botton turns the purpose of a travel guide on its head and instead of providing advice on where to travel, asks why we go places — and how we might become more fulfilled by doing so.

In the first chapter, On Travelling Places, he delivers a brilliant analysis of some unexpectedly poetic travelling places: airport terminals, train stations, motels, or the service station – “forsaken, on the ridge of the motorway, far from all habitation”, and refers to artists who, like Baudelaire and Hopper, were “alive to the power of such liminal travelling places”.

As recalled by his Invitation au voyage, Baudelaire felt incomfortable at home. He ever dreamt of leaving France for somewhere far away, with no-reminders of daily life, and eventually ventured to India, only to feel lethargic and reminicscent of his homeplace, evidencing a lifelong ambivalence towards travel.

“It always seems to me that I’ll be well where I’m not and this question of moving is one that I’m forever entertaining with my soul.”

Charles Baudelaire

Indeed, it seems that Baudelaire “felt more at home in the transient places of travel than in his own dwelling”, after which T.S Eliot proposed that Baudelaire “invented a new kind of romantic nostalgia, ‘the poésie des départs, the poésie des salles d’attentes‘”.

De Botton draws interesting parallels between the 19th century sea-going ships that Baudelaire often admired – a “vast, immense, complicated, but agile creature, an animal full of spirit, suffering and heaving all the sighs and ambitions of humanity” – , and the modern aircraft, “it too a vast and complicated creature which defies its size and the chaos of the lower atmosphere.”
He quotes airports as the quintessential place of travel, plane passengers as aliens “for whom this ordinary english afternoon will have a supernatural tinge”, and the plane itself as “a symbol of worldliness, carrying within itself a trace of all the lands it has crossed; its external mobility offering an imaginative counter-weight to feelings of stagnation and confinement.”

Few seconds in life are more releasing than those spent in an airplane taking off, resulting in an undisguisable pleasure – “an examplary symbol of transformation”, he explains. The vibrating cabin of the aircaft ever raising to the skies, the thrusting engines in one the the most impressive display of power, can inspire us analogous shifts in our own lives, “to imagine that we too might one day surge above much that now looms over us” – “all along, hideen from our sight, our lives were this small.”

If flying “lends order and logic to the landscape”, train travel fosters an unequalled dreaminess, in which we seem to stand outside our normal selves and have access to thoughts and memories that may not arise in more settled circumstances:

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts requiring large views, news thoughts new places. Instrospective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.”

Views from the train window evolve just a the right speed; the landscape changing fast enough for us not to get exasperated, but slowly enough to offer us some brief, inspiring insights into the privacy of backyards and hidden alleyways.

In a particularly influential study about city-planning, Kevin Lynch conducted methodical interviews of inhabitants in three major US cities, asking them first to draw a mental map of the city, and then to give detailed descriptions of their trips as well as an account of the parts they felt to be the most distinctive. The results of the survey were then analysed, and Lynch identified how some aspects of the city were the most readily represented: He came up with an interesting classification system for ordering people’s “readings” of a city, composed of five items:

1. Paths. Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves […] People observe the city while moving through it and along these paths the other environmental elements are arranged and related.
2. Edges. Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer […] Such edges may be barriers, more or less penetrable, which close one region off from another.
3. Districts. Districts are two-dimensional sections of the city, which the observer mentally enters “inside of” and which are recognisable as having some common, identifying character.
4. Nodes. Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is travelling […] Nodes are related to paths, since functions of nodes are typically the convergence of paths, events on a journey.
5. Landmarks. Landmarks are another type of point reference but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external. They are usually a rather simply defined physical object: building, sign, store or mountain.

(Lynch, 1960, p. 47)

Lynch’s primary concern is the Image of the Environment: “Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings.”¹ The subject orients him/herself according to a visualisation of their environment in map-like form, heavily tied to the legibility of the city: the ease with which parts can be recognised and organised into a coherent pattern.

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¹ Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960, p.1.

Parkinson’s geographical analysis of social class and movement in Britain ¹ shows a sarcastic picture of England projected into social space – a humorous expression of how the country’s regions are prone to encourage social ascent (or descent), from desperation to privilege either side of a line drawn from Hastings through London to Liverpool

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¹ Quoted in Peter Gould & Rodney White (1974) Mental Maps. London: Penguin Books, p.43.

Following the release of the eponymous book ¹, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) ran A Mis-Guide to Anywhere in April 2006: four walking tours within the environs of the gallery, which unlike ordinary guided tours, are disrupted by the practice of “mytho-geography”, which places the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal on equal terms with ‘factual’, municipal history. E.g. “Out of place” took people out for a walk of coincidences, derived from overlaying a map of Paris onto London.

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¹ Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner (2006) A Mis-Guide to Anywhere. London: Wrights & Sites

Lars Arrhenius’ A-Z was first shown at PEER gallery (London) in 2002. The gallery also produced a book that borrowed its design from the popular London street guide. In this work, 18 characters evolve in scenarios through more than 250 illustrations arranged horizontally, vertically and diagonally against the backdrop of the London map and intersect in an apparent randomness.

The book adopts the non-linear grid reference format of a street atlas, thus highlighting the city’s fragmented nature. Like in Debord’s Naked City, The narrative potentiality of the city gives ground to a rewriting of the map, overlaying social narrative with geographical narrative. Despite holding imaged storylines and being bound, Arrhenius’s A-Z cannot be read as a book; it has no actual beginning of end. The reader is led into turning pages, back and forth, ‘up and down’, to follow each story, ‘traversing’ the map rather than following it.

When writing Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, Guy Debord was seeking a new way of life in the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets:

“The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – these phenomena all seem to be neglected.” ¹

Debord observed how he could extract urban areas that had been drawn through and delineated by the emotional and behavioural responses to those spaces that conformist town-planning would ignore. His psychogeographic map entitled “The Naked City” (illustration) shows the fragmented experience of pedestrian wanderings, where meaning is found through walking the streets instead of motoring through them, where it is the pedestrian who creates a mental ordering of the cityscape instead of the city forcefully imposing its structure upon the individual character of these experiences.

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¹ Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, in Les Lèvres Nues # 6, September 1955