Psychogeography and Speculative Design v2.1

Another City for Another Life: Here is v2.0 of a possible course on psychogeography and speculative design. What follows is an effort to gather materials and ideas for such a course. Many thanks to everyone who proposed materials, much of which has been incorporated. (Special thanks to Dunne + Raby) Suggestions still welcome, of course.

The course would combine: A. Psychogeography, as a way of moving through the city, gathering a knowledge of its ambiences, but concentrating on its special moments. B. Unitary Urbanism, or the practice of imagining another city for another life, based on the ambiences detected in creating a psychogeography, and C. Speculative Design, which experiments in a playful and open way with models or projects or components for realizing Unitary Urbanism. A. Psychogegraphy: The opening section below introduces psychogeography In brief: the idea is that through wandering in the city, outside of the organized time of work and leisure, one can glimpse ambiences that might suggest a whole other kind of city for a better way of life. Here are some classic readings, coming out of the work of the Letterist International and Situationist International in the 50s:

Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm
Guy Debord ‘Theory of the Dérive’ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm
Ivan Chtcheglov, ‘Formula for a New Urbanism’ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm
‘Proposals for Rationally Improving the City of Paris’ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/paris.htm
Guy Debord, ‘Situationist Theses on Traffic’ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/3.traffic.htm
Constant, ‘Another City for Another Life’ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/3.constant.htm
McKenzie Wark, ‘New Babylon’ http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1879-new-babylon
Kevin Pyle & McKenzie Wark ‘Totality for Kids’ http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/7/totality/

The next section is about different ways of practicing psychogeography in New York City.

Garnet Cadogan, ‘Walking While Black’ https://lithub.com/walking-while-black/
McKenzie Wark, ‘Zuccotti Park: A Psychogeography’ http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/735-mckenzie-wark-zuccotti-park-a-psychogeography
Dave Mandl, ‘The Ends of Brooklyn’ https://placesjournal.org/article/the-end-of-brooklyn/
Joseph Heathcott, ‘Borderlands’ http://urbanomnibus.net/2015/01/borderlands-traveling-the-brooklyn-queens-divide/
Mattern, Shannon, ‘Infrastructural Tourism’ https://placesjournal.org/article/infrastructural-tourism/

Exercises: These are ideas for ways of practicing Psychogeography that have a particular focus, and which could be steps towards a Unitary Urbanism. The principle of Unitary Urbanism is “another city for another life.” Here are suggestions for various different ways one could start experiencing the city and thinking through different alternative cities one might design. These excercises are just suggestions. You can modify them or come up with your own. The exercises are always best done as small group projects.

The alternate ability city. What is the city like if one has to be on wheels, or cannot walk very far or fast? Could one imagine a city for everyone based on the principle of low power or self-powered wheeled motion?

John Hockenberry, Moving Violations, Hachette, 1996
Tomás Sánchez Criado on ‘funcional diversity’ https://tscriado.org/publications/
Astra Taylor, Examined Live (movie), 2008 Sunaura Tayor & Judith Butler section,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/disabled-new-york_us_55a5084ee4b0a47ac15d5334

The amusement city. What if the city’s leisure zones were not time off from work, but the whole basis of a life of play?

Zoe Beloff Coney Island http://www.zoebeloff.com/pages/books.html
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, Monacelli, 1997
Simon Sadler, Archigram, MIT Press, 2005

The animal city. Maybe the idea city would not be for humans. What would a city for squirrels look like? Or birds?

Jason Munshi-South, http://nycevolution.org
Architecture for Animals: http://www.expandedenvironment.org/category/publications/
Meredith Drum ‘Oyster City’ http://meredithdrum.com/work/oyster-city
Natalie Jeremijenko http://nataliejeremijenko.com
Mark Dery http://boingboing.net/2013/02/18/nervals-lobster-why-should.html

The city of women. What if one could reverse, or erase, male dominated space?

Laura Elkin, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, FSG 2017
Rebecca SolnitWanderlust: A History of Walking, Verso, 2002. (chapter on women)
Janet Wolff ‘The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity’ Theory, Culture & Society November 1985 2:37-46
Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flaneur’ https://newleftreview.org/I/191/elizabeth-wilson-the-invisible-flaneur

The cognitive city. We are not all of the same mind. Maybe the city would be different if one was depressed, manic, autistic, and so forth. Chtcheglov proposed different zones for different emtional states, but what about cognitive states?

Andrea Captick, in Tina Richardson (ed) Walking Inside Out, Rowen & Littlefield, 2015
Steve Graby, ‘Wandering Minds’ https://www.academia.edu/8586966/Wandering_Minds_autism_psychogeography_public_space_and_the_ICD_2011_

The driverless city. Apparently Tesla are testing driverless cars here already. Would there be another city one could create that was driverless?

Building Blog, ‘Trap Streets’ http://www.bldgblog.com/tag/trap-streets/

The drowned city. Truth is, the waters are rising. Rather than think this as an apocalypse, what might an aquatic NYC be like?

Eve S Mosher ‘High Waterline’ http://www.evemosher.com/2007/highwaterline/
MOMA ‘Rising Currents’ http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/category/rising-currents
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312, Orbit 2013

The dumpsterdive city. Is there a way to think the psychogeography of dumpster diving or gleaning as a fragment of another life?

Jeff Ferrell, Empire of Scrounge, NYU Press, 2005
Agnes Varda, The Gleaners and I, (movie), 2000

The edible city. What might the city be like if it grew its own food?

Fallen Fruit: http://fallenfruit.org
Nicola Twiley, ‘The Coldscape’ http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/47/twilley.php

The hip hop city. This might be a drift through used record stores as much as the streets, but what if we took the utopian promise of very early hip hop, and built a city out of it?

Jim Fricke, Yes Yes Y’all: The Oral History of Hip Hop’s First Decade, Da Capo, 2002
Charlie Ahearn, Wild Style (movie), 1092

The infrastructure city. If one thought backwards from the experience of infrastructure, how might that be structured differently to enable other kinds of city?

Mattern, Shannon, ‘Infrastructural Tourism’ https://placesjournal.org/article/infrastructural-tourism/
Nicola Twiley, ‘The Coldscape’ http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/47/twilley.php
Steve Duncan http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/2016/8/5/talk-steve-duncan-brooklyn’s-urban-explorer-daredevil-and-sewer-man

The micro city. There are cities within cities. That have their own languages, customs, idioms. You might want to start with a psychogeography of something very small, a block or two, even.

Ada Calhoun, St Marks Is Dead, Norton, 2015
HT Tsiang, The Hanging on Union Square, Kaya, 2013
Paul Beatty, Tuff, Anchor 2001 [East Harlem]
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is Dead, Little, Brown, 2011

The minor city. Sometimes it seems as if NYC is only ever optimized for rich white men. What about any or every-body else?

Garnette Cadogan, ‘Walkiing While Black’ http://lithub.com/walking-while-black/
Brandon Harris, ‘Recovering Weeksville’ http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/recovering-weeksville
HT Tsiang, And China Has Hands, Kaya, 2013
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/08/13/nyc-neighborhood-novels

The negated city. Hollywood movies love to destroy New York. In what scenarios could its destruction, in part or whole, be beneficial?

Unclear Holocaust: https://vimeo.com/42724320
Mike Davis, Dead Cities, Verso Books, 2012

The queer city. Is there another city for another life that would be a queer life? One not premised on heterosexual monogamy? And the built form it imposes?

Alvin Baltrop: http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/3370/under-the-piers-alvin-baltrops-gay-new-york
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, 2009

The sanctuary city. Maybe you don’t feel at home. Maybe the best city is the one that avoids detection, that knows how to hide, If you had to hide this city, how would you do it?

Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen, https://player.vimeo.com/video/125475136

The sensory city. We only see but we hear, feel and smell the city. What might a city for other senses be

‘Matter of Sense’ https://www.academia.edu/20211152/Matters_of_sense_pre-occupation_in_Madrids_popular_assemblies_movement
Derek Jarman, Blue, (movie), 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVaC3XKSi5M

The thief’s city. A remarkable amount of time and effort goes into keeping people’s stuff secure. What does the city look like from the point of view of its liberation?

Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City, FSG, 2016
Terry Williams, Con-Men: Hustling in New York, Columbia 2015

The waste city. Where does all the trash go? Could the city be something other than a huge emitter of waste?

Gowanus Dregder’s Club http://www.vice.com/read/dredging-the-world-of-NYC-waterways/page/0
Maintenance Art http://www.queensmuseum.org/2016/04/mierle-laderman-ukeles-maintenance-art

C. Speculative Design Not all speculative design is about the city, and not all unitary urbanism is speculative design. Our interest here is where these two kinds of practice intersect. In this part of the course, students take what they have learned and documented from their psychogeographic practices, chosing an ambience they have discovered (either through one of the exercises listed above or one of their own design) and produce a speculative design proposal, for another city for another life.

This can take the form of writing, visual design, modeling, performance — or propose another form altogether.

D. Reading list. In addition to resources mentioned above, here are some more materials relevant to each of the sections:

Readings A. Psychogeography (General)

Michele Bernstein, The Night, Book Works, 2013
Matthew Coolidge et al, Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Metropolis Books, 2006
Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography, Oldcastle, 2010
Laura Elkin, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, FSG 2017
Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Verso, 2011
Justin McQuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, Verso 2015
Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City, FSG, 2016
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women & Cartographies of Struggle, U Minnesota, 2006.
Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah, Verso, 2011
Mary Pattillo, Black on the Block, U Chicago Press, 2008
Simon Pope, London Walking: A Handbook for Survival, Batsford, 2000
Tina Richardson (ed) Walking Inside Out, Rowen & Littlefield, 2015
Sukhdev Sandhu, Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night, Verso, 2010
Phil Smith, Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, Triarchy, 2014
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Verso, 2002
Witold van Ratingen https://www.academia.edu/33898419/Loitering_with_Intent_the_Histories_and_Futures_of_Psychogeography
McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography, Indiana UP, 1995

Readings: A. Psychogeography (New York)

Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Penguin, 1998
Marshall Berman, On the Town, Verso, 2009
Ingrid Burrington, Networks of New York, Melville House, 2016
Teju Cole, Open City: A Novel, Random House, 2012
Arienl Dávila, Barrio Dreams, U California Press, 2004
Mike Davis, Dead Cities, New Press, 2002
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, NYU Press, 2001
Jim Fricke, Yes Yes Y’all: The Oral History of Hip Hop’s First Decade, Da Capo, 2002
William Helmreich, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City, Princeton University Press, 2013
David Kishik, The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City, Stanford, 2015
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, Monacelli, 1997
Federico Garcia Lorca, Poet in New York, Grove, 2007
Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, Dutton, 1940
Stephen Miller, Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers, Fordham 2016
Luc Sante, Low Lifes: Lures and Snares of Old New York, FSG, 2003
Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, Anchor, 2005
Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Richter Verlag, 2003
Sarah Shulman, Gentrification of the Mind, U California, 2013
Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives, Chiacago, 2002
Rebecca Solnit, Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, University of California Press, 2016
Michael Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Reaktion, 2009
Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book, Grove, 1993
McKenzie Wark, Telesthesia, Polity, 2012
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York, Anchor, 2004.

Readings B. Unitary Urbanism

Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, Princeton Architectural, 2008
Craig Buckley (ed) Utopie: Texts & Projects, Semiotext(e), 2011
Larry Busbea, Topologies: Urban Utopia in France, MIT Press, 2012
Greg Goldin et al, Never Built New York, Metropolis Books, 2016
Peter Lang & William Menking, Superstudio: A Life Without Objects, Skira 2003
Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, 2009
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312, Orbit 2013
Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, MIT Press, 1998
Simon Sadler, Archigram, MIT Press, 2005
McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street, Verso, 2015
Wigley, Mark, The Hyper-architecture of Desire, 001, 1998

Readings C: Speculative Design

Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf
Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: design, fiction and social dreaming, MIT Press, 2014
Laura Forlano, Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design?, Ethnography Matters.
Anne Galloway, Towards Fantastic Ethnography and Speculative Design, Ethnography Matters.
Katherine Harmon, You Are Here, Princeton Architectural, 2016
China Miéville interview about his book The City and The City http://www.bldgblog.com/2011/03/unsolving-the-city-an-interview-with-china-mieville/
Normals, Anticipating the Future by Projecting Design Fictions and Hyperlinked Storylines onto a Neo-Brutalist Graphic Novel Series, 2013. http://www.normalfutu.re
Noah Raford, From Design to Experiential Futures, The Future of Futures: The Association of Professional Futurists.
Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus, Rizzoli, 2006.
The Solution Series by Sternberg Press – http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=3&cat1=107 especially Solution 11-167 The Book of Scotlands: Every Lie Creates a Parallel World, The World in Which it is True, Momus, Sternberg Press.
Superstudio’s 1070s Cautionary Tales in the form of 12 cities http://www.readingdesign.org/twelve-cautionary-tales/
Matthew Ward Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice Towards a fictionally biased design education, Medium.
Yuichi Yokoyama exploring alternative cities, eg Colour Engineering http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/yuichi-yokoyama-color-engineering