Geosynchronicity
For many years I’ve enjoyed strolling around the environments of my past – most notably my childhood neighbourhood, the woods and open spaces I roamed and explored as a teenager, and my old university campus. I’d say that I’ve been practising a personalised form of psychogeography without naming it.
Psychogeography’s origins lie in the urban explorations of the 1950s Letterists, 1 the aim of whose free-flowing rambles was to map the energetic forces at play within the built environment, exploring their effects on the emotional lives of the human inhabitants of towns and cities. Nowadays, the term is used with rather more freedom, and covers a range of approaches to pedestrian urban wandering. Nick Papadimitriou names his practice of conscious walking “deep topography”. His approach is a synthesis of factual observation of mundane topographical details and the subjective, experiential relationship between himself and the changing urban environment. 2
Without being aware of my psychogeographic forerunners, I’ve always seen my own nostalgic perambulations as
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