Blueprint Magazine - Architecture & Design
“The term ‘psychogeography’ was created in the 1950s, as part of a strategy for imagining new architecture. Of course it was picking up on earlier strategies, but these were generally literary or philosophical. In the mid-19th century, Baudelaire’s flaneur wandered the streets observing society with detachment. The surrealists introduced the idea of allowing the subconscious to control associations made during these perambulations. Walter Benjamin focused on the arcades of Paris as a text through which recent history could be deciphered. Yet it was Debord who loved to dream up terminology for the ephemeral, and defined psychogeography as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’”
