Guy Debord
Theory of the Derive
Psychogeography
A Definition by Guy DebordPsychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord 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."
- "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
- "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."
The Right Tools for the Job
Tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to
build better tools.
A representational tension
Do I need to know the precise polygonal geometries of Los Angeles and the University of Southern California to assert that the latter is within the former? No. My mind contains no such precise geometric model of points and lines, yet I know that USC is in Los Angeles. When humans reason with the real world, they focus on its objects, relations, and processes—rather than starting with geometry—because these are the keys to understanding and explaining the real world. Our GIS tools, however, usually do the opposite. Built from the geometry-up around the legacy logic of traditional cartography (geometries and layers), most GIS tools today are restricted by that legacy’s limited ability to model objects, relations, and processes. A representational tension thus exists in GIScience between being a geometric information science versus an ontological, relational, and processual information science.
The teleology of tool-building
The teleology of tool-building suggests that the real value lies in the end use of the tool, rather than in its origins
Urban form and grain
One square mile of different cities' street networks, held at the same scale to compare the urban form and grain.
Software often feels inevitable
Software often feels inevitable because its backstory is often invisible. We click a download link, run an installer, and suddenly have a new tool to use. Yet this conceals years of human decisions, experiences, and constraints shaping software outcomes that are in no way pre-destined.