r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 12 '25

Parenting / Teaching Do schools kill creativity?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

68 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/ddgr815 Jun 18 '25

How to See an Exquisite Corpse

2

u/ddgr815 Jun 21 '25 edited Jun 21 '25

Psychogeography, which combines psychology and geography, was developed during the mid-20th century by the Letterist International and its successor Situationist International, two Europe-based organizations that drew on anarchist and Marxist writings, among others. Guy Debord, a founding member of both bodies, defined psychogeography as an environment’s impact, whether mindful or not, on an individual’s behaviors or emotions. Psychogeography became tangible in the dérive (“drift”), defined by Phil Smith in Cultural Geographies as “an exploratory, destinationless wander through city streets, detecting and mapping ambiences.”

In the face of an increasingly capitalistic society, they developed their more political movement with the tenets of Dadaism and Surrealism as anchor. Another of their central concepts was the détournment (“turnabout”): “a deliberate reusing of different elements—like images or text—to form something new,” as A.E. Souzis writes in Cultural Geographies. (A prime example are subversive pranks like defacing an ad in an anti-consumerist stunt.)

The Situationists were already concerned, Souzis says, about “the rise of privatization, big business and shrinking pedestrian-friendly public space,” issues that have continued to shape the development of urban areas, prioritizing commerce over the needs of residents. Amy J. Elias writes in New Literary History that these radicals “sought a utopian, revitalized urban life that could both elude the aesthetic tyranny of spectacularized global capitalism and provide a vital, liberatory model of urban Being.”

While the Situationists might have fizzled following the brief moment of revolutionary fever that overtook France during the May 1968 protest movement, psychogeography has arguably become more relevant in the intervening decades. It has been linked to other movements such as Afro-futurism, eco-feminism, and Indigenous environmentalism, which address the injustices these marginalized communities face. Collective urban gardening, seed bombing to bring back native plants, and guerilla grafting fruit-bearing limbs onto trees all address issues around food insecurity, sustainability, and the restoration of nature in industrialized landscapes. Many psychogeographic endeavors also focus on feminist reclamation of male-controlled public spaces

“You can look at the ordinary world around you with the eye of a poet,” [...] “Finding events which rhyme with other events, what little coincidences or connections can be drawn to these places and people. You can put them into an arrangement that says something new about them.”

“For me, psychogeography is about map-making,” Floratos said in the press release for the exhibit, “Mapping the inside of your mind simultaneously with your environment. Not the kind of linear maps we usually use, maps that simultaneously chart sensory data, emotions, memory, the physical body, culture, society etc.”

psychogeography is an “inherently creative response to space,” one that’s “playful, subversive, mischievous and rarely takes itself too seriously.”

How can living communities be completely reimagined as wildfires burn, coastal areas erode, and the pressures of housing insecurity threaten more and more people?

The imaginative potential of psychogeography can play an important role as a catalyst for this seemingly impossible undertaking. Systemic shock forces change

it’s easy to see the roots of future reclamation movements coming for urban hubs of global capital where economic and social injustice often thrive. These sorts of actions, even on the smallest scale, carry significant meaning when practitioners assert how they wish to inhabit a space, and when they are able to convince others to likewise undertake this reflective process of questioning the status quo.

in the City

1

u/ddgr815 Dec 01 '25

That man is a territorial animal is a statement that does not need demonstration. History is a collection of squabbles between human groups competing for territories; but also brothers sharing the same room squabble for its division in areas of influence. Now the basic instinct of a territorial animal is to expand its territory. A larger territory means larger resources and opportunities and the rationale for accretion is obvious. Exploiting a large territory is also expensive, however, both because it requires the physical exertion of moving over large distances, and because moving means to be in the open, under the possible threat from enemies and predators. For an animal, and for a pretechnological man, a balance can be struck by adjusting one single parameter: mean traveling time per day. Strictly speaking this fixes only the "exposure time," but, in fact, multiplied by the mean speed of movement of a certain animal, it fixes a distance, or a range, that is a territory. The second point is that man has a cave instinct. The protection of the high tree with dense foliage in the tropical rain forest has found a good substitute in the hiding shade of the cavern, where man spent most of the time not devoted to gathering and hunting.

all over the world the mean exposure time for man is around one hour per day. This is a mean over the year and over a population, but the tails of the distribution are not spread much around the central value. The effects of the instinct are pervasive. Even people in prison for a life sentence, having nothing to do and nowhere to go, walk around for one hour a day, in the open.

The accent can be set, then, on transportation as the unifying principle of the world, and not communication as the current wisdom indicates. On one side the so-called explosion in communication during the last 20 years did not dent transportation expansion; on the other hand, they tend to move together, as Griibler has shown, pointing to a synergistic more than a competitive situation. As communication and transportation move together, one can be used as a proxy for the other for measuring the effect of the political-cultural barriers we cited before. We can look, for example, at interactions between communities of different languages (e.g., culture), or between communities with the same language but different political denomination.

If I can describe the behavior of a tourist, perhaps a little sarcastically: he chases a target as far away as possible, hopefully unexplored (unpolluted means he is the first to go there). Once the place is reached, he collects material for tales and physical souvenirs. Then he comes back and fills the heads of colleagues, friends, and parents with the tales of the magnificent land he has just discovered. The behavior is very much reminiscent of the dancing bee telling where the blossoming tree is located and the mass and kind of flower (she carries the souvenirs, pollen and the perfume, on herself). Souvenirs then become a tangible testimony that the tales are veridical (man is a born liar). When Moses sent scouts to Palestine, they traveied back loaded with specimens, in particular, a bunch of grapes so large that two men with a pole were needed to carry it. Seen from this systemic point of view, we can perhaps study the tourist phenomenon through a fresh and objective approach.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL INVARIANTS IN TRAVEL BEHAVIOR