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The Situationist City Simon Sadler
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Apparently the Dutch situationist Constant had (co-)written a pamphlet fifty years earlier about his ideal city. It comes from a group of theorists called the Situationists, whose work I have been interested in since learning about it in a first year art course. Situationism was an urban movement, based primarily in Paris. Psychogeography: Situationist Reconnaissance for Revolution: Part 1. In reading and reviewing McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, I couldn't help but think about the practice of art in the city of Detroit. The rest of this chapter takes us on a whistle-stop tour of alternative urbanism; from the Situationist International's avant-garde 'psychogeography' to graffiti, parkour and free-running, to contemporary urban exploration. Christopher Collier (University of Essex) and Joanna Figiel (City University London), 'The Recombinant Dérive – The Situationist International, biopolitics and the neoliberal dérèglement de tous les sens'. Connected drift is based on the situationist technic of the psychogeographic walk in which chance and the surrounding environment itself determines the route taken. Sadler, Simon, 1998, The Situationist City, The MIT Press I picked this book because cities are interesting to me and I'd like to learn more about theories and movements to do with living in city, urbanism, utopia and the like. As Rebecca Solnit has said, the great city of walkers and of revolution is Paris. Ever since I started teaching this course in 2003, I've wanted to incorporate the work of the Situationist International in ways more explicit than my brief lectures on spectacle and modernity. The pamphet, it was revealed, could just as easily be interpreted as a joke instead of as an actual serious statement. The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city. The Situationist International, led by Guy Debord and central to the Paris uprising in May 1968, published many incendiary texts on politics and art in the journal Internationale Situationniste. The Situationist International movement is inspring it in dogmatic approach to reducing the passive nature of people in their everyday lives. The book is divided into three parts. One of its central ideas was “derive” or drift — wandering aimlessly through the streets of the city, open to real experience instead of being a passive slave to spectacle. Book Review: The Beach Beneath the Street – the Situationists · bkg_constant_babylon-1 Constant was a Dutch painter and artist who spent many years designing the utopian city of New Babylon. (from the amazon blurb: "Simon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the SI left behind.