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The Situationist City Simon Sadler
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As Rebecca Solnit has said, the great city of walkers and of revolution is Paris. An interesting thought that springs to mind about the experience of walking a city but using a map that doesn't 'match' the actual space, is Guy Debord and his writings upon the Situationists International. David Pinder's Visions of the City and Jonathan Raban's Soft City. Situationism was an urban movement, based primarily in Paris. The situationists hoped that architecture would ”revolutionize everday life, release the ordinary citizen into world of experiment, anarchy and play”. 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. The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city. This vision was radicalized in the . The Situationist International movement is inspring it in dogmatic approach to reducing the passive nature of people in their everyday lives. 3:AM: I think you say in The Spectacle of Disintegration that détournement is perhaps the Situationists' greatest strategic legacy, but I wonder whether you'd agree that the dérive is a useful strategy for negotiating the networked environment, or what you called the One is the internet itself which was a kind of wild west area, and the other was about networking together across various cities, we'd travel around and visit each other and form temporary associations. The Cobra group dissolved only three years after it was founded, but Cobra members Constant Nieuwenhuys and Asger Jorn were to re-appear on stage as co-founders of the Situationist International in 1958. But the agenda of functional separation also resulted in the conclusion that Amsterdam's economic center, the CBD, had to be further expanded and the old city had to be “opened up” to traffic. It is an interesting idea to think about maps as both a tool to navigate the city as well as a tool to represent a particular experience in that city. Though I missed out on the Situationist art movement, the notion that I gather of it has always struck a certain chord with me, especially in regards to Detroit. His publications study the architectural ideas of the Archigram group, the Situationists, and other experimental practices. David Pinder's Visions of the City (2005) takes a primarily Situationist look at the city and discusses détournement, the dérive and their cartography in depth. 'Allure' is an experiment in SITUATIONIST CINEMA.