It is clear Raban is affected deeply by the ideas of Situationism in his meditations on the city. The Situationist International, a group founded in 1957 and led by Guy Debord, argued for an urban realm ruled by the imaginative; they wanted to counter the increasing rationalisation and meaningless capitalist spectacle of city life. Their tools to chart and promote the emotive urban existence were the dérive (or ‘drift’) and psychogeography. Through both, they attempted to discover and articulate how the city and its districts affect us emotionally and the personal geographies we create for ourselves out of them.
Focusing on these personal imaginative geographies, psychogeography set out to create maps that better represented the way we see cities. These described and promoted certain dérives, in which members of the group would explore the city by means of free association and chance, giving rise to unexpected meetings and meanings in the landscape. Their wanderings traversed what David Pinder (2005) calls the ‘emotional contours’ of the city. Debord’s best-known psychogeographical maps, Guide Psychogeographique de Paris and The Naked City (1956-7) were made through cutting up parts of traditional maps and reorganising them subjectively to describe journeys and selective significances of parts of the city.
This is a physical representation of an activity in which we all partake: cognitive mapping. How we see the city and its organisation is defined by the routes we take through it, the memories we associate with certain places and the myths we identify with unexplored areas; realities wholly unrepresented by traditional maps. Henri Lefebvre (1991) differentiates representational space, bound up with the symbolism of social life and lived experience, from representations of space, which are tied to production and order. We can never perceive the world in completely accurate terms – whether figures or maps. So if our cities are experienced through our mental comprehension and experience, so they will always be malleable to our distortion, subjectivities and associations. In this way, cognitive mapping is a way of coping with the immense amount of information the city offers us.
‘It is precisely because the city is too large and formless to be held in the mind as an imaginative whole that we make recourse to irrational short-cut and simplifications’ (Raban)
By any account, cities are overwhelming organisms to comprehend, let alone live in. In reaction to this bombardment with information and options, we choose elements of the city to create an identity and a reality of our own imagining. One theorist attuned to this overwhelming nature of the metropolis was Georg Simmel. His ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) talks of the ‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’. Simmel states, however, that this has lead to a supersaturation in which city inhabitants can no longer respond to the plethora of stimuli, and consequently adopt a blasé, unemotional, rational attitude. It is clear, however – and only natural – that emotional engagement has not been dissolved in the city; as has been discussed, it is merely limited and defined to personal imaginations of identity. While we may admittedly emotionally invest less in the proliferation of events and strangers around us, this only serves to intensify our own individual experiences and associations; our own mental life.
Robert Park, leading member of the Chicago School, once said that the city is ‘a state of mind’. In the city especially – rather than the countryside – everything is concentrated, overwhelming, giving rise to a variety of thoughts and feelings. We focus on personal geographies and particular mythologies in order to make sense of it, while spaces and activities proliferate that make us feel anxious or hopeful.
What the Situationists aimed to do was reclaim the city in terms of imagination and emotion. While emotional realities and imaginative interpretations have not subsided, we could also realise their political potential in combatting increasingly regulated systems of metropolitan existence. Leonie Sandercock (2007) argues for a new kind of planning approach that embraces the imaginative realities of urban life: ‘we need to be more attuned to the city of spirit, the city of memory, and the city of desire: these are what animate life in cities’.
When we conceive of an experienced city, we think not of facts or figures, or official maps. We remember memories, moments, myths. Places evoke particular emotions and associations: we get a ‘sense’ for them. We conceive of the city as a subjectively connected agglomeration of experiences; whether home, work, favourite places or poignant reminders of love lost and found. Our maps are mental; as Raban articulates, ‘one man’s city is the sum of all the routes he takes through it, a spoor as unique as a fingerprint.’
Urban statistics chart the actions we carry out in a city. But these actions speak of lived experiences; experiences grounded in subjective perspectives and emotions. Statistics and monographs do describe a reality; one that is a scientific tool for analysis and understanding. Our reality may be framed by this – i.e. wealth, location, schooling – but we do not naturally analyze these formal classifications; rather we deal with the hopes, anxieties or myths they play into, produce, supply or embody in a constantly shifting, personal mode of imaginative experience.
Both cities and their inhabitants change every day; the production of meaning and reality is never complete. We must go on what we know, and that is a life shaped by feeling and memory. As with the example of mental and psychogeographical maps, we chart our own city: the one that makes the most sense to us, taking the urban structure and moulding it into a place defined by subjective experience and imagination. This, as Raban would say, is our reality: our Soft City.
