Divergent Metropolis: Report 1
The following is the first in a series of psychogeographic reports on experimental walks, my friends and I have been taking in Houston. The project has connections around the globe with scholars and urban planners in Canada, the U. S., Mexico, and elsewhere.
Read more
at the website of the Social Agency Lab: an exciting urban planner group that is one of the project’s key partners along with Rice University Anthropology and TxRx
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The city of Houston is not that hard to get lost in. The lack of zoning means you can be looking for a commercial space in the most residential of areas. The constancy of the strip mall emplaces one’s psychogeography in a feedback loop of ubiquitous repetition. Psychogeography, by the way, was a word which Guy Debord—most prominent of the French avant-garde “situationist” group—used to describe the way walking in the city can give rise to effects in the mind. In order to rupture the banality of routine or, on the other hand, the kind of irking accidental lostness I just described, the situationists were interested in a kind of walking that could bring about lostness as a technique, a practice, a style. They called this practice of perambulation a dérive. “Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior,” Debord famously stated; they necessitate an “awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” I recently participated in the first of a series of attempts to ask what it would mean to partake in the dérive in American cities today, now, in 2011. This premier experiment took place in downtown Houston.
Now, downtown Houston is probably quite a difficult place to get lost in. It’s built on a grid system right? Bombed out as downtown is it is a perfect replication of a structure of city planning as normativization first identified by architect Rem Koolhaas in late 1970s. He asserted that the layout of cities on a grid pattern, most famously in Manhattan, was an “intellectual program” not merely excusable by its “apparent neutrality. Neil Campbell, has noted that, though the grid begins with Manhattan’s 1811 layout, it extended quickly to many cities in the American west and even the organization of the agricultural face of frontier geography. “There are,” he asserts, “curious coherencies between the story of city and country, East and West, as a collision of the desire for control, and pattern with straight lines and rectangles.” Bringing things back to the city, Campbell notes that the urban ‘new frontier’disciplined space through accepted and designated ‘efficiencies’ or ‘metropolitan manifest destiny.’” Houston, with its marginal status with regard to both the “American West” proper (certainly not in the South East despite its geography and not neatly at the frontier between East and West as are Dallas-Fort Worth) and the truly urban (no zoning, excess of suburban commuters, etcetera, etcetera). And yet, in the middle of all this, here’s this grid: the epitome of either and the fulcrum between the two.
We began our dérive at Texas Avenue and Main. Setting two newly relocated Houston arrivals as our guides, we were able to assure ourselves that the grid wouldn’t own us. We’d get lost no matter what. As Debord asserted, derive “includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.” This was the idea then, coordinate our own loss of control, calculate the letting go. We were soon to discover that Debord was also right when he noted that: “Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” Before too long, past water installations, with parkour pathways opening up along sculpted granite paths, corporate carparks, and every available railing, we were drawn by out hapless guides toward a beautiful inevitability: we happened upon Allen’s Landing. The site of the 1836 arrival from downriver by the Allen brothers who founded the city. That was the beginning of our psychogeographical investigation as conversation soon turned to the historical indices from then to now; Zakcq Lockrem shed a great deal of light for me on the transformations in Houston history, as other companions clambered the nearby railings and leapt to the water’s edge.
But the point, as Marx said, is not to interpret the world, but to change it. As we wandered further along the banks, under the Main Street bridge, change meant clambering ceaselessly: ducking, diving, and ninja rolling. It meant getting to a place where one would never normally walk, halfway up the bridge in dusty, distant spots. But then, as I looked around at the many homeless people who inhabited the space less as a playground and more as a site of necessity, I came to reflect on what our urban tourism might mean. If there was an ethics to this encounter, it would have to begin with a moment of interaction. It would be necessary not only to play in their world, but listen to and encounter their worlding. As we wandered further up the Landing, transient downtown dwellers were laid out in demarcated spaces, almost their own, self-imposed grid. As my friends spoke to a man known only as Mr Grumbles, who, along with his wife, claims the local ducks as his “children,” I noticed an argument breaking out between a woman—call her Geraldine—her daughter—call her Alice—and a shirtless man. A minor altercation, it turned out to be, he was drunk and dispensing advice on Alice’s recent pregnancy; advice which turned out to be unwelcome. But, offering my support, I made sure Geraldine and Alice were ok. He would sleep it off, Geraldine said. But he wasn’t welcome in her “camp” that night. Her camp? I asked what she meant: “do people know that this spot is yours?” “Oh yeah, a lot of people have camps down on the bayou she said, that you don’t touch—and this is mine!” A whole basis of social organization was potentially implicit, a territoriality of implied privacy, even as, on that hot night, people were sleeping in the open air. As we wandered back up to the Fannin Street bridge and mulled over the implications of the encounter, I felt as though I had blundered into a glimpse of another world. As a privileged guest, no doubt. As a tourist in a social reality which I could escape and Geraldine and Alice could not. The psychogeography of downtown Houston will nonetheless always be altered for me. The first step, I imagine, in making that make a difference, is writing this; it’s telling you. Perhaps we can produce some new maps that redefine the territory.
http://anthropology.rice.edu/
