Dérive: The Expansion of Our Own Personal Urban Realm
A defining element of urban life is the potential of chance encounters and seemingly endless possibility. Take Andre Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja as an example, where a chance meeting takes place between the narrator — also named Andre — and the eponymous Nadja, a fascinatingly complex muse who utterly engulfs the narrators affections and subsequently leads him, and thus the reader, on a surrealist bender for 10 days in 1920’s Paris. This tale lifted from the pages of surrealist fiction, indeed embodies this notion of chance within the urban realm, for it is possible for us to be meandering down the pavements of our various urban milieu and essentially bump into a future friend or lover.
Yet, reality seldom meets fiction. The fact is, spatially speaking, we live rather ‘narrow’ lives which only encompass a fraction of the cities in which we live. The city dweller will tend to commute from home to work each week day, then at the weekend will head to various places at their leisure. This is normal, and is an explicit element of suburban life — where the commute is often by car, an expansion of private space. The significance of this observation lies in the assumption of the general character of urban randomness, the types of experience espoused by Durkheim (organic solidarity) and Simmel (blase attitude), therefore refuting the lazy notion that cities are messy or unruly. This narrowness also shapes our mental relationship with the city we call home.
The writer and psycho-geogropher Will Self highlights this notion when he discusses his own personal experience of San Francisco. Self, a learned and well travelled chap, delivered a lecture to the employees of Google in 2009 on psychogeography and used his experience of the nearby city to argue the point above; namely the notion that we live narrow urban lives. He noted that his experience of the city was entirely centered on landing at the airport, grabbing a cab and being taken to his hotel, from where he would visit a selection of predetermined locations, get a cab back to the airport and go back to London. This is a self admitted (no pun intended, however lazy) narrow experience of San Francisco.
However, during the trip where he delivered his lecture, he took the bus from the airport. This may seem an innocuous action, but when one rides the bus in an alien setting, they must pay attention to their own location within it, thereby having a sense of place which needs to be referenced against the various routes, changes and times of the bus service. Rather than relying on the knowledge or satellite navigation of a taxi driver, Self placed himself within the city and, thus, expanded his narrow experience of San Fran ever so slightly. This example shows how the simple act of riding the bus, and subsequently using its time tables and routes, has the potential to expand our experience of a city, but it is still contingent on us having fixed points of arrival. It still presents barriers to our expanding experience.
The solution to this quandary arises from, as many things do in urban theory, Paris in the 1950s and 60s. Guy Debord led the situationists, a Marxist sub sect of thinkers and artists who wanted to subvert the capitalist means of production. As you may have guesses they objectively failed. Yet, as with most human endeavours, value emerges through the pursuit of a goal rather than its attainment. Dabourd and his comrades argued in the Marxist tradition that the city was shaped by the demands of capital accumulation and that our experiences of the city were in turn shaped by those same forces and a result. This vein of thought was proposed by Fredrich Engels in his 1944 work The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he argued that the main foroughfairs of Manchester which linked the city to its wealthy suburbs were made to look presentable in relation to the squalor of the workers housing which sst behind these boulevards. A side effect of this shaping of the urban was the potential for the city’s inhabitants to be alienated from the city itself — a serious issue if you are trying to usher a Marxist uprising. Debord and his allies ‘wanted to get out of this conditioning [and search for] different uses of the urban landscape’. [1]
The situationists proposed the act of dérive as a means of supplanting the influence of urban capitalism upon the city dweller. The word derive is defined by Debord as ‘the swift moving through place’, with its premise being the reintroduction of randomness and chance into the life of the urbanite. For one to carry out dérive, they are to walk, ideally setting off from their home, across the city in an undetermined manner for a number of hours — ideally a day.
Whilst on this absurdist pilgrimage, the wanderer is to break down the boundaries set within the city — be those geographic, symbolic or personal — and render them meaningless, to experience the city at a level beneath the symbolism of surface texture. Another form of derive amounts to what is essentially a fake rendezvous. The wanderer selects a random, and alien, location within the city — say a park or public square — and then initiates a conversation with a random passerby or user of that space. In a contemporary context, this unsolicited interaction may be set against a backdrop of techno infused urban isolationism ushered in by the smartphone. Through removing oneself from the confines of the boundaries set by the city, the dérivist is able to experience the city in an expansionist manner and thus imbue their relationship with the urban with increased levels of chance. However, it must be said, dérive is not an easy task and is something to be worked on. Different methods may be used, such as if you see a taxi take the next left turn and walk straight until you see a post box, then turn right. The more random the better as dérive is by its very make up is a means of ushering in the random in the pursuit of chance.
Ultimately the goal of dérive is to shatter the self imposed boundaries of our narrow urban experiences and expand them through the imposition of randomness and chance. These boundaries aren’t in-and-of-themselves a bad thing, but they do limit the resident to a small proportion of — and has the potential to alienate them from — the city in which they reside. Yet, within today’s context of Covid-19 and the emerging promise of a vaccine which will (eventually) relieve us from the various forms of isolation we have experienced across 2020, derive and the random expansion of our urban experiences, has the potential to be a definitive act of 2021. For, what would be better than spending the (hopefully) virus free summer months expanding our experiences of our own cities and embracing randomness whilst doing it all for free. I for one cannot wait.
[1] Quote taken from The Situationists and the City published by Verso — available here
Picture Source: Tokyo Walking Food Tour at Night
Will Brown
Doctoral Researcher
Loughborough University
w.brown@lboro.ac.uk
