PSYCHO GEOGRAPHY
And the Secret City of San Francisco

Recently I have taken an interest in psychogeography. It’s hard not to living where I do in San Francisco. Some days I walk straight along Fifteenth Avenue through the gate into the Presidio, along the Los Lobos creek, the only fresh water creek in San Francisco and on to Baker Beach. One is uplifted by the sweep of the sandy beach ending with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, lapped by the surf of the Pacific. I feel grateful to be at my beach, at your beach.

Oh the secrets of these places.

I heard someone say that had to move out of the Avenues – that area of Sunset and Richmond districts. They could not take it anymore. Avenue after avenue under the grey blanket of fog for weeks and months at a time. They had to move east into the sun.

Psychogeography is the 'study of the effects of the geographic environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals'

The districts and neighborhoods of San Francisco are made up of distinct psychic microclimates; places that attract or repel us, or feel psychically warmer or colder, in a way that can be mapped. This emotional effect of a place can be extended to a single block, to a building, or even a room. In different hands, it can be supernatural, tending to ideas of something like haunting, or entirely materialistic. In might include:

• Ambience of place – the atmosphere or mood it invokes in us.
• The emotions it arouses in us, the behaviors that result.
• Cognitive maps – whether visual hand drawn or as described verbally.
• History of a place particularly of neglected events literary, criminal and labor struggles, outsider history.

What we need for psychogeography is a device like a laptop computer which could detect the wireless signals of wi-fi but instead it would detect the aura of a place.

An example in San Francisco:

The graveyard tucked behind Mission Dolores where one can feel the presence of lives who lived before us, do you remember the scene early in the Hitchcock movie Vertigo where Madeline played by Kim Novak comes to contemplate her alter ego Carlotta at the garden graveyard of the Mission. It is a strange scene shot in a filter. But there is something unsettling about the place where so many native Americans perished after abuse and mistreatment in the Mission.

Why do places of religious worship cluster in the city? On Starr King way we have 3 churches in a line – Presbyterian – Unitarian-Universalist – and the Catholic. Or the place on Arguello and Lake where there is the huge Dome of the Emmnauel Synagogue visible from half the city and across the road a Presbyterian church. Just down the road in the Presidio is Inspiration point – looking out to another Dome – the Palace of Fine Arts. I found Inspiration Point athe perfect place to see the moon rise.

Take another example

Most of us feel Van Ness Avenue is a dividing line in the city. Not surprising to find out it was the line at the time of the earthquake when mansions were dynamited to create a fire-break to protect the rest of the city from the raging fires.

This is the real Sasn Francisco not the artificial places sanitized at Fishermans Wharf the San Francisco theme park.

I am interested in the secret, the hidden spaces of real life, untouched by control and mediation, where the authentic and the marvellous still flourishes. Wandering the city one can find them.

Psychogeography is about exploring and discovering the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions and characters which charge environments. Like the ley lines which have been discovered in England which connect in straight lines the ancient and holy sites There are lost social ley-lines which make up the unconscious cultural contours of places.. Or like the Wifi networks which appear on the laptop in cafés, a sort of atmosphere comes to the fore, apparently familiar yet full of secrets.