inhurbanity poetry and psychogeography in London modern landscapes
Photography and design C S Tonso Printed on Munken Polar rough 12 gms Set in Neutra Light alt and Bold alt LCC June 2016
inhurbanity poetry and psychogeography in London modern landscapes
4 intro 6 shapes 16 journey
intro The best way to explore a city, is by getting lost into its streets, to breathe its real essence and discover new places. This is the key concept or psychogeography, defined by Utne magazine as 'a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities, just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape'. London is one of the most interesting cities under this point of view: it has a incredible eclectic range of architectural styles, formed as the city grew up. In this way, the city offers many subjects and points of view that can be captured with the camera, the new urban explorer's medium.
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Inhurbanity explores the landscape of modern buildings in an almost abstract journey, along with the enchanting words of Italo Calvino in one of his masterpieces, Invisible cities.
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shapes London is not characterised by any particular architectural style, having accumulated its buildings over a long period of time. It is not unusual to see old and new coexist side by side, creating interesting contrasts of epoques. Eye catching modern buildings are flourishing in the central areas of the City and Southwark, in a rich variety of shapes, colours, materials and features. Many architectures are not visible immediately, and have to be discovered by walking around the city: they appear suddenly to the eye of the observer in a sort of unexpected show. But they are always there, standing proudly in their place, breaking the pace of the city without being dirsuptive. The urban explorer is indirectly and unintentionally affected by a particular design which he experience only in passing. Only weather conditions can influence the perception of these immortal and timeless architectures, where the human presence seems to be completely absent.
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The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
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Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes
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What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
journey The idea of urban wandering relates to the concept of the flâneur. The terms date to the 16th or 17th century, denoting strolling, idling, often with the connotation of wasting time. But it was in the 19th century that a rich set of meanings and definitions took shape, as a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. The concept had an important role in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity: the modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship with time and space, altering fundamental notions of freedom and being. Consequently, it has also become meaningful in architecture and urban planning.
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Susan Sontag describes how, since the development of hand held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur: 'The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world picturesque.'
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An invisible landscape
conditions the visible one.
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.
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Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
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For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name.
Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls.
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You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
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He cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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Italo Calvino, Invisible cities, 1972. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903. Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977. Joseph Hart, A New Way of Walking, Utne, July/August 2004. Wikipedia
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Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.