Psychogeography

Psychogeography:

"The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals."

                                                                                        Quote - Guy Debord, (1955).

Another definition - 

                 "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."

 *((( I have spent hours researching, and learnt alot of useful information, some of which i have included in this post, although it looks like a big passage of text, it is all consolidated and relevant, more importantly interesting and informative, i have colour coded key words along with further explainations below! )))*

*(((( Psychogeography is really interesting, i see it as being the way that people view their surroundings, and or paces they vist or live.
It is about the asumptions made by people after initial glances.
I think it speaks volumes about peoples personalities and i feel is an indication to how observent different people are.
In Addition different people will have different thoughts and feelings in different places, it would be interesting to observe others reactions to such places and go about discovering why.
Being from Manchester and having grown up here i like to think that when i walk around i visually explore above me, below me and around me. I am constantly noticing new things, small or big. A new bit of graffiti, or a new shop face, I am fairly aware of changes in the city!
Initially this change is something which interests me so much so I think I could base my project on such ideas.))))* 

(Text below courtesy of Wikipedia)

Psychogeography was originally developed by the Lettrist International in the journal Potlach. The originator of what became known as unitary urbanism, psychogeography, and the dérive was Ivan Chtcheglov, in his highly influential 1953 essay "Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau" ("Formulary for a New Urbanism").
The Lettrists' reimagining of the city has connections to predecessors like the Dadaists and Surrealists, while the idea of urban wandering relates to the older concept of the flâneur, theorized by Charles Baudelaire. Following Chtcheglov's exclusion from the Lettrists in 1954, Debord and others worked to clarify the concept of unitary urbanism, in a bid to demand a revolutionary approach to architecture. At a conference in Coscio de Arroscia, Italy in 1956, the Lettrists joined the Situations International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus to set a proper definition for the idea announced by Gil J. Wolman "Unitary Urbanism - the synthesis of art and technology that we call for — must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated." 
 It demanded the rejection of functional, Euclidean values in architecture, as well as the separation between art and its surroundings. The implication of combining these two negations is that by creating abstraction, one creates art, which, in turn, creates a point of distinction that unitary urbanism insists must be nullified.

The Letterist International was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group. Letterist International had almost no ideas in common with Isou's Lettrism, of which used the name only ironically instead, it was more a draft version of the Situationist International, of which anticipated many of the core ideas.

Unitary urbanism (UU) was the critique of status quo urbanism employed by the Lettrist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between approximately 1953 and 1960.

In psychogeography, a dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, where an individual travels where the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct them with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience. Situationist theorist Guy Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." He also notes that "the term also designates a specific uninterrupted period of dériving."

The term is literally translated into English as drift.

Ivan Vladimirovitch Chtcheglov, (Russian) (16 January 1933–April 21 1998) was a French political theorist, activist and poet, born in Paris to Ukrainian father and French mother.

Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.

The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature.

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artefact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important centre of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.

The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of  "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity. In French Canada flâner is rarely used to describe strolling and often has a negative connotation as the term's most common usage refers to loitering.

Charles Baudelaire (French April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. 

He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Guy Ernest Debord (December 28, 1931 - November 30, 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International (SI). He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

The Situationist International (SI) was a restricted group of internationalist European revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general strike of May 1968 in France.

With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography.  Their theoretical work peaked with the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. 

Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system, the Situationist International supported the May '68 revolts, and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them with direct democracy, through workers' councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.