The places we walk through or drive past, the sites we visit or that simply fall into our frame of vision, all have a heritage and inner spirit of their own. Even in our familiar everyday world, we are often just steps away from some location rich in hidden history and forgotten associations.

The ideational term “psychogeography” refers to the attainment of deep connections with man-made environments, usually by way of unplanned walks thru cities. It has been described as a “charmingly vague” practice by no less a man the French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord, who coined the phrase himself in 1953. It can also be seen as a more risk-averse cousin of today’s urban explorer subculture, which I’ve written about many times in this blog.

The preserved archway frame of Pier 54, where survivors of the Titanic disembarked from the Carpathia, now serves as the south entrance to New York’s Little Island.

But there is also a very practical side to psychogeography, that would do us all good to be aware of. The theory goes that the distractions and pressures of modern society have caused people to become disconnected from the public realm, leaving the one-percenters to run roughshod over the greater public interest. Understanding and appreciating our common built heritage can lead to thoughtful historic preservation and the design of more livable cities thru greater community involvement.

Winter’s bare trees reveal the vestigial facade of a paternalistic institution on Hawkins Street in Boston.

So while coming to understand the effects of the built environment can lead to a greater good, psychogeography can be both a passive pleasure or a wildcat experience. It’s something almost everyone has experienced, whether consciously or not. It can be the satisfaction of finding a great hole-in-the-wall eatery or tucked-away antique store because you wandered away from a usual walking route. It could mean tiptoeing into an off-limits but unguarded location to do a photo session with friends or discovering a fascinating historical vestige steps away from a throng of selfie-taking tourists, as in my photo below.

This statue of Ethel Barrymore, and of two other former stage icons, evoke an earlier era of Broadway, just a few feet away from the back of a gigantic electronic billboard in Times Square.

In his 2006 book “Psychogeography,” writer Merlin Coverley, traces this concept back to its immediate roots: French Marxists and Situationists. But he also vividly  digs back to an earlier era and the “urban gothic” stylings of authors like Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, showing how their “obsessive drifting (yielded) new insights.” Poe’s 1840 story “The Man of the Crowd” is perhaps the first examination of the mysteries and perplexities of the modern teeming metropolis. In “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Stevenson shows not only the duality of man’s nature but the stark dichotomy of the different parts of London his split protagonist inhabits. Dickens was a famously keen observer of the same city (often engaging in all-night walks) and had the fame and power to influence social reforms in the darker aspects of the city he witnessed, the exploitation of children, the workhouses, slum conditions etc.

I stumbled on this Dickens landmark during a London walkabout in 1994.

It’s Baudelaire, quoted by Cloverley, who has the most telling description of the psychogeographer, which has as its alpha the Parisian flaneur (or boulevardier). “For the perfect flaneur it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude… to be away from home and yet to find oneself everywhere at home… to be at the center of the world and yet remain hidden from the world.”

Sounds cool, yes? So try some psychogeography yourself. Put away the GPS and get to know your town. Stick up for livable cities and against gentrification. Patronize independent small businesses out of the way points of interest. Lastly, LOOK UP to see what I call the Museum of the Street, and see what those who came before built before us and begin to feel “everywhere at home.”

All photos and text by Rick Ouellette. More info on my “Placeology” photo series coming soon!