Psychogeography

remapping of London through an alignment of those churches designed by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor.

Paris, the figure of the solitary stroller who both records and comes to symbolize the emergence of the modern city has a name – the flâneur.

Patrick Keiller’s films London and Robinson in Space

represented by the motif of the imaginary voyage, a journey that reworks and re-imagines the layout of the urban labyrinth and which records observations of the city streets as it passes through them.

all share a perception of the city as a site of mystery and seek to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the everyday.

dramatise the city as a place of dark imaginings.

Hawksmoor

The Practice of Everyday Life. Taking New York as his subject, de Certeau provides a useful distinction between the street-level gaze of the walker and the panoptical perspective of the voyeur,

the tradition of writer as walker

writers such as Defoe, de Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen, paints a uniformly dark picture of the city as the site of crime, poverty and death.