John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Teach us how to pray

Luke 11 - Teach us how to pray - today's offering to the good folks of the Good Shepherd, and anyone else who'd care to read it.

On Martha and letting go

Great to be back at the church we were married in, and where I previously preached just under 12 years ago: Luke 10 - On Martha and letting go, at St Gabriel's Toxteth, today.

Psychogeography: defined by Wilfried Hou Je Bek

In psychoanalysis the word psychogeography is used in relation to phenomena of location based hysteria: you are perfectly sane, you enter a particular room and within a split second you are stark raving mad. Only when this response is universally shared and not dependent on a random individual neurosis, this power of a room can be called psychogeographic. Albert Camus suggested another form of place induced behaviour by telling the story of a man who, hypnotized by a conspiracy of sun, beach and ocean, committed a murder. These are the fictional reports of intuitive minds trying to grasp the conditions that lead to extreme deeds. Both are circumstantial evidence for the existence of something impossible to isolate: the power of landscape to force us into certain behaviour, sometimes even overpowering our will. As it turned out, this interaction is much more complex than generations of urban planners, politicians, political radicals and behaviourists suspected. Urban planning has had its fair share of projects attempting to hardwire human behaviour in urban structure. Walpole exemplifies the suspicion that psychogeographic effects can be artificially created, not as a linear process, but as an emergent, that is serendipitic, enfolding of events. The importance of these indirect consequences of urban form resurfaced as relevant subject in urban planning in the late 1950ties when Kevin Lynch modestly rephrased the need for architectural objects that generate meaning, in his concept of imageability, "that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer".  

- Wilfred Hou Je Bek, from socialfiction.org. Thanks, John at National Psychogeographic for making the connection.