socialfiction | psychogeography
Psychogeografie Leidsche Rijn
OUTLINE
PML (Psychogeographical Markup Language), as a tool developed in the public domain, might play an important role in the development of a participatory urban design. PML enables non-specialists to make reasonable statements about urban space: with PML anybody can get their second opinion if the one put forward by the urban planner doesn't seem right.
With this in mind socialfiction.org did a psychogeographical walk in Leidsche Rijn, a newly built part of Utrecht that, when it is completed 10 years from now, will have a population of a hundred thousand.
Very few people, at least among the people we know, foster positive feelings about Leidsche Rijn. Even though it is only half completed & many planned services like a theatre still have to be built, all efforts to prevent Leidsche Rijn from turning into a suburban deadzone, seems to have resulted in little. Leidsche Rijn in our eyes is a wasteland, from the developers perspective however it is a success, as the houses have proven to very popular marketwise. Maybe this is because of the general shortage of houses & maybe because the people who live here actually like it. These subjective feelings towards places, PML tries to capture. Urban theory, in the person of Kevin Lynch, gave us a good definition of what makes urban design successful: "It must invite it's viewer to explore the world".
This capability of Leidsche Rijn to explore the world was tested in the first systematic PML experiment in which 7 brave people walked their part. The results are presented here in a way that is still very much under construction.
All psychogeographers were asked to keep track of every street they passed & mark the streets they felt if one of the two markups: 'open' or 'closed' was applicable. 'Open' being defined as a street that you want explore, 'closed' as the opposite of that.
NOTES ON THE DATA
Are 7 participants enough to turn random subjective experiences into an objective picture? No!
Does PML actually measure something? Good question!
Future walks should determine that without doubt. The centre of Amsterdam definitely feels different than Leidsche Rijn, but does that translate in a significant different PML?
Can PML be used to detect differences within cities? Leidsche Rijn is homogonous in that it was built in the same few years, but is there, for instance, a difference between the bits with mainly social housing & other parts where houses are privately owned?
A frequency count shows this to be the case. The social housing part, (locked in between Groenedijk in the south & the Melissekade in the north) scores 19 times 'closed', 4 times 'open', an unfortunate high score for 'closed', compared to the other part, (which is bigger) that was regarded 22 times as 'open' & 17 times as 'closed. The Langerakbaan, the main street, with few people living on it, is excluded, otherwise the score would be 24/20. But also in this part some streets stand out. Firstly is the Groenedijk that is without nay-sayers considered to be 'open', it happens to be the only old bit, a path more than a street, a remnant from when Leidsche Rijn was still rural. The Klifrakplantsoen, a major block on the south is regarded less positive: stimulating every psychogeographer passing it, to notate a psychogeographical experience: 2 times open, 4 times closed.
REMEMBER
PML with this tiny experiment slowly moves from a fistful of ideas into the realm of a workable application. If PML seems unworthy of the term of psychogeography, that joyful combination of peripatetic hedonism & cartographic sadism, this is only because it needs to be injected with a portion of social fiction. PML is after all not a university project but a psychogeography project.
PML (Psychogeographical Markup Language)
links: http://socialfiction.org & http://urbanxml.com
info?: info at socialfiction dot org