The Situationist idea of psychogeography is structured around the interplay between the subjective imagination and feelings on the one hand and urban space and built environment on the other. One of psychogeographical principle means of exploring an urnan space was dérive or drift. To drift was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonates with the walker's states of mind, inclinations and desires, and to seek out
I often aimlessly stroll through the city to take photos. It is an an escape from daily routine that enables me to look at my urban environment in a fresh way.
During my photowalks in the city I notice the empty offices and empty shops and the newspaper headlines about the empty factories as manufacturing goes offshsore. I shudder, and drift into a new car park. This, along with the freeway and ring road, is an icon of the automobile age. Cars are an object of desire; a status symbol for the wealthy, an aspiration for the poor. In the carpark electronic music rings in my ears and I hear the sound of heavy metal on a car radio as it races around the car park looking for a parking space. The music expresses the starkness of the modernist conception of a city---a machine for machines to live in. I remember Le Corbusier's 1925 "Plan Voisin," that was sponsored by a then famous automobile manufacturer.
Corbusier's "Plan Voisin," was designed for a flat topography devoid of natural features such as hills and rivers. In it, Le Corbusier proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine, and replace it with his sixty-story cruciform towers from the Contemporary City, placed in an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space.
