Living in the City

“Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”-Karl Marx

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities says that what makes up a city is not so much its physical structure but the impression it imparts upon its visitors, the way its inhabitants move within it.



Descending from psychogeographical techniques that started with the Situationist dérive, one now even finds artists measuring the Chi of their cities with giant acupuncture needles. Such attempts at urban holism however go back to ancient China, where feng shui was used not just to make sure one's room is copacetic, but to determine that the proper building place for every house, shrine, and tomb in the city was aligned to the entirety of the cosmos. Thanks to modern technologies we can now also map the psychology of locations.