Urban forage psychogeography

Oliver Rowe's attempt to open a restaurant feeding its clients with London produce only made for a vaguely amusing BBC series. My favourite bit is when Rowe teams up with Fergus the Forager and finds himself unable to keep up with the foragers antics of moving silently through the underbrush. As said before: foraging = psychogeography.

...after a long wait, the forager finally arrives: in a battered old Volvo!

One of North London's many woods...

"Fergus!?"

"I think I lost Fergus..."

"Fergus... Fergus!" 

"Oh, is that a squirrel or is that Fergus? No that's a dog"

Two books with three-word titles, both containing the words 'food' and 'history'

Recently I have read two books on the History of Food.

The first was 'Food in History' by Reay Tannahill. It was first published in 1973 but my Penguin is a revised edition of 1988. It's an easy read that deals with the origin of our food-sources, the history of national cuisines and the complexities and political issues civilizations from the Romans to the present have needed to overcome to feed itself. The first part deals with pre-agricultural food and seems very low on information content and maybe a bit outdated, the last part deals with food security in the language of the 1970ties. It's a good book to get a general picture of things (the history of Chinese cuisine in 3 pages, a few medieval recipes, the birth of modern cookbooks, the assimilation of corn in the European diet, etc etc) but it doesn't really nourish in the long run. 

The second book I read was 'History of Food' by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. It was first published in French in 1974 and translated to English in 1992. It's a 700 page tome of small print that comes with endorsements by Raymond Blanc and H.G. Ballard. It solely deals with the history and cultural facets of individual food sources, it neglects non-European cuisines and is Franco-centric to a fault. I haven't actually read it because its is unreadable. This book is like a collection of Wikipedia pages on speed or like one of those Chinese encyclopaedias Borges wrote about. The matter is made worse by the fact that chapter-headings only provide a meagre indication of what the chapter will actually be about. This history of food is unsystematic to the point of randomness, but not in a good way. What I find especially annoying is that Toussaint-Samat makes grand claims about all sorts of things (the origin of language included) without any reference or source. This book is a waste of space.

The dictum is: never read one book. In this case it is followed with: two is not enough either and readers of this blog are encouraged to submit better books on the subject if they know any. Thank you!

The primitive savage as a class-A naturalist

Columbian Desana constructing a trap.

The following quote is taken from 'Cosmology as Ecological Analysis' (PDF-link) by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (earlier, earlier). It reiterates a point that has been made before and before and before: to be successful as a hunter-gatherer you need to be a keen naturalist. Reichel-Dolmatoff's unique contribution is in the how he shows that the stories and superstitions of 'primitive' people make-up a well-argued and consciously operated ecological strategy. 

Among the Indians there is usually little interest in new knowledge that might be used for exploiting the environment more effectively and there is little concern for maximising short-term gains for obtaining more food or raw materials than are actually needed. But there is always a great deal of interest in accumulating more factual knowledge about biological reality and, above all, about what the physical world requires from man. This knowledge, the Indians believe, is essential for survival because man must bring himself into conformity with nature if he wants to exist as part of nature's unity, and must fit his demands to nature's availabilities.

Animal behaviour is of the greatest interest to the Indians because it often constitutes a model for what is possible in terms of successful adaptation. On the one hand the Indians have a detailed knowledge of such aspects as seasonal variation and micro-distributions of the animal and plant species of their habitat. They have a good understanding of ecological communities, of the behaviour of social insects, bird flocks the organisation of fish schools, the patterns of fish runs, and other forms of collective behaviour. Such phenomena as parasitism, symbiosis, commensalis, and other relationships between co-occurring species have been well observed by them and are pointed out as possible models of adaptation. On the other hand, myths and tales abound with accounts of visits to the animal world, of people turning into animals in order to learn more about their habits, or of animals teaching men how to make use of certain resources.

The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves and this world

You can always rely on Wendell Berry (earlier) to deliver the harshest condemnations of society in the clearest and politest language. And he does so in a way that has you nodding in agreement and shivering with doubt in turns. Mr. Berry is certainly never boring though sometimes for the non-American of little interest. Over at Metafilter his essay 'In distrust of movements', at least 12 years old, has been dug up as worthwhile material to read in the light of Occupy and it's easy to see why. Below are my favourite fragments. The pictures are from last November and show the Utrecht occupy camp after being trashed the night before. I was thinking the culprits were vandals but now it may appear they may well be targeted by Wendell Berry inspired radicals.

The Captains of Industry have always counselled the rest of us to be “realistic”. Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only it would give women and favoured minorities an equitable share of the loot? Realism, I think, is a very limited programme, but it informs us at least that we should not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock.

Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking these things for granted, the modern educated mind reveals itself also to be as superstitious a mind as ever has existed in the world. What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?

The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves and this world. To make ourselves into a practical wholeness with the land under our feet is maybe not altogether possible — how would we know? — but, as a goal, it at least carries us beyond hubris, beyond the utterly groundless assumption that we can subdivide our present great failure into a thousand separate problems that can be fixed by a thousand task forces of academic and bureaucratic specialists. That programme has been given more than a fair chance to prove itself, and we ought to know by now that it won’t work.

We need to find cheap solutions, solutions within the reach of everybody, and the availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap solutions.

The urban forage website for/from Utrecht

The article above appeared yesterday in some rag that is pushed through my letterbox every week. It reminded me of the existence of plukdestad.nl (harvest - the - city), an urban forage website along the lines of the Boskoi app that has been mentioned before here several times. They provide the same service: showing you where to find edible greens and giving you the opportunity to add your own finds. Plukdestad has recipes and a splash more colour, it's in Dutch, maybe a little easier to understand for forage novices. It's focus is on Utrecht only. Boskoi is an app first, functional in design, lacking recipes and probably more useful to more experienced foragers. The vast amount of locations in Boskoi are from Amsterdam but it is open for submissions worldwide. 

The folly at Le square des Missions-Etrangères, Paris [updated]

In January 1955 Michelle Bernstein pointed the readers of Potlatch to the above structure on Le square des Missions-Etrangères (see here for a 2010 winter view). She described it as "a kiosk of great dignity which looks for all the world like a station platform and has a medieval appearance". She ends with the notice that it "may be used for receiving visitors, for being stormed by night and for other psychogeographical purposes".

Simon Sadler's The Situationist city argues that for Bernstein psychogeographic architecture is created by placing out-of-place objects at unexpected places. Sadler adds that for Bernstein the structure was a modern day folly, "meant to move the viewer to salutary states". He also states that "Bernstein's admiration of the structure typified the situationist acceptance of ugliness." But where does Bernstein actually says she finds it ugly?

Notbored (where else?) offers Bernstein's complete text which is really the 1950ties equivalent of a blogpost. (with thanks to Tina Richardson for reminding me)

Square des Missions Etrangeres

On the border between the 6th and 7th Arrondissements, this small garden, squeezed in between the nearby rue de Babylone and boulevard Raspail, is not easily reached and is normally deserted. It is fairly extensive, as Parisian public gardens go. There is almost no vegetation. From inside, its forked shape becomes apparent.

Its shorter leg is enclosed between blackened walls over ten metres high and the backs of some large buildings. On this side, a private courtyard makes it difficult to make out the garden's edge.

The other leg is overhung on one side by the same stone walls and bordered on the other side by the attractive facade of rue Commaille, a very quiet street. The end of this leg abuts on rue Bac, a street with a great deal more activity.
Square des Missions Etrangeres, however, is separated from this street by a strange, empty plot of ground, with a very dense hedge between it and the garden itself. In this totally enclosed empty garden, whose only prupose seems to be to keep a distance between the garden and the passers-by on rue Bac, there is a bust of Chateaubriand, two metres above the ground, in the form of the god Terminus, commanding a cinder covered surface.

The only access to the garden is through a gate situated at the point of the fork, giving onto rue Commaille.

The only monument in the neighbourhood serves to block the view even more and to prevent access to the empty garden. It is an exceptionally dignified kiosk, highly reminiscent of station platforms or medieval regalia.

Square des Missions Etrangeres may be used for receiving visitors, for being stormed by night and for other psychogeographical purposes.

(Written by Michele Bernstein and published in Potlatch #16, 26 January 1955. Translated from the French by Gerardo Denis.)

The forest has no climax, the cryptoforest is a meeting-place

Rotterdam cryptoforest hut spotted by Petr.

You and me have been taught at school that the forest is the stable and inevitable end result of biological succession. This turns out to be a now discarded approximation of an earlier age.  Biologists today speak about the high forest but not about pristine forests. The forest keeps changing after it has reached maturity. Here is how Andrew Revkin puts in The Burning Season (a book about Chico Mendez):

When a Tree Falls it can create in microcosm the same kind of disruption caused by a strong storm. Such tree falls may be a crucial element in shaping the mix of species in the forest. A tropical forestry scientist named Gary Hartshorn studied tree-fall rates around the tropics and found that in many areas, the time it takes for a section of forest to be completely replaced can be as little as eighty years. The overall effect is that the forest is perpetually off kilter, in a continual state of recovery but never quite returning to some inanimate state—a condition that opens up opportunities and lets no organism settle too comfortably into a static niche.

The climax state is really 'late successional'. Here is the byline: disturbance creates diversity, diversity happens when the Teutonic stranger gets a chance to shine. The cryptoforest reminds the city that it won't last forever.

Also see.

The Amazon as a cryptoforest megapolis

The Amazonian Indian techniques of swiddening is not just a bit of slashing and a bit of burning. Swiddens have a long use and shifting use that are meant to change the landscape for a long time. From a 1986 article by Leslie Sponsel (PDF-link) comes this resume.

The major source of carbohydrates is cultivation of the variety called slash-and-burn, shifting, or swidden. Like other agroecosystems, swiddens are anthropogenic, created and maintained by humans through the manipulation of limiting factors and with the input of energy and nutrients. Also, swidden takes advantage of environmental conditions and processes in the early stage of succession. The slash opens section of forest to allow penetration of sunlight for photosynthesis of the new plant community. The burn returns nutrients to the soil, although substantial amounts are lost to the atmosphere as volatiles and particles as well as to leaching. As the crops grow and are harvested, nutrients are removed from the agroecosystem until productivity declines after two or three years. Another factor is competition as wild plants take root and compete for nutrients and light, part of the natural process of succession. Often tree crops are also planted which encourages succession and eventually the return of the forest.

Swiddens are not necessarily abandoned; instead, they often phase into another type of agroecosystem known as agroforestry. Tree crops mark the transition from swidden to forest, but this is not a sharp boundary in either space or time. While agroforestry is a new research frontier for Western science, it is an ancient practice among indigenes. The Bora exploit up to 135 plant species in their garden fallows. The Kayapos till harvest plants and hunt in their gardens after 40 years. They even plant species to attract game. Swiddens are adaptive for subsistence economy as long as the population density is relatively low, ample land is available for active and future gardens, and fallow area and time are sufficient for forest recovery. Geertz, among others, argued that swiddens are adaptive another sense--intercropping imitates the diversity and structure of the forest. However, swiddens do not always mimic the forest in the way Geertz suggested. In Amazonia they range from polycrops to monocrops (including polyvarieties) and are adaptive in other ways. Agroecosystems generally provide a morer eliable supply of foods than do wild plants and thereby allow greater size and sedentariness of the human population. Many anthropologists have linked this in turn with greater cultural complexity, although this position has many critics. Recently Moran argued that there is a tension between farming and foraging because the latter requires mobility which works against acquiring adequate ethnoagronomic knowledge of soils for efficient productivity of swiddens. However, the Kayapo practice a form nomadic agriculture in which on treks six to eight months long they visit old gardens and plant new ones and in other ways experiment with domestication and cultivation. Furthermore, Posey argues that there continuum from wild to semidomesticated to domesticated plants which developed over millenia of experimentation by mobile indigenes.

Did I read that right!? "The Bora exploit up to 135 plant species in their garden fallows." Can you even name that many species? Here is the PDF of the source for this (and the images used here). Also don't miss that little sentence that argues that to be a good nomadic forager you need qualities that you can only acquire by being a stay-home peasant.

The implication of all this is that the Amazonian rainforest is not a pristine natural landscape but one gigantic man-made fallow. The argument continues by stating that the pure hunting-garthering lifestyle in the Amazon is only possible because of the presence of (often ancient) fallows. One good overview for all this is Laura Rival's 'Domestication as a Historical and Symbolic Process: Wild Gardens and Cultivated Forests in the Ecuadorian Amazon' (PDF-link). The following paragraph discusses the Huaoroni view and use of the forest (also see) and the way they try to see everything in its historic context.

Lévi-Strauss noted, more than forty years ago, that in South America “there are many intermediate stages between the utilization of plants in their wild state and their true cultivation,” and that “farming always accompanies, and is never a substitute for, the exploitation of wild resources.” This remark applies particularly well to the Huaorani context, where numerous plant species are encouraged to grow outside of cultivated areas as people engage in numerous daily actions (planting, selecting, transplanting, protecting, using, and discarding) that have a direct or indirect effect on the distribution of species, be they fully domesticated or not. Huaorani people daily consume a great number of cultigens that are not planted in gardens. They see in their forested land the historical record of the activities of past generations. They are quite explicit about the inseparability of people and the forest, which they describe as a succession of fallows. Most of the western part of Huaorani land is said to be ahuene—that is, secondary forest. Only in the Yasuni, they tell me, are there pristine forests, omere, with really high and old trees. Secondary forests are further divided into huiyencore (four-to-ten-year-old clearings characterized by the frequency of balsa trees), huyenco (ten-to-twenty-year-old clearings), huiñeme (twenty-to-forty-year-old clearings characterized by the high incidence of adult palms), and durani ahuè (forty-to-a-hundred-year-old clearings, remarkable for their big trees). Before the arrival of missions, huiñeme forests were the preferred sites to establish main residences. However, all types of forest were—and still are—continuously visited and lived in for longer or shorter stays. Cultivars are found—discovered—throughout the forest. This further indicates an evident strategy of resource dispersion within specific regions. Fish-poison vines are found along the creeks where people fish, semiwild fruit trees near hunting camps, and numerous useful palms (such as Astrocaryum chambira; in Huaorani, oönempa) along trails. The regional groups (huaomoni) are constantly moving through their vast and relatively stable territories. Hilltop longhouses are regularly left for hunting and foraging trips, during which forest-management activities take place. Wherever a Huaorani finds herself in the forest, she chances upon needed plants. Informants are vague as to whether these strategic and handy resources were planted by someone, or just happened to grow there. What matters to them is that their occurrence can be related either to individuals known for using a particular area regularly or to a house-group who lived in the area, sometime in the past. For instance, when young Huaorani unexpectedly discover useful plants in a part of the forest they are not familiar with, they often attribute them, with noticeable pleasure, to the activities of past people. If they decide that these cultigens were left by dead forebears—usually great-grandparents—they may see the plants as an invitation to move permanently and legitimately into this part of the forest, and to create a new longhouse. When no certain link with past or present human activity is established, the wide occurrence of cultigens is linked to animal activity. For example, semiwild manioc is said to “belong” to the tapir.

Earlier links include:

Amazonian Gardening 

Anthropogenic Forest Islands and Fallows

Written on the land (geoglyphs & others)

'Nature' does not exist for everyone

Achuar map of their territory.

In an interview with Phillipe Descola (earlier, earlier, earlier), published in the Tipiti journal, comes the following quote that is good to have on record as it explains how Descola came to see during his fieldwork with the Achuar that nature does not exist:

...what really made me marvel was the realization that, although the Achuar certainly recognized certain discontinuities between humans and non-humans, these discontinuities were radically different from our own. And this was a bit surprising in an expected way, but also in an unexpected one. I was expecting this because I’d read, of course, not only the South American ethnography, but also Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim and a few others pioneers of our discipline whose work was entirely devoted to resolve this bizarre scandal, that some people appear not to make distinctions between humans and non-humans. So, I was prepared to find that. I was prepared to find it at the level of, as we would say at the time, ‘representations’ at the level of ways of thinking about life. But I had no way of understanding how people would actually live with this idea and put it into practice, or really experience the world in this fashion. And this is the discovery. No? It’s not only what people say; their whole way of life revolved around the fact that they didn’t make a distinction between nature and society.

How the invaded recorded the invaders

The earlier post of the Inuit carving of a Viking reminded my of Julia Blackburn's 1979 book 'The White Men, the first response of aboriginal peoples to the white men'. It's a collection of drawings, artefact and stories that remind us that just as 'they' entered our history, we entered theirs. The book begins with an excellent foreword by Canadian anthropologist Edmund Carpenter and continues with a zillion documents from Africa, North America, Oceania and Indonesia illustrated with artworks. The texts are a bit much for me but the images are stunningly fascinating as you can see for yourself in the small sample below. 

West African legend says that the white men came from a hole in the ground, a mud sculpture from Nigeria.

Fully rigged ship on a New Caledonian bamboo pole (1850ties).

Portrait of a missionary from the Western Congo. (1930-40ties)

Mask of a sailor from the West Coast of Africa around 1900.

Nicobar Island scare-devil in the form of a policeman.

Cave Painting in Arnhem Land showing the recent surge of European visitors. (1940ties)

A 1850ties Eskimo seal skin showing whales, ships and people. A map? 

A Dutch couple depicted by a South African bushman in the mid 1850ties.

Papua New Guinean Christ after WWII

Brass bracelet made by the Dogon in Mali.

Postman Pat Psychogeographix [Back at Whiteladies]

After four months of hard graft in the bleak enormity of Garden Village (earlier) this week I was transferred back to Whiteladies, the grubby gnomeville where I live and were my adventures in the postman trade began (earlier). Every postal worker is a cartographer too (earlier) and what I mean by that is that postal work makes geography explicit by walking into all streets and all its front doors. The job unpacks streets and neighbourhoods and as exposure lasts its geography becomes internalized. And you want the geography to be internalized because only once it is in your head you can start planning short cuts and optimal routes. You don't want this mental map perfected to save time, though that is one aspect of it, but because it creates flow.

This week I worked four different rounds, two I did twice, two I did once and I had the pleasure of delivering to my own house. One half of the terrain was deeply familiar, the other half offered a few surprises, I discovered four streets I never knew existed, I observed grubbier houses, architectural diversity and I learned a little about connections between areas I didn't know existed. A mental map has the tendency to make crooked streets straight and to ignore all slight curves and bends. But a few tiny bends can add up to a 90 degree turn, with all sorts of effects on daily navigation as you find things in the streets that you expect somewhere else. A postal route cuts through that, they are a fascinating combination of randomness and rationality. They are drawn up to start and end as near to the depot as possible and they all need to take the same time to complete. The end result is a collection of walks following a counter-intuitive set of streets that have no ulterior point to make: they go from A to B without reaching a conclusion. 

The map above shows the rounds in different colours, other streets are in grey. The green route has two parts. What is funny is that the round on the top comes across as a uneven bundle of small remaindering streets, a mongrel walk connecting streets that somehow would have unbalanced any other of the walks. 

Gathering portrayed in Paleolithic art

Near Valencia can be found the Cuevas de la Araña, a cave-system that contains 8000 year old images of hunting-gathering scenes: goat hunting and honey gathering. 

Even though Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's History of Food (800 pages small-print, first edition 1987) begins with 'gathering' she has remarkably little to say about it and what she does say usually is only about the things that would become the first staple crops of agriculture. She begins the segment on gathering with the gathering of honey and that is an odd choice because honey, in an otherwise sugar free diet, is the ultimate prestige food of hunter-gatherers. For instance, here is what Napoleon Chagnon writes about the Yanomami of Venezuela in 1968:

"Wild honey is one of the most highly prized foods of all, and the Yanomamo will go to great extremes to get it. Should someone spot a bee's nest, all other plans are dropped and honey becomes the priority of the day. One can usually assume that when someone returns to the village later than expected, he has been detained because he ran into a cache of honey."  

You can't really extrapolate but why would someone make the effort to paint a honey collecting scene if it wasn't important to him or her?

It is typical though that a modern-day historian can give a festive food a key position while food stuffs of far greater importance are completely ignored. If you are willing to take up the comparison with hunter-gatherers as they are living on in our own times Toussaint-Samat is essentially wiping out thousands of years of woman's labour in exchange for a few good moments.

How the Skraeling saw the Norse

This figurine was made between 1250 and 1300 and records the meeting of the Skraeling coming from the west and the Norse coming from the east in a short period of a warmer climate. It was found on Baffin Island, it 's 5,3cm high, carved from driftwood (though my books says walrus ivory), in typical Inuit style but showing western clothing with a cross incised at the chest. 

Weeds, heresy and the great foraging revival

The greater plantain, but the Algonquin called it the White Man's Foot or the Englishman's foot because it appeared everywhere the Europeans went.

Alfred W.Crosby's 'Ecological Imperialism, the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 ' (Cambridge University Press, 1986) reads as if Jared Diamond's uncle Fester is on a roll. 

Crosby explains how weeds from the old world prepared the ground of the new world for European colonisers and were critical to the success of European expansion. 

"Weeds" is not a scientific word. It refers not to plants of any specific species or genus or any category recognized by scientific taxonomy, but to whatever plants spring up where humans do not want them. More often than not they are plants that evolved originally to fill the minor role of colonizing bare ground after fires, landslides, floods, and such and that found themselves wonderfully preadapted to spread across the expanses stripped clean by the Neolithic farmer's plow or sickle. Already tolerant of direct sunlight and disturbed soil, they added tolerance of sandal, boot, and hoof. Always ready to spring up fast in the wake of disasters, they easily evolved to survive and sprout again in the wake of the tug, tear, and chomp of grazing livestock. The farmer calls them the bane of his life, and they are, but they also provide livestock with feed and help combat erosion.

The Neolithic farmer simplified his ecosystem to produce quantities of plants that would grow rapidly on bare ground and would survive grazing animals, and he got exactly what he tried for, but some of them he cursed: tufted vetch, ryegrass, cleavers, thistles, coriander, and others.

Those plants with a talent for finding and settling on disturbed grounds rose to the challenge when agriculture first emerged. Evolving with agriculture these plants found better and better ways to use the opportunities provided by agriculture's annual cycle of soil disturbance (the decimation following the plough and the harvest). When seafaring began these plants had become especially well adapted to conquer other lands, easily outcompeting local plants that lacked previous experience with agricultures impact on the land.

In other words: agriculture not just created the possibility to think of a plant as a weed, it also created conditions for plants to acquire the persistent characteristics of weeds. Crosby goes on to cite from the Proverbs in the Old Testament:

I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding;

And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and weeds had covered its face, and its stone wall was broken down.

Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction.

Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:

So shall your poverty come like a robber; and your want like an armed man.

There you got the agricultural obsession with strive, purity and ecocide in the language of King James: the damnation of weed as a moral wrong.

The gloom and grump of the Soft City

The city ... breaks down many of the conventional distinctions between dream life and real life; the city in the head can be transformed, with the aid of the technology of style, into the city on the streets. To a very large degree, people can create their cosmologies at will, liberating themselves from the deterministic schemes which ought to have led them into a wholly different style of life.

[Jonathan Raban in the Soft City (1974) offers no redemption: in the city everything is fake, the people are actors, surface is everything. ] 

There can be no doubt that the unreality of the city, its prolixity and illegibility, its capacity to exceed all the imaginative shapes we try to impose upon it, enables its citizens to treat it with terrifying arbitrariness. 

[Raban is all gloom and grumpiness but as the book enfolds I find offers enough originality to momentarily forget about his Calvinist all-is-rotten-in-the-city mood.]  

The city dweller is constantly coming up against the absolute mysteriousness of other people's reasons... I feel about the road much as a primitive tribesman might feel about a dangerous ravine with a killer river given to unpredictable floods. I personify and apostrophise it, I attribute mysterious and malign volitions to its traffic, and it frequently disturbs my dreams. 

[Refuting the rationalism of the city as a designed culture cherished by urban planning.] 

For most of their inhabitants, cities like New York and London are nature, and are as unpredictable, threatening, intermittently beautiful and benign, as a tropical rainforest. That they are in fact constructs is a might and eluding irrelevance.  

[Up against the wall motherfucker, this is a stick-up.]

As surely as any mountain face, the city throws us back on ourselves; it isolates us, both as people and as tribal groups. Just as it constrains the expression of individuality, threatens us with absorption into total anonymity, so it makes self-assertion and projection into overwhelming necessities.

[Hey! Was raw nature not supposed to turn us into savages, making us act on our basest desires only (the Heart of Darkness), rather than turn us into schizophrenic actors acting a different role in every different social situation?]    

Raymond Van Over, the editor of the most widely available edition of the I-Ching, says in his introduction: 'form is a mere illusory manifestation of underlying causes'. It is the same consoling message that the Situationists and the Hare Krishna people preach: believe it and the city, with all its paradoxes, puzzles and violent inequities, will float away before your eyes, a chimera to delude only the hopelessy, cynically earthbound. 

[Surely this is strangest thing ever written about the Situationists, the least you can say about them is that they at least were never proselytizing.] 

We live in cities badly; we have built them up in culpable innocence and now fret hopelessly in a synthethic wilderness of our own construction. We need - more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes - to comprehend the nature of citizenship to make a serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

[We still live in cities in badly but without the innocence.]