Our 22-year old flapper girl from 1924, Billie Quinn, said, “There’s so much beauty in the place we live in.” The New Zealand born actress wasn’t talking about her home country or her home suburb. No, this was my group's play in an improv class. She was talking about the wholly unsatisfactorily distant city of Chicago. But, what did she mean?
There is so much beauty here. The people. The places. The greenery. The spirit of the air. That was New Zealand, but what if I consider my own country, the United States of America.
What does a place of birth, education, or work do for us or to us? Places matter. We disregard the environment (and its associated buildings) because it doesn’t seem immediately important. We disregard nature and the spirit contained within it because we refuse to listen.
Nevertheless, we have wholly subjective, intimate, and unvoiced conversations with every environment we immerse ourselves in, unconsciously recognizing the lack of something and the overabundance of another thing. Take summer for example the heat makes us uncomfortable because there’s an overabundance of it. We notice the temperature, but we also notice the opposite, we crave the cool wind or spring air.
The artificial cities, then, that so many of us call home, must do something for or to us. The psychology of being estranged from the so-called natural world must be important. Look at the overuse of technology, the diseased attachment to phones. The thing that's lost is the soft natural environment. The greenery, flora, and fauna of nature, right? We put fake plants in offices—we can't get away from the green, even if it's artificial. What am I saying? I don't know really; technology keeps on advancing, and we need to keep in mind what we lose as well as what we gain from that advancement. Sure, a lot has improved, but the environment stays the same if not ages with the increase in population and the further concentration of said increase in cities.
Psychogeography aims to discover what these cities do to our unconscious and conscious thought processes. What or how can this even be done? Place must factor into identity. People may say they’re American, but many will prefer to say the city they're from first and the country second because that firmly locates your identity and sanctions a place of being in the mind. In any narrative, setting is crucial—it establishes a where, and this location speaks volumes to readers. The where is important for characters' identities and greatly aids in their descriptions and self-definitions. So, what about people? We, as human beings, internalize our environments and become interconnected with where we travel, live, and study. Somehow our external world affects our internal world by engaging in a conversation with the environment. We should figure out how.