Walking off the Map

Books discussed in this essay:
Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London
by Iain Sinclair
Granta Books, 1997
432 pp., $20

London Orbital: A Walk around the m25
by Iain Sinclair
Granta Books, 2002
460 pp., $20

Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s “Journey out of Essex’
by Iain Sinclair
Hamish Hamilton, 2005
385 pp., $36

Wanderlust: A History of Walking
by Rebecca Solnit
Penguin USA, 2000
336 pp., $23

n the cities of North America and Europe, a new way of understanding and enjoying urban reality has recently emerged among certain artists, architects, writers, and persons without portfolio. The people captivated by this cool passion can be recognized by their patient gaze at what most others ignore or find offensive—the sidewalk clutter of signage and graffiti, construction debris, untended laneways—and by their meditative preoccupation with odd rips in the urban fabric: vacant lots, condemned buildings, naked electric­al transformer stations, other places where the skin of urban propriety has been torn or worn away. They are all walkers, and their tread through the city streets is intent and focused. We see them moving at the pace of dowsers looking for streams buried beneath pavement; and dowsers they are, these seekers for the fugitive urban imaginary in the solid matter of the city.

They are not exactly like the flâneurs of nineteenth-century Paris—loafers, dandies, idle strollers. They are not like the Surrealists, those æsthetes, trawling the same city’s streets and flea-markets for the objet trouvé; nor are they much like Walter Benjamin, wandering through the arcades of Paris. The measure of these newer walkers is more disciplined, their haunts unstylish, even uninteresting by any usual standard. It is globalism that makes their manner of touring urgent, and the Internet that makes possible a sense of com­munity among those who use digital gadgetry to record their trips and transmit them instantly to the tribe. There is no time to be lost in this endless task of identifying and cataloguing complex reality before it is simplified out of existence by the rationalizing forces in the world.

They are impatient with official street maps and conventional guides to notable monuments, which seem to have lost all usefulness as tools for discovering the city that now matters. The significant city that excites this sensibility is off the maps, beyond them, requiring new cartographies. It is composed of infamous, or non-famous, places: the homes of marginal populations, squatter camps and refugee dormitories, inner-city desolation, the banal zones under expressway flyovers and in suburbia, the smokeless sump of light industrial facilities at the city limits, once-rolling farmland stunned into flatness by bulldozers and overridden by the seemingly unstoppable grind of conurbation.

An image from the 1990s: fifteen young Italian architects with stout hiking boots—they call themselves Stalker—on a four-day tramp along the perimeter of Rome, photographing, writing in notebooks, sleeping in fields at night, claiming the unsightly, flabby fringe of that city for imagination, doing what they call “architecture” in the realm of the hitherto unimagined, unimaginable. But the new interest is dir­ected not merely, or even principally, toward the edges. Again in the 1990s, Toronto architect Paul Raff slips undetected into downtown construction sites, jumping over fences and scouting the urban banal for suppressed evidence of past human presence and passage. And Paul Raff and David Warne’s insitu 1995 artwork called UNbuilding Ways is yet another investigation of the customarily unseen: the gradual, minutely documented wrecking of an Ontario cottage, its coming open, the skin and darkness being stripped away. A few years later, British novelist Iain Sinclair would be similarly circumnavigating on foot the great expressway encircling London; the journey will be reported in his London Orbital: A Walk around the m25.

The interests of Raff and Warne, like Stalker’s, and those of numerous other operatives at work throughout the advanced capitalist world, reach into the shadowy places below the maps of the city’s most familiar precincts. They probe for what is under threat of banishment by the tourism and heritage industries, by civic boosterism, by the amnesia of bureaucrats. Excavated mindfully, the city, at both centre and edge and in its vast catchment outside the official boundaries, reveals itself to be something beyond the merely visual: a sensuous field of smells, sensations on skin, feet, and fingertips, tatters of memories, swatches of textures; collisions of desire, territories contaminated by toxic wastes and stories, by use and misuse, by reuse forbidden by the authorities, but happening anyway.

p to a point, this secret city can be researched in archives. The raw material of vision is there. One finds clippings from old newspapers, photographs, sedimentary layers of advertising, letters, rumours, and gossip in books of tittle-tattle long forgotten. There is civic poetry, discredited lore, propaganda aimed at would-be immigrants, wilful misinformation put about by earlier guardians of the city’s public image. Along with archival materials, a life lived keenly in the full swim and swell of things also helps, as made clear by the bountiful harvests of memory that Iain Sinclair gathers into his books from his life among London’s marginal filmmakers, writers, and artists. But in the end, the archive, along with the avant-garde institutes and the architecture faculties where new images of the city are discussed professionally, must be abandoned—escaped. The city must be engaged on foot, in intimate, indiscreet encounters disrespectful of traditional itineraries, with curiosity about what lies behind locked gates, under manhole covers, down disreputable alleys: psychoanalysis with the city on the couch, an interpretation of the city’s dreams.