TORONTO—Riding the TTC started me thinking about a book I’ve been reading in bits and pieces over the past few months, Will Self’s Psychogeography (link to the original column). Self’s book provided a much-needed overhaul to how I’ve been viewing the city in terms of narrative and history. Self describes the story of the land in grand detail. By walking countless kilometres, he lets his two feet do the writing for him.

That every walk has a story brings to light new, old, unseen, and unnoticed ideas and history. Somewhere on the north side of College Street is a plaque about a historical fire in the area; it goes largely unnoticed, only lurking on the inner cusp of a small alley. These artifacts that chronicle a geographic area are as flat and dead as the history they try to describe. In Self’s relentless pursuit of stories the lies a key to discovering and sharing the narrative of place online.

There are countless city-based blogs, like Gothamist or its Canadian cousin Torontoist, which are fed content by the general public. Murmur is a service that will tell you the story of a geographic point via your cell phone. Flickr, the photo sharing site, has a huge database of images from cities, towns, and every place under the sun. All this content, all this history, minute by minute, day to day, is provided by anyone with a camera, a story to tell, and two good feet for walking. History is being written for the sake of writing it in a three-dimensional way that is accessible to everyone with Internet access or a cell phone. It isn’t the dry factual form of history I was taught in undergrad, but the gritty, smelly narrative of regular life.

Hence why I love to walk to work and live in a city; why I keep my eyes open and look around; why I don’t like taking the subway. When I disappear into a subway tunnel I ignore the wonderfully linear narrative of the city. If you take a piece of paper and draw an A and B and then connect the dots; you’ve left your mark. If you fold the paper in half so A and B are touching each other; if may be a faster, a more efficient route between two points, but you’ve left nothing behind.

Will Self’s Blog

His wonderful office

Definition of a Flâneur

More in How to Read | Email Chris Ellis <-->| Blogs Home | Current Issue | SUBSCRIBE »

Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.