TY - JOUR

T1 - Disintegration highway

T2 - Towards a psychogeography of planetary urban breakdown

AU - Wilson, Japhy

PY - 2024/9/27

Y1 - 2024/9/27

N2 - This paper develops a psychogeographical approach to our apocalyptic urban present, based on a journey down a highway on the outskirts of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. The intensity of psychogeographical method brings out elements of the senselessness and violence of planetary urbanization imperceptible at more abstract levels of analysis, while the subjective impact of this spatial unravelling demands a surrealist psychogeography less attuned to the oneiric and marvellous than the chaotic and absurd. These conceptual reflections are interspersed with depictions of my walk along the highway, as fragments of a psychogeography of planetary urban breakdown. Instead of seeking to explain the political ecology of the road, I aim to contribute to an aesthetic of accelerating collapse that can undermine the normalizing ideological function of our sense‐making mechanisms.

AB - This paper develops a psychogeographical approach to our apocalyptic urban present, based on a journey down a highway on the outskirts of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. The intensity of psychogeographical method brings out elements of the senselessness and violence of planetary urbanization imperceptible at more abstract levels of analysis, while the subjective impact of this spatial unravelling demands a surrealist psychogeography less attuned to the oneiric and marvellous than the chaotic and absurd. These conceptual reflections are interspersed with depictions of my walk along the highway, as fragments of a psychogeography of planetary urban breakdown. Instead of seeking to explain the political ecology of the road, I aim to contribute to an aesthetic of accelerating collapse that can undermine the normalizing ideological function of our sense‐making mechanisms.

U2 - 10.1111/sjtg.12565

DO - 10.1111/sjtg.12565

M3 - Article

JO - Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

JF - Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

ER -