This document outlines the syllabus for a course on the creative city. It discusses key concepts like psychogeography, the derive, and situationalism. Students will explore the city through assignments focused on inequality, work and leisure, non-human time, and unofficial histories. They will create personal maps tracing their movements throughout the term. The course covers artists who use walking and landscapes in their work, and examines how everyday urban spaces are shaped by systems of power and consumption. It also discusses locative art games that encourage experiencing cities in new ways.

1. THE CREATIVE CITY
SM3138 | Sem B, 2015 | School of Creative Media |Prof SHANNON WALSH

2. WHAT IS A CITY?
Most people in the world now live in
cities.
Cities are places of life, work, love,
play, creation, leisure, discovery,
pain, migration, exclusion, joy,
construction...etc..
different ways of inhabiting, and
using the city, dynamics of
migration, access, play work and
leisure, inequalities and exclusions,
separations and disappearances,
old and new…
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3. COURSE OUTLINE
 BLOG PLAN:
http://thecreativecityscm.wordpress.com/structure/
 Week-by-week breakdowns
 Lecture Slides online
 Missions and Adventures
 Meetings and Tours at various locations over the term
 Creative Art Works

4. READ |WATCH | MAKE
ASSIGNMENTS
 1 Inequality 20%
 2 Work & Leisure 20%
 3 Non-Human Time 20%
 4 (Un)Official Histories 20%
 Personal Map 10%
 Presentation/Missions 10%

5. PERSONAL MAPS
Over the course, you will be creating your
personal map. This map will trace the
movements that you make in your particular
world.
The map should reflect what is important to
you, what is central to your journey through the
city streets and campus, perhaps even your
emotional world of friends, acquaintances,
family.
Your map will be like a reflective log of the term.
GPS coordinates for points on your map must be
somehow recorded, where available, so as to
link your map coordinated with others.
Each map will be plotted together at the end of
the course to create a global map of our
movements through the term.

6. 6

7. 7

8. 8from Flaneur Society’s “Guide to Getting Lost”

9. WHERE ARE YOU?

10. SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (SI)
 A philosophy of space &
political action
 Formed in Italy 1957 through
the 1970s
 Guy Debord, Michel de
Certeau, Henri Lefebvre
 Student movement &
university movement in
France 1968
 how could everyday life be
subverted radically 10

11. Psychogeography
Psychogeography is
"the study of the precise laws
and specific effects of the
geographical environment,
consciously organized or not,
on the emotions and behavior
of individuals.”
- Guy Debord

12. Psychogeography
Explore everyday
environment and
streets of the city;
open up to play and
chance;
“transforming ‘the
whole of life into an
exciting game’ — the
play principle before
the work principle.”
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13. Dérive
Drift…”migrations undertaken with the intention of discovering new
perspectives on city life”
“a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances”

14. 14

15. “The need for the dérive is necessitated,
according to situationist theory, by the
increasingly predictable and monotonous
experience of everyday life trudged through
by workers in advanced capitalism.”
“The dérive grants a rare instance of pure
chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and
authentic experience of the different
atmospheres and feelings generated by the
urban landscape.”

16. 16

17. Autonomy & Power
The dérive held assumptions
of race, class, gender,
privilege — who could walk
freely, leisurely, curiously,
and where could they
walk…?
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18. ART OF THE WEAK
“Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about,
shopping cooking etc.) are tactical in character if they
become independent from the rhetoric of power.”
-Miche de Certeau
 “This was about describing how gestures of resistance
among the ‘disenfranchised’ or ‘the other’ give the
powerless a way to survive and, at times, even thrive
within or against dominant cultures.” Flanagan 190
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19. 19

20. EarthWorks & Walking
Artists like: Sol Lewitt, Maya Lin, Christo, Nancy Hoyt, Richard Long,
Robert Smithson

21. 21
ART MADE BY WALKING IN LANDSCAPES | RICHARD LONG
WALKS MADE INTO TEXTWORKS | www.richardlong.org

22. 22
HAMISH FULTON | "If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art"

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26. As Henri Lefebvre argued, capitalist
spaces are systems of property relations,
surveillance, and consumption.
“It is through
everyday habits,
and through the
body, that people
experience urban
space”
The Production of Space (1991)
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27. Artists’ Locative Games
Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design, 2008

28. 28
“People have become divorced from authentic
experience, are passive spectators of their own
lives and no longer communicate or participate
in the society of the spectacle. The dominant form
of spectacular commodity production and
consumption ensures that people do not engage in
self-directed or autonomous activity, but answer the
needs of the spectacle.”
-Adam Barnard

29. ARTISTS’ LOCATIVE GAMES
Cruel 2 B Kind (C2BK) locative game

30. Dérive App
Let’s play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kTukct98vA