Crypto-Topography

we're working on this as a new term of reference for our work and welcome any comments psychogeographers, artists, writers, architects, urban planners, anarchists, ramblers, buskers, dog walkers, buffoons etc. may have about it.

Crypto Topography more accurately describes what some people call psychogeography or ‘neo-psychogeography’. It’s a study of our environment in all its forms physical and ambient. A peeling back of the hidden layers of meaning. It takes in mere musings on how place makes us feel to more detailed studies of the evolution of communities and street patterns. Marginal studies of graffiti, subverts, ley lines, fairy paths, prostitutes beats. The secret and invisible markers that guide us through space. The cryto topographer does not necessarily aim to change the built environment, although the work may have a use in urban planning and community action, but reveal the hidden city beneath the architect’s creations and the pulse beating beneath the surface of daily grind. People weave their own magic throughout place, an invisible matrix of associations, experiences and stories. It’s our job as evocateurs of space to reveal and present this underlying existence.

Crypto Topography often exists in the spaces between buildings, towns, cities standardised modes of business and routine; in the fringes, the provincial towns, built over plague pits, suburban streets, arterial curb-sides, satellite communities. The next great battle is not over the built realm, but the mental realm, the street plans and markers we create in our minds, the city we experience rather than the one imposed.